How do you determine whether your event succeeded? All too often, meetings, conferences
and other events are reported as productive because “people liked this year’s keynote
speakers” or “the hotel received high marks.” Sure, positive reactions are an important factor,
but they are not the only or primary indicator of success. Meetings are of most value when
they are driven by business needs and clearly stated objectives.

To get a better idea of how to evaluate your events effectively, let’s look at a real-world
example where a meeting planner was challenged to show how a major meeting — the
company’s annual agent conference — was aligned with strategic business goals in order to
prove its value.

Case File
A company, which we’ll call Community Insurance Company (CIC), operates in most major
communities in the Midwest, offering life, homeowners and automobile insurance to
consumers. The company operates and grows its business through local agents who provide
service and reputable support to policyholders. Although the company provides some national
advertising and promotion, each agent has a budget for local advertising. However, agents
obtain much of their business through customer referrals, following up on contacts and
presenting the business case for switching insurance providers to CIC.
Each year, CIC conducts a conference where agents are invited to attend to obtain updates
on the company, network with other agents, review changes in products and processes, and,
more importantly, develop and refine marketing and business development tools and
processes.

Approximately 60 percent of the 1,000 agents attend. The conference and attendance
expenses of the agents are entirely paid from each agent’s advertising and promotion budget.
Because of this, some agents do not attend, choosing to spend their advertising money in
other ways.

The company’s CEO and senior staff, who always attend the conference, view this as one of
CIC’s most important meetings. Because of increased costs of conducting the meeting,
however, the CEO is questioning the value of this meeting in its present form. Among other
things, he would like to know if it would be more cost-effective to conduct the meeting in
some other format, such as a series of live teleconferences, or perhaps the meeting could be
eliminated altogether in favor of more direct communications and visits by regional
executives.

As a starting point, the CEO would like to know the value attendees derive from the meeting
in terms of this question: What impact does this meeting have on revenue, market share,
profits and other important measures?

The director of meetings and events, whom we’ll call Marilyn Hansen, accepted the CEO’s challenge and planned an
impact study of the meeting, including an ROI analysis. She realized that the starting point was to clearly identify the
objectives and business purposes of the meeting, along with the business impact that senior executives desired.

Level 1: Defining Reaction Objectives
These objectives reflect the immediate and long-term satisfaction with the issues important to a meeting’s success.
After clarifying what reaction management expected from the agents, Hansen made the following list:
After attending this meeting, participants will perceive the conference to be:

Organized and efficient
Conducted by effective speakers
Valuable for business development
Important to their success
Motivating
Challenging
An excellent use of their time
Full of new information
Action-oriented (they intend to use the material)

Remember, developing reaction objectives for meetings and events should be
straightforward. Typical reaction objectives reflect issues including:
Relevance of the meeting to my work
Effectiveness of the speakers
Appropriateness of meeting topics

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