How do you evaluate the impact of your live events on your audience?

1 Define your goals

Before you can evaluate the impact of your live events, you need to define your goals and objectives. What do you hope to gain from your events? What KPIs will help you measure success? Common objectives for live events include increasing brand awareness and reach, generating leads and sales, educating and informing your audience, building relationships and loyalty, and creating a community and network. Depending on your goals, you need to select the appropriate metrics and data sources to track and analyze your impact.

2 Collect feedback

Gathering feedback from your event attendees is a direct and effective way to evaluate the impact of your live events. This feedback can provide insight into how your audience perceived the event, what they learned, and what they liked or disliked. It can also help you identify areas for improvement and opportunities for growth. To collect feedback effectively, you can use surveys and polls, Q&A sessions and chats, testimonials and reviews, social media and hashtags, and net promoter score (NPS). However, it is important to design your questions carefully, ask them at the right time, incentivize your respondents, and analyze the results objectively.

3 Track engagement

Evaluating the impact of live events can be done by tracking the engagement of your audience. This helps to measure how interested, involved, and satisfied they were with your event, as well as assessing the quality and relevance of your content, the effectiveness of your speakers, and the value of your event. To track engagement effectively, you can look at attendance and retention rates, participation and interaction rates, social media and web analytics, content consumption and downloads, and referrals and word-of-mouth. To do this successfully, you need to define your engagement metrics, use the right tools and platforms, segment your audience, and benchmark your results.

4 Measure outcomes

To evaluate the impact of your live events, it's important to measure the outcomes. Outcomes can help you understand how your events affected the behavior and decisions of your audience, as well as calculate the ROI and ROO. You can measure outcomes through leads and conversions, sales and revenue, customer retention and loyalty, customer satisfaction and advocacy, and community and network growth. To measure outcomes effectively, you need to align your objectives with your goals, use attribution models accordingly, track leads and customers, and optimize your event strategy.

5 Use tools and software

To effectively evaluate the impact of your live events, you should consider using tools and software that can automate the process, integrate data sources, visualize results, and share insights. Popular options include SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Qualtrics, Slido, Kahoot, Mentimeter, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Eventbrite, Tableau, Power BI, and Databox. When selecting the right ones for you, take into account your needs, budget, and skills. Additionally, set up tracking and reporting systems and review and update your data regularly to ensure accuracy.

6 Evaluate and improve

Evaluating the impact of your live events is an ongoing cycle of learning and improvement. Comparing your results with your goals and expectations, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and applying insights and feedback to your next events can all help you understand what works and what doesn't. Celebrating successes and learning from failures, experimenting with new ideas and formats, and using the methods and tools we discussed can help you measure and improve your event performance. Ultimately, evaluating your impact can help you create more meaningful, valuable, and memorable experiences for your audience.

7 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?