November 20, 2018
By Mansi Soni

It is well known that face-to-face events provide your attendees with an unparallelled opportunity for collaboration, education, and networking. What is often overlooked (and is becoming more vital with the rise in expectations for events to deliver measurable ROI), is the opportunity for organisers to collect a vast amount of data from their attendees and turn that information into meaningful event insights.

Think about what you want to gain from your event and consider these four effective methods of collecting insights.

1. Attendee Interaction

Encourage your attendees to interact as much as possible, as often as possible throughout your event. The qualitative and quantitative data you gather is invaluable and – as an added bonus – attendees stay more engaged and empowered. There are a lot of great ways to incorporate interactive elements into your event. Try building polling questions into your sessions, utilising a discussion board, enabling attendee-to-attendee messaging, or hosting a game or competition through the event.

2. Social Media

The reality is attendees are accustomed to utilising social media channels in their day-to-day life, and they will continue to use the tools that are most familiar to them. Integrating social media (through a mobile event app, a tweet wall, or even a social competition) can really extend the reach of your event beyond the venue. With a curation and analytical tool, exploring social media contributions can lead to valuable discoveries, including trending topics, event perceptions, and insight into influential users.

3. Surveys

Collecting data before, during, and after your event is a key step in determining its ROI or ROO (return on objectives), making the use of event surveys a no-brainer. Collect better data with mobile, in-the-moment surveys that are brief, to-the-point, and contain a variety of question types.

4. Mobile Event App Analytics

If you’re already using an event app, you are probably aware of the powerful analytics they contain. If not, you should know the possibilities! Not only can event apps provide detailed data following the event they also help you evaluate and improve your event in real time.

Find out what your attendees are thinking and how your event is performing by taking a look at networking and schedule analytics, session performance, survey results and more. Make any adjustments or enhancements you can in-the-moment and further analyse the data to gain future event insights.

Ever wonder what the maturity level of your meetings and events programme is compared to your peers? Click here to get your benchmark.

Mansi Soni, Assistant Team Lead, Content Marketing, Cvent

Mansi Soni

Mansi is part of the content marketing team at Cvent. She has 7+ years of experience in developing content for the travel and hospitality industry and leads the content production team for the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regions. When not researching new topics for writing, she can be found making glass paintings, trying new ice cream flavours or playing family games.

More Reading

Attendees paying attention at a conference
Event Marketing & Management

7 Top Lessons from Event Association Leaders You Should Know

By Paul Cook
Mobile Apps & Event Tech

25 Event Planning Tools That Will Make Your Job Easier

By Mike Fletcher
Meeting Icebreaker
Events

55 Engaging Meeting Icebreakers

By Hope Salvatori

Subscribe to our newsletter