How a post-event review primes your event for success
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
– Henry Ford
Event management is a process of continuous improvement.
The most effective starting point of the event planning cycle (and most critical part) is not what most people expect it to.
At rEVENTS Academy, we start with the end, and end with the beginning....clear as mud, right?! 😜
The first step in planning a successful and sustainable event is reviewing your event to find out what’s working and what’s not.
How are you doing in achieving your event’s purpose?
Your annual post event review will help your committee answer questions like:
How do we deliver a successful event?
How do we increase attendance?
How do we sell more tickets?
How can we improve the visitor experience?
How do we stop our committee from burning out?
Attracting visitors to events is competitive!
It is important that you listen to your audience so you can improve your event and continue to remain relevant and appealing.
How to review your event
Assign a coordinator
Assign a committee member to the role of post-event review, and let them focus on that alone.
Develop attendee and stakeholder surveys
Prior to the event, develop surveys for attendees and stakeholders such as sponsors, stallholders, and volunteers.
Think about the critical questions that will help you improve your event. They can be as simple as
What did you enjoy about the event?
What do you think could be improved about the event?
Set up the online survey using free software such as SurveyMonkey (which only allows 10 questions and 100 responses in its free plan) or Google Forms on your website. These are much easier than paper surveys because they collate all the answers into an easy to read report, saving a lot of time!
If you organise a valuable sponsored prize for participating in the survey, that will help to inspire attendees to take it.
Distribute your surveys
Have signage at your event requesting attendees take the survey announcing the prize and with a QR code link to the online survey.
Distribute a link to the attendee survey via your social media, your post-event wrap-up email newsletter, an automated email to ticket-purchasers, and on your website.
Distribute your stakeholder surveys to the relevant stakeholders by email.
Consider organizing one small team of volunteers just to encourage survey responses during the festival, and to have conversations with attendees about what's working well at the event, what could be done better, and what would enhance the visitor experience.
Leave the survey link open for a week after the event.
Gather other feedback and data
If you are not paying for a media report you can set up basic media monitoring prior to the event by setting up Google Alerts for keyword phrases such as your event name.
Have your Post-Event Review Coordinator gather information on the budget washup by talking with the Treasurer, looking at the actuals compared to the forecast figures, and having a discussion about what's happened, where has the committee overspent, where have they underspent, did you reach income targets, etc.
Review the ticket sales’ reports: Where did ticket sales come from? What marketing channels worked best to drive ticket sales?
Review the Google Analytics for your website.
Review the insights for your social media accounts and online reviews of the event and mentions on social media.
Call or visit higher level sponsors to discuss what worked from their perspective around your event (or ask the Sponsorship Manager to do this and provide a report).
Hold a community debrief meeting
We recommend you host a public community debrief meeting. While these can be a little daunting, they’re extremely valuable. We need our community to be ambassadors of our event, and the only way we can do that is to bring them on the journey. Invite local businesses, community groups and the public to come along and have input. Go open minded, let them speak, and take notes. It's a valuable process, I promise!
Hold a committee debrief meeting
Host a structured and comprehensive discussion about the event with your committee and volunteers. Pre-prepare and distribute a summary of all feedback and data to support robust discussions about what will help your event develop and grow. Ask each coordinator to provide dot points on what worked well, and what should be improved next year for their area of responsibility and what they noticed about the event as a whole.
Prepare a post-event report
Distill everything into key recommendations to improve the event - this can just be dot points.
Note what needs to be changed for the next event:
What will make a difference to the event and the visitor experience?
What will make a difference to the planning cycle?
What will save the committee time?
What will improve your systems and processes, and improve your productivity?
Note the long-term opportunities. These are the things over the horizon or pretty radical big picture recommendations but take note of them. What will make a difference to the long-term sustainability of your event?
Implement changes
At the first organising meeting for next year’s event, start to implement the changes in the post-event review report.
Learn more
Online Learning Module: Post Event Review
This training module consists of three lessons comprised of an on-demand webinar and DIY templates and a case study:
The significance of a robust post-event review process
Which tasks need to be undertaken post-event
Efficient ways to collect data and feedback
How Parkes Elvis Festival maintains its success