Why ROI?
Top tips to make sure your events pay off.
From communications to activations, internal events take both budget and time to bring to life – so it’s vital that you’re seeing a Return On Investment (ROI) to make sure they’re worthwhile. We pride ourselves on maximising both, offering the best possible value for money while creating the most impactful event possible.
But what exactly should you be measuring, how and why?
Is your event paying for itself?
Simply put, ROI calculates whether the value you get out of an event outweighs the investment you’ve put in.
If you’re creating a ticketed or paying corporate event, then calculating the ROI boils down to a simple sum:
Levelling up your corporate culture
At their core, internal events are designed to develop teams, deepen relationships and share updates. With the right event design, these elements can combine to shape your corporate culture too. But your company image, values and even type of organisation will affect what you measure and how it manifests.
So, when we talk about ROI, it’s not just what success looks like, but what does success look like for you?
Information Sharing
The most common internal communication goal, information sharing events can range from AGMs to town halls, training summits and beyond. Clear agendas and long-lasting goals are the keys to success, often showcased through training, demonstrations and new process sharing.
Measurements of success: Level of information retained post-event through department/individual level check-ins.
Employee alignment
Getting everyone in the business to see eye to eye is a tricky proposition, so it’s best to focus on key elements – like your goals for the year, strategic vision or employee values. To effectively embed them, we recommend combining this top-down messaging with bottom-up activations, such as networking, recognition or rewards.
Measurements of success: Employee satisfaction, retention and renewed effort. Although since trust and energy-based, these may take time to see measurable results.
Promoting productivity
Alongside distributing information, internal events are well placed to share the latest best practice thinking too – gathered from previous employee satisfaction surveys, internal check-ins or wider industry research. If successfully shared and implemented, the productivity potential can be enormous.
Measurements of success: Long-term rise in productivity, greater team collaboration in future projects and cross-team working.
With any of these outcomes, success is determined by setting your ambitions out early – ideally during the kick-off process.
For the best results, we recommend listing out every goal of the project, and challenging yourself to narrow it to just one. Once you’ve agreed what success truly looks like, it becomes a platform to measure your ROI against.
Types of ROI tracking
Pulse Surveys: Taking the temperature (or pulse) of your people through targeted questions, turning emotions into useable data.
Analytics: Employee engagement analysis, asking what people enjoyed and how long for.
Trackable Tech: Wearable technology can offer a more granular approach to movement analytics and attendee behaviour.
Meetings: From workshops and breakouts to 1-2-1s, focus groups and interviews, keeping track of internal meeting takeways can be invaluable for long-term trends.
For the most accurate trends, continually review your results against previous performance to stay ahead of ROI trends within your organisation.
Your three steps to success
Pre-Event
- Lay your groundwork: Set expectations and generate excitement with your pre-comms, preparing your audience for the event theme and content ahead.
- Invest in identity: A recognisable and memorable identity can offer an effective touchpoint across all materials.
- Encourage audience involvement: A pre-event survey can determine the content your audience want to see, getting them invested in the event by helping to shape it.
Live Event
- Objective clarity: From speakers to set designers, make sure the objective is clear to everyone. Showcasing the company’s values and culture are essential to an effective event ROI.
- Effective content: Pairing pre-event survey results and the pre-determined aims, content should always be relevant and relatable.
- The right agenda: Just like Goldilocks – not too long and not too short, but with a variety of session types to suit the content.
- Looking good: Just like the session types, getting a stage design which suits the content – from slides to video, can elevate the whole show.
- Mementos: If budget allows, branded physical giveaways can be a great reminder of both the event and its messaging in the future.
Post-Event
- Post-event performance: Maximising your ROI often starts after the event. The right follow-up comms campaign can continue the momentum, reinforce messaging and share materials long term. For the best results, try and keep the flow of information consistent right up to the next event.
- Activity means more: From workshops to feedback surveys, attendees always want to know their ideas were heard and acted upon, so a plan of action can make sure they feel valued and continue to contribute in the future.
To sum up, measuring ROI for internal events isn’t always straightforward – relying on metrics like trust, happiness, and satisfaction.
However, if you put the work in pre-event to agree what you’re measuring, how you’re measuring it, and how you’re going to determine progress, you will generate meaningful long-term data to test and learn with. And, ultimately, see a growth in employee engagement, participation, and buy-in for your company goals, vision, and culture.
Want a helping hand to maximise ROI? Drop me a message today at: hello@ctlcomms.com