Measure what matters
Delivering an event that resonates with attendees and aligns with business objectives is no mean feat. It often involves months of strategizing, planning, and focused work. But once it’s done (and you’ve had a celebratory drink or two), how do you know you’ve created the impact you need?
Author:
Shaan Bassi, Insights Director
It might sound obvious, but it’s vital to measure the performance of your experience against your objectives. And that means you need to get those right.
Identify objectives that start with people, not numbers
For us at Emota, delivering impact starts with well-crafted objectives. They provide a constant that helps map out exactly what to deliver and how, to ensure your vision for success becomes a reality.
Too often, objectives are wholly focused on business goals (for example the number of leads needed, or the messages you need to communicate). Whilst these must be defined, it’s vital to focus on understanding your audience, to ensure those objectives aren’t vague or unrealistic.
Objectives can be better defined by answering questions such as:
Dig out those killer audience insights
With those defined, the next step is to dig out killer insights that will help guide how to most effectively engage your audience: analyze the competitive space and market dynamics; carry out listening exercises to validate the challenges; audit the success or failure of past experiences. The resulting insights will be invaluable in defining the experience you need to deliver to meet your objectives.
Measure what really matters
It’s too easy to focus on vanity metrics (high level data that looks good and helps you communicate the success of your event within the business) and fail to look deeper to quantify the impact of what you’ve done.
Here are 3 key principles we use at Emota to measure impact:
1. A robust measurement framework
A framework aligned to the event KPIs that reflects and includes input from as many of the available data sources as possible. This could be data from content assets (e.g. tablets, videos), attendee feedback, the platform (if virtual), social media, media banners and sponsorships (the list goes on).
2. Expert analytics and interpretation
Having the data isn’t enough. To assess true impact, it must be analyzed and interpreted. The interpretation of the data needs to be conducted in the context of a) the objectives b) the landscape (e.g. competitor, trends) and c) the audience.
3. Actionable insights
Don’t leave anything on the table. Leverage the insights you find to help shape the broader strategy and delivery of future experiences. What have we learnt about the audience? What works? What doesn’t? What other opportunities exist?
We then work with UX experts to explore how the design of the experience – physically and digitally – can be made as frictionless as possible to ensure the best possible chance of our attendees enjoying the key moments that will drive delivery of our objectives.
Need help?
We help our clients design more impactful experiences through the combination of Behavioral Science, Data Insights and User Experience (UX).
This focus on attendee insights and behaviors means we can construct objectives that take audience behaviors into account, help clients measure the true impact of experiences and use proven Behavioral Science to identify levers to change perceptions and behaviors. The unique combination means our clients can be confident their efforts and investments will deliver real impact, now and in the future.
Read the rest of the Event Impact Booster series below.