What's the best way to evaluate a live event?

1 Define your goals and objectives

Before you plan and execute your live event, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. What is the purpose of your event? Who is your target audience? What are the desired outcomes and benefits? How will you measure them? By defining your goals and objectives, you can align your event strategy with your overall business or organizational goals, and create a framework for evaluation.

2 Choose your evaluation methods

Depending on your goals and objectives, you can use different methods to evaluate your live event. Surveys and polls are a simple way to collect feedback from attendees, speakers, sponsors, and partners about their satisfaction, expectations, learning, engagement, and recommendations. You can also use analytics and metrics to track and measure the performance and impact of your event. These quantitative data can be used to compare your event with previous or similar events, identify trends and patterns, as well as measure attendance, retention, engagement, reach, conversions, revenue, and ROI. Testimonials and reviews are qualitative data that you can use to showcase the value and benefits of your event. These can be used to create stories, case studies, and social proof. They can also help improve your event design and delivery to attract more participants and collaborators.

3 Collect feedback and data

When selecting your evaluation methods, it is important to collect feedback and data from your event. You can do this through various channels and sources, such as online platforms and tools for surveys and polls, tracking analytics and metrics, and collecting testimonials and reviews. Additionally, you can use offline methods and materials like paper surveys, feedback forms, comment cards, observation notes, audio recordings, video recordings, and photos to supplement online data. It is also beneficial to ask stakeholders and partners such as attendees, speakers, sponsors, and vendors for their opinions, suggestions, insights, and experiences. Collecting feedback from these sources can provide referrals, testimonials, and reviews as well.

4 Analyze and report the results

After you have collected feedback and data from your event, you need to analyze and report the results. To process and interpret data, you can use data visualization and dashboards to present information in a clear and compelling way, such as by using charts, graphs, tables, maps, and infographics. Additionally, you can use data analysis and evaluation to understand and explain data, identify and solve problems, measure and demonstrate the impact of your event, and make decisions. Lastly, data reporting and storytelling can be used to summarize and share data with your audience, inspire action, celebrate achievements, acknowledge contributors, and promote your brand.

5 Improve and optimize your event

The final step in evaluating your live event is to use the results to improve and optimize your event. You can use the feedback and data to identify your strengths and weaknesses, recognize opportunities and threats, and plan your next steps. This data can be used to enhance your event content, format, agenda, speakers, activities, and technology. Additionally, you can optimize your event strategy and goals by refining your vision, mission, values, objectives, budget, resources, timeline and KPIs. Finally, you can use the feedback and data to build relationships with attendees, speakers, sponsors and partners. Furthermore, you can expand and diversify your audience as well as generate and nurture leads through leveraging partnerships.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?