Finally! The event is over, and it is time to take a break. Hold your horses, though, have you stopped and analyzed your event for future benefits and changes? Analyzing your event with technology or with handwritten notes is a great way to help yourself plan the next event. Let’s go through this together!
Personally, I’m more old-fashioned, but sometimes nothing beats the technological advancements that we have today. From virtual check-in systems to surveys that can pop up after the event, the options are endless. These surveys, while they can be done with a QR code or via paper, are more accessible when you have them on the event app or pop up through email.
On the flipside, with notes and direction, you can make some powerful observations on your work to see what it is that needs to be changed and what can stay the same. In many ways, going by notes allows more introspection and self-reflection, which is what makes you a better event coordinator. Using technology, in turn, helps reflect on the event itself.
To be honest, a solid combination of the two types of reflective practices is probably going to be the best way to approach your events.
First, let’s ask this: what hard data do you have that is going to help you analyze your event? Honestly, the hard data, or quantitative data, is going to give you a baseline to look at.
You’ll want things that are hard numbers, such as attendance budget analysis, any earnings from the event, email communication, and looking at the clicks that you received through emails and through your event applications. These are going to show your interaction rate and really help you get the overall picture of the event.
This type of information is also what you are generally going to present first when talking to stakeholders in the events that you are running. They are going to be more concerned with the numbers that are actually going on rather than the feedback that was received.
Here’s where the vast amount of reading and work comes in. Apps and data analysis programs like Excel can do most of the data analysis for you. However, when it comes to human input or things that are not hard numbers, you have to figure out how to assign numbers to feelings so that you can analyze them! It all goes back to analysis.
For example, a great way to try this is when going through feedback. You’ll want to arrange feedback responses with anything from letters to numbers, but I wouldn’t go over five different analysis points. Assign each letter or number a ‘feeling’, be it good or bad, based upon its rank in the alphanumerical line-up. This takes time! It helps if you have a team to keep you going or to take off some of the workload, but sometimes this is something you have to do on your own.
Once you have everything assigned, you can turn the soft commentary into hard numbers. So say that you got a lot of threes, which are the middle ground: the event was in the middle. Of course, we all want our event to have the highest rating possible, but we can’t make everyone happy.
You can repeat this process with all kinda of qualitative data so that you can make it into something that you can analyze and present to stakeholders.
This lands more on the physical notes that you were hopefully taking during the event. These can be little notes from something along the lines of “decor needs to be higher” or “I need to watch for catering backups”. These little notes and things that you may not think are important are actually vital to understanding your process and how you think through an event.
Collect the commentary that you have, and also sit down and have a decompression session with your team. They are going to be able to give you a great breakdown of your behavior, guest behavior, each other’s behavior, and work ethic, and help you move forward together as a stronger team!
One of the hardest things to do is to bring it all together. Slides or PowerPoint are both great ways to organize your data in graphs and move them around with ease, instead of having to try and move everything around in a word processing document. Remember, your final goal is to have something ready that follows along this guide so that you can successfully present your event!
