4 Tips for Post Event Success
How do you measure event success? Depending on your individual goals, your answer will differ. However, the work isn't completed just because the event is over. There are many things you can do after your event to greatly improve its overall success. We have selected 4 of these actions that you can take post-event to increase success.
Appreciate the important people
A thank you goes a long way. Many factors can influence the inclusion of external help: financial factors too event sizes. As an event host, you may have needed a sponsor or required a partner to aid with preparation, venue or gaining access to acts.
These are people who have helped see your event to completion. Sending these individuals a simple thank you can be enough to build a trust relationship. This can be as simple as sending an email, letter or a phone call. The important element here is personalization. Each person has helped you in a unique way and thus, should receive a unique thank you. This also opens up potentially closed doors after the event, by generating conversation again with those who've helped you prior. In the case of sponsors and partners, these can be a small number of people, offering them a thank you in the form of a gift can be a cost-effective way to secure further partnerships.
Similarly, you can also send your attendees a thank you message for being part of the event. It is worth considering making these personalised for each individual. You would need to think about your audience size and whether or not that's time you can justify using.
Gain Valuable Feedback
Whilst remaining on the topic of audiences, gaining feedback after your event is one of the most valuable & beneficial steps you can take. Chances are you have access to your attendee's emails, if you list with Priorbooking then you can set this as a required field when your audience purchase tickets.
Take some time to create a short but concise survey. you can use tools like Survey Monkey to create and track these with ease. Focus on collecting important data, you're looking for ways to improve not to know miscellaneous information about your audience. If you're asking a lot of detailed questions that take some time to answer, consider offering an incentive for your audiences time.
It's always nice to receive positive feedback, use this to continue to strive at that strength(s). As an event organiser, you should be constantly thinking of ways to improve the value and experience for your audience. Every comment is constructive. Surveys provide a means for you to gain constructive criticism, take note of all the information you can gain and apply it to your next event.
Debrief
It's absolutely essential that once your event has finished, you sit down with your team and take a look at how the event performed. When evaluating you should judge the overall success against the goals you previously set for this particular event. During the planning stage, you should have established what data you will be measuring in order to tell if you reached these goals. This can be anything from the number of tickets sold to customer satisfaction. It's important you collect this data accurately, this way you get a definitive measurement of success. This can be difficult if you're trying to collect qualitative information (audience comments) in this case t could be more beneficial to split these into positive and negative comments.
Holding a debrief also provides an effective way to communicate with your team and converse about the event as a whole. Your team will be able to provide additional information that your audience won't have necessarily noticed or raised. Take a look at what went well, what went wrong and what you can do to improve your next event. Always be thinking about why, if something went wrong you need to understand why it did so you can prevent it happening again. Think about how you can increase the value you're offering to your audience whilst maintaining the structure of past events.
Update your online profiles
Your website is arguably one of the best marketing tools that you have at your disposal, especially if your event is regular/annually. Chances are the vast majority of your audience will visit your dedicated website to see more information about the event, booking info or for footage about past events.
You should keep your website up to date with the latest information and visuals. Upload any photos or videos of the event as soon as it has ended. Sharing these to social media can also generate engagement from your audience. It's also a good strategy to use these as promotional material for future events. If your event is one of a kind then this may not necessarily apply to you. if your event is a regular occurrence, highlighting images and feedback from your last event can go a long way in enticing potential customers to attend.
Conclusion
A lot of work goes into planning events but the actions you take after the event is over has an equal impact on the overall success. Being an event organiser can be incredibly stressful Often than not the next event is right around the corner and you need to begin preparations soon. Making sure to de-stress after your event is an important part of the process.
Post-event success is important for growing your reputation. Yet, why not increase the appeal before the event? Check out: 6 elements to consider when designing event posters to learn how important event posters are for promoting your event.