A comprehensive event report relies on these essential ingredients
The dreaded event report. It’s the least exciting task, but incredibly important nonetheless. Your event may have been a roaring success, but without a detailed breakdown of data, your clients won’t have a concrete idea of whether or not their function helped them to achieve their objectives.
Unfortunately, by the time an event is over, the last thing you feel like doing is sitting down to sift through reams of paper in order to collate one.
The benefits of an event report (for both you and your clients) are plentiful. The most crucial? Being able to determine whether all of your hard work and your client’s investment resulted in ROI. It’s imperative that you’re able to account for every cent, as well as justify why you chose to do X over Y. If you’re wondering what exactly an event report should entail, read on.
Accurate statistics about every single element of an event form the foundation of a comprehensive event report.
‘Guesstimates’ or approximations won’t cut it. Providing clients with insight into any event starts with the numbers. At the end of the day CEOs are only interested in the numbers. Your data needs to be extremely detailed, and should include information about every single aspect of an event. This includes the attendance rate, the number of no-shows, invitation open rates and bounce rates – to name a few.
An event report can never be too detailed.
If you’re already using event management software, make sure you’re using one that enables you to create event reports that contain information about every single aspect of your event. The RSVP Agency’s Enterprise solution includes event reporting capabilities that are far more thorough than if you were to attempt to collate this information manually.
One of, if not the most important inclusions in a report is a detailed breakdown of your budget.
If you can’t account for R5000 purely because you’ve misplaced the receipt for the bar service, your client is bound to be unimpressed. Any event report, whether for a team-building excursion or gala dinner, needs to include information about what was spent, and how. If you went over budget, you’ll need to provide the exact details on what the extra cash was used for.
You wouldn’t be able to have an event without any guests, so don’t underestimate their feedback.
In order to glean valuable insight about your guest’s impressions and experience, always include their comments and suggestions. (Collecting these in the first place via email surveys should be a pre-requisite) This will enable you to identify areas that can be improved on, and notify you about aspects that you might not have deemed important. (For example, if guests complain that they didn’t like the fact that the bathrooms were unisex, or that the music was too loud.)
At the end of the day, clients want to see if the money they spent on a guest was less than, equal to, or more than the money a guest spent with their brand. Ultimately, comprehensive event reports, like those included in our bespoke RSVP Enterprise software, need to be compiled with adequate attention to detail in order to ensure that you and your clients know exactly how successful an event was – on all fronts.
Image Credit: Bleacher Nation
