When the last floor has been swept after your event, you probably want to kick your feet up way more than evaluate your event’s success. But measuring what worked and what didn’t is an integral park in evaluating your event’s ROI.
Here are some key tips for how to incorporate evaluations into your next planning process…
Map it out from the beginning: When you’re planning, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the enjoyable details, like choosing your venue or picking a theme, but be sure to establish how you’ll evaluate your event’s success off the bat.
Choose a method: Do you have the emails of all your attendees? Use Survey Monkey to email them all a short evaluation of the event 24 hours after. Make it easy for them to select what they liked the most and least, and be sure to give them a comment box.
Automate it: Write your survey before the event and have it timed to send 24 hours after its completion. If you leave writing the survey until after, it probably will be rushed.
Keep an open mind: Your results will probably follow a bell curve, with 10% of people loving your event, 10% with not-so-nice comments, and about 80% somewhere in the middle. Focus on those 80% and what you can do to get them to become more like the 10% who loved it.
Follow these simple tips, and you'll have the facts to back you up when someone asks, "So… how did it go?"