1. Set event goals and expectations
You can’t measure success when you don’t have any benchmarks to measure it against. This is why the first step in evaluating the success of an event is to clearly define your goals and expectations.
These goals will vary from industry to industry and event to event. It is important to align the goals with your event’s ultimate aim (i.e. the chief reason for hosting the event) as well as what your guests expect to get from the event. It is also important to keep these goals as objective as possible.
For example, a social media event might have the following goals:
Get 5,000 Twitter mentions
Have 20% or higher sponsor recall rate
Collect 1,000 emails from guests and online channels
500 check-ins on Foursquare
25%+ survey response rate
Objective goals (“get 500 email addresses”) are easier to quantify than subjective goals (“everyone should have a great time”), and can help you evaluate event success better.
2. Conduct surveys immediately after the event
A survey or feedback form can give you objective as well as subjective data on the success of our event. The best time to hand out this survey is immediately after the event, when guests feel favorably towards you and are more likely to respond to a survey request.
Designing surveys is an art in itself and beyond the scope of this article. However, keep the following tips in mind when creating your surveys and you’ll do fine:
Relevancy: Keep the survey questions directly relevant to the event.
Length: Shorter surveys get a higher response rate than longer ones (although the data is inconclusive in certain cases).
Ease of Responding: Respondents are more likely to drop out of a survey if responding to questions requires too much time or effort. Design surveys in a way that respondents can give answers as easily as possible. This means keeping subjective responses to a minimum and using multiple-choice questions instead.
Language: Using clear, precise language with well-defined answer labels will earn you a higher response rate. If respondents have to think hard about the question, they will likely abandon the survey.
You can either hand out surveys on paper, or email respondents with an online survey made with Google Forms or similar tools. Personally, I prefer the latter since I can immediately export the data to a spreadsheet and crunch the results.
3. Use Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a concept first pioneered by Bain and Company. It involves asking customers, or in our case, event guests, a simple question:
“How likely are you to recommend this event to someone else, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 stands for least likely, and 10 for extremely likely?”
Scores are categorized as follows:
Scores of 9-10: These are your promoters – super fans and loyal customers who actively spread the good word about your event. You want as many of these as possible.
Scores of 7-8: These are passives. They feel ambivalent towards your event and are not likely to actively recommend it to their friends.
Scores of 0-6: These are the detractors. They are liable to criticize your event in public and make for bad word of mouth.
To get your NPS, you subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters. Ignore all passives.
Thus, if you have 100 respondents, 80 of which are promoters, 10 detractors and 10 passives, your Net Promoter Score is: 80 – 10 = 70%
Here’s a handy graphic illustrating the process:
measure-of-success
Higher Net Promoter Scores have been directly tied to better word of mouth and high referral rates. Some of the best companies in the world have Net Promoter Scores in the 70-80% range (Amazon:
You can learn more about NPS and how to use it here.
4. Evaluate your finances
Hosting an event can be an expensive affair. It isn’t uncommon for event organizers to overspend and find themselves in the hole even with a ‘successful’ event. Therefore, taking stock of your finances should be a key part of the evaluation exercise.
I recommend consulting an accountant before undertaking a fiscal evaluation, but for starters, here are a few key metrics you should focus on:
Expected costs vs. actual costs: Hopefully, you already had a thorough breakdown of the expected costs of the event. Comparing this against the actual cost will tell if you overshot your budget, and give you a measure of your resource utilization efficiency.
Expected revenues vs. actual revenues: The difference between the actual revenues and expected revenues is a strong measure of the event’s success. Generally speaking, the larger this gap, the more the event went to plan.
Unexpected costs: It’s inevitable – things will break, plans will fail and mishaps will happen when dealing with an event. Figuring out the unexpected costs will help you manage your finances better at the next event you host.
5. Gather feedback from event stakeholders