Step 6: Evaluation

With the event over, ask yourself the question; was it worthwhile, did I achieve my objectives?

Immediate impressions count

As soon as possible afterwards, jot down your own thoughts about how the event went:

• what worked well/didn’t work
• ‘on the day’ verbal feedback comments
• what did your colleagues and speakers think?

Later you'll have time to reflect on these observations, but what you felt at the time is an important barometer to the overall event experience that will fade from memory as other projects take over your attention.

What did your attendees think about your event?

Most of the time event organisers are staging an event for someone else - even if it's your day job to organise events, chances are it will be on behalf of your employer and that organisation will want to know if they achieved anything from your efforts.

The traditional approach to gathering this specific feedback is to carefully place "happy sheets" on seats or in delegate packs to ask those very questions, collecting them at the exit door. If the person chairing your event is persuasive and forceful enough, you can get a good response rate from this tactic, but bear in mind that at the end of an event, people are usually more interested in rushing for the train, chatting to their friends/networking, hoovering up your catering, comfort breaks... in fact almost anything other than searching for a pen and fiddling with paper forms.

Do it online

The thing that most event organisers miss here is that happy sheet responses usually don't tell you anything useful. If survey respondents aren't motivated to complete your survey they'll usually jump straight to the easiest box to tick that gets it over with - hardly an objective or extensive insight.

For a more insightful review, online surveys work particularly well, though again try to avoid the temptation to over-ask (i.e. too many questions) because respondents soon loose patience and abandon long surveys.

The real plus point for online feedback is that attendees feel less inhibited about typing in a survey box what they would be very unlikely to write on a form or tell you face-to-face. This might be something trivial in the grand scheme of things, but was very important to them at the time e.g. "no vegetarian food left". Often you'll pick up very specific comments like this which is great because they're easy to fix next time. It's also an opportunity to follow up on such specifics, say with a quick phone call - "sorry you missed out, I'll make sure there are more choices next time". This flips a small negative niggle in to a very positive experience, because you've shown that you listen and valued their attendance.

Looking at the repeated themes or patterns from your feedback helps you in a different way. This helps you to answer the big questions about whether your event did actually further your objectives as planned. Was there anything that you could have done differently, looking back, that would have changed the outcome?

The feedback scores allow you to compare events, especially useful if you are running the same event in a number of different venues. Try allocating scores to relevance, housekeeping and venue and the quality of the event. Represented in graphical form, this allows easier comparison from one event to the next.

On the money?

This is also a good time to go back to the budget and consider whether it was value for money. Has your event reached the people you wanted, has it got the correct message across and did people enjoy it?

6 steps to a perfect event - summary

So at the end of our "6 steps to a perfect event" blueprint, we've covered how to go about:

• defining your objectives
• setting your budget
• devising the right content
• how to resolve the conflict between objectives, budget and content
• letting everybody know about your event through advanced marketing techniques
• easy to use techniques to create a buzz on the day
• following up to make sure that you really did achieve what you wanted and expected

For novices or event professionals, we hope you have found something both thought provoking and practical that you can use in running your events. Oh - and don't forget to check out all the great features of plusforevents.com designed to help you do just that!

Integrated online feedback

• send event feedback requests by email
• collect responses online
• customisable survey questions
• graphical feedback report analysis
• integrated with your attendance list data

manage and compare one or many events

• easily manage multiple events
• overview of all your events in one place
• accessible via the internet in the office, at home and on-site at your event

Make it easy for your attendees to say Yes!
to your events