Proving The Value Of Meetings & Events
5 Levels Of Evaluation
By Jack Phillips, Ph. DMeasuring and evaluating meeting success has earned a place among the critical issues in the meeting and events industry. Meeting sponsors often want evidence that meetings are adding tangible organizational value and that the benefits of meeting participation are aligned properly with strategic goals.
How can a meeting event, conference, convention or trade show be accurately measured to prove its value and its importance to business success? As a meeting professional, you add value by negotiating the right site, obtaining the best prices, and managing logistical details effectively.
You can also add value by asking the right questions: “Why are we holding this meeting and what are we trying to achieve?” Defining clear, measurable meeting outcomes with stakeholders before staging a meeting event will increase your likelihood of achieving success after the meeting. Outcomes help the meeting planner define desired results and create plans to determine the success (and thus value) of meetings against those outcomes.
Showing Value At Multiple Levels
Typically, meeting value is created when meeting participants react positively to an event; acquire new knowledge, information or skills; apply new skills on the job after a meeting; and, as a result of these applied actions, positively influence targeted business measures.
While satisfied attendees are certainly one measure of value, planners can help advance the industry by moving beyond the simple tracking of reaction (Level 1) to outcome measures. (“How did you like the speaker, the food, the room temperature?”) For meetings and conferences, this is usually captured with such content-related survey questions as “Was this meeting useful, necessary, motivational, challenging, and important to your success?” This also includes questions about planned actions, such as “What do you intend to do differently as a result of this meeting?”
Next, it is important to measure success with learning outcomes (Level 2), since many meetings and events are considered learning opportunities. With studies showing that only about 10 to 20 percent of meeting events are now being evaluated at this level, increased effort is needed here. To evaluate learning outcomes, you can ask attendees to “Name three new sales techniques you learned” or “Describe a cross-selling opportunity you will use during the new product launch.”
A big challenge is the follow-up after the meeting to determine what learned knowledge or skills are being applied or implemented (Level 3). For example, are they applying new management skills, enhanced product knowledge, or sales techniques?
Evaluating the business consequences or impact (Level 4) of those actions often becomes more difficult, but necessary, for some meetings. Business measures like sales revenue, employee turnover, and new product developments are typical areas that can be influenced by participants’ applied behaviors. Asking participants questions like “Did your productivity increase?” “Did your cycle times decrease?” “Did the quality of output improve?” “Did your sales increase?” “Did customer satisfaction improve?” will help show the impact of participants’ behavioral changes upon specific measures of business performance.
Finally, many organizations, sponsors, exhibitors, delegates or suppliers consider return on investment (Level 5) to be the ultimate measure of a meeting’s value. So what is ROI? ROI is the ultimate measure of accountability that answers the question: Is there a financial return for investing in a meeting event? ROI involves converting data to monetary values, isolating effects of the meeting on that value, and capturing the meeting’s fully loaded cost.
Together, these generate the actual ROI. Evaluating to the ROI level is not necessary for all meetings. An actual ROI calculation should be limited to those meetings that are strategic, high profile and expensive. This may mean that only 5 to 10 percent of the meetings would be evaluated at this level.
Each of these five levels of evaluation answers basic questions regarding the value of a meeting and presents results in a way that makes it easy for the audience to understand. Each level of evaluation provides important, stand-alone data. But, when reported together, the five-level ROI framework represents data that tells the complete story of meeting success or failure.
Summary
Using a consistent, credible evaluation process can help meeting planners set priorities, eliminate unsuccessful programs, or reinvent those that are successful but expensive. Reporting meeting results in terms of their influence upon key business measures is the best way to secure and even increase budgets for meetings since executives generally reward those parts of the company that add value. Despite trends for increased accountability in the meetings industry, pursuing a comprehensive evaluation process can often create anxiety, issues and concerns.
If you’re a meeting planner seeking tips, tools, and strategies for proving your value, you can get help in the new book “Proving the Value of Meetings and Events: How and Why to Measure ROI,” published by Meeting Professionals International and ROI Institute Inc. This is a “how-to” book that details the ROI Methodology and includes 17 actual case studies.
As chairman of the ROI Institute, Jack Phillips, Ph.D., has developed a methodology for calculating true financial ROI for training, leadership and performance programs. Phillips consults with Fortune
500 companies and major organizations throughout the world and is the author and editor of more than 30 books and 100 articles. www.roiinstitute.net. 
