Planners of internal meetings are not being sufficiently encouraged by their bosses to focus on business objectives. This is the conclusion of research conducted by event content specialist KDM Events, which set out to discover how organisers evaluate their internal conferences. The company surveyed planners from 49 companies, many of whom were PAs, last December to reveal what event success looks like.
KDMโs research shows that the success of any event is still largely being attributed to logistical effectiveness and delegate experience on the day. The satisfactory outcome of everyone enjoying themselves garnered the greatest number of responses with an 88% tick rate, while logistical (64%), budgetary (69%) and scheduling (43%) targets were all way ahead of business priorities.
Respondents were asked to select from a menu of 14 event objectives that included logistical, budgetary and business priorities. At the bottom end of the scale, 14.3% of organisers claimed not to be setting objectives at all. From the business goals selected, education (employee training and raising staff knowledge) was the top scorer, cited by 73.8% of respondents.
Communicating business strategies was mentioned by 59.5% of respondents and raising staff morale came in at 57.1%. But quantifiable business performance improvement came way down the pecking order, with collecting new business initiatives cited by just 19%, the improvement of staff retention by only 21.4%, and helping to achieve sales targets by 26.2%.
KDMโs research revealed that few organisations approach event evaluation with the intention of measuring and monitoring behavioural change. The survey analysed methods used to measure and evaluate results. Although 88% of respondents said they undertook post-event surveys, less than a quarter (23.8%) said they surveyed delegates before the event as well.
Delegate feedback was revealed to be by far the primary method of event evaluation.
According to KDM, organisers collect delegate feedback in three ways: 41.6% of respondents asked attendees verbally; 39.6% circulated a questionnaire during the event and 60.4% conducted post-event surveys. Other event evaluation metrics included post-event budget reconciliation, cited by 47.6% of respondents and measurement of business performance, such as sales uplift or number of new clients, mentioned by 45.24%.
Responses revealed that organisersโ approach to evaluation largely revolves around event content and delivery. When asked to specify the event elements that appeared on their delegate feedback questionnaires, activity and entertainment were cited by 87.5% of respondents; venue 79.2% and format/itinerary 70.8%. However much less data was collected on the achievement of business goals such as the effect on motivational levels (cited by 35.4%), new skills learned (33.3%) and specifics relating to the eventโs business content (37.5%).
In spite of their content and delivery focus, organisers said that they would like to be able to demonstrate the business case for their events. As many as 75% of respondents stated that they believed it would be an advantage if they were able to easily quantify the success of the events they organise.
