“Hello, is anyone there?” Measuring Audience Engagement and Participation

In the events management industry, “audience engagement” and “participation” are buzzwords that are at the top of everyone’s minds.

“Improve audience participation with our innovative solutions!”
“Engage your audiences with a world class speaker!”

But, are you really getting a qualitative, tangible return on your investments? After all, “innovative solutions” and “world class speakers” usually don’t come cheap. That’s why one of the most important things you can do after any event, is to study your return on investment (ROI). Simply put, did the amount of money you spent on this event, bring about an equal or greater value in terms of improving your brand, building customer loyalty and/or potentially increasing your sales and customer base?

No guesswork please, only metrics matter

A common mistake event planners make is to estimate their ROI based on gut feel. “This event was a success because a bunch of participants personally told me they had a good time.”
When evaluating your event’s success, you need to measure multiple factors across your entire audience, to get a true picture of how well your event did.

A few key metrics to measure include:

1. Participation rate

How many percent of your audience members were present for the presentations and activities they were invited to participate in?

2. Engagement rate

Were your audience members engaged with what was going on? Did they respond to questions asked by presenters, leave comments and get engaged with the other people in the room?

3. Feedback

When looking at feedback, it’s important to analyse the feedback given to see how future events can be improved. What’s also important, is measuring what percentage of participants skipped giving feedback at all. This could hint at a group of participants that were as not engaged as they should have been.

4. Other metrics

Figures such as total page views, unique visitors, comments, instant messages and others give you a fantastic insight into how many people have been visiting your event website, portal or app.

The most effective way to capture these metrics

A great way to ensure your attendees’ actions are captured, is to put a tool that will capture these actions into their hands. A tool such as the Mobile Event App from PowerVote.

By incorporating the event information, agenda, speaker profiles, presentation materials, check-ins, Q&As, attendee directory and chats into the app, your event participants will use it for anything and everything related to your event - and you’ll be able to track their every action, without being intrusive. You’ll see how often they used the event app, when they used it and what they used it for.

All this data will reveal which areas of your event were successful, and which weren’t. Analysing these metrics can be even more telling than the direct feedback your event participants give you.

Who knew measuring your event ROI could be so simple? It can be, with the right technology.

This post was originally published at www.powervote.com on March 10, 2016.