Virtual report on the event What to include in an event report post-event

However, there's one detail that marketers should be thinking about in the beginning -- yet often forget of until later: the post-event report.

Today's world of data-driven decisions marketers must be able to justify every decision they make and each dollar they invest. Putting on a virtual event isn't cheap, and creating a strong post-event report will help prove the return on investment (ROI) of your event. This report can provide you with the numbers you need to draw a bigger budget as well as better speakers and increase the attendance at the next occasion.

In this section, you'll find the essentials you'll need to create your perfect report after the event. Take a look early on to ensure you're recording each metric that you'll need prior to, during, and after the occasion.

In this article

1.    What's a summary of a post-event?
2.    Why measuring the efficacy of your event matters
3.    What do I need to include in my post-event reports?
4.    OK, but how long should my event report be?
5.    What kind of imagery or images do you think an event report should include?
6.    What is the best way to normalize your reporting post-event
7.    Reporting to promote future activities
8.    Checklist for memorable event summary report in 4 steps
9.    Be ready to host your next event

What's a post-event review?

The post-event summaries (also known as an event report) can be a document internal to your organization which is used to provide stakeholders with information on how the event went. It includes your original goals as well as any other metrics to show the success of your event. These metrics can aid in proving the ROI of your event, be used to predict necessary budget for future events, and be used to help advertise future events.

The reason why assessing the success of an event is crucial

"Events require energy, money as well as time and resource," Jasmine Jenkins, Director of Marketing and Sales at Senior Customer Crossbeam, says.

"It's important to dig into the ROI you can get from your events. How many deals did this event source? How much revenue did you influence through the launch of the event? How many leads did we receive? Event marketers can become caught with the minute details of of running events, however, it's important to remain in of our minds that this is our "why.'"   Jasmine Jenkins, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Crossbeam

Each team will have different goals of their respective events. Certain teams will seek to make an actual profit from the events they host, while other will simply want to generate leads, educate their existing customers, or increase branding awareness. In any case, tracking the metrics that correspond to your unique goals will allow you to understand how effective your event was as well as provide information you require to run even better occasions in the future.

What should my post-event report Should my report after the event be?

Your post-event report should be concise, but contain all the information stakeholders need to understand your event's success and performance.

Executive Summary

The executive summary should summarize the rest of your post-event report in under a page. Because it draws on the information that is included in the remainder of the report, you'll likely want to write it last -- but it's best to place it at the start of your report.

The executive summary of your report should contain:

• Your event's objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• A summary of the event's budget
• Any important insights garnered from the hosting of the event
• Recommendations for future events

Goals of the event

In this part, you'll share the objectives and goals you set for the occasion. It is important to make sure your goals are as specific in time, time-bound and quantifiable as is possible. As an example, instead of saying that you'd like to "Generate leads," make it clear that your goal is to "Generate 200 lead leads who are qualified" for instance "Have 10 percent of attendees sign up for demos within the first month of the event."

This will give stakeholders an understanding of why you chose certain KPIs to measure the efficacy of your program.

In this section, include:

• What are your goals for the day
• The KPIs used to track the progress toward each goal
• Your target audience

Event summary

In this section it is important to provide participants all the pertinent information about your event -- from where it took place, to the number of sponsors who took part. If you'd like to provide readers with even greater context, you could include an agenda or schedule as an appendix.

In this section, you can include:

• Event's name
• Event date(s)
• Event length
• Event location
• The number of sessions
• Number of speakers
• The number of sponsors

Participant data

Within this area, you may include:

• Your target demographic
• Number of registered and attending participants
• An analysis of registrations of the participants according to country, industry department, country, or the persona of the customer
• How many participants participated in the sessions?
• Engagement of the audience
• Attendee satisfaction and Net Promor Score (NPS) after the event

Metrics

The metrics you choose to feature in your post-event report will be directly related to the goals of your event and KPIs. You can format this section in a way that restates your goals and KPIs that are followed by event results.

Depending on your goals, here are a few indicators you might be interested in measuring and including:

• Number of event registrations
• Number of attendees
• Speakers' number
• Number of sponsors
• Amount of social media posts and engagements prior to or during and even after the occasion
• Analytics from your landing page for your event (visits and actions)
• Total reach of your event's social media and email marketing strategies
• New followers are added to social media
• Number of leads generated
• Amount of actions targeted by registrants and attendees (such as demos or sales calls booked or purchases made)
• The most popular sessions
• Least popular sessions
• Attendee engagement in surveys, polls, as well as chat boxes
• Attendees' NPS or satisfaction levels
• Sponsorship NPS or satisfaction levels

When it comes to certain measures, you'll need to track numbers long enough to be able to observe exact outcomes.

"One factor that can help is not only looking at figures right after an occasion," says Charlie Riley, VP of Marketing at Send Technology. Then he adds:

"Painting the picture for long-tail opportunities is key. Most people will want to know the results immediately including the number of contacts made or demos scheduled. But an important metric to establish the mood and in evaluating the event's effectiveness is aligning the stage for your deal back into the date of the date of the event.
  If you have a long selling cycle, then illustrating how you will report on deal stage progression by 60 days for instance, will show not only the immediate success of making connections at the show, but the additional marketing and sales initiatives that helped develop the Marketing qualified Lead (MQL) into a higher stage of the funnel of sales."

Budget

In this section, you'll be able to break down the top items of your budget as well as the amount each element of your party will cost -- from speakers' fees to how much you spent on your event's software, marketing and gear.

In this section, you'll also want to explain whether the event was either over or under budget and why.

Conclusion and recommendations

In the end, it's important write a summary of your event report and look into what went well and where you could improve.

This section may want to include:

• Comments and suggestions are received from the attendees or speakers as well as team members
• Reflections on topics and speakers who were most well-known
• Recommendations for future events

Formatting

When formatting your post-event report, start with a title page. Then, you can add the sections above chronologically. Be sure your report is clear and straightforward, and that stakeholders are able to easily look through your post-event summary for the most important information.

"I always aim to make it easy for people to understand the information through bullet points" adds Milo Cruz, Chief Marketing Officer at the Freelance Writing Jobs. "This helps me strategically summarize all the events while making sure that the most important information is precisely and concisely presented within the document."

Discussing your findings

If you've clearly stated your objectives and associated KPIs in your post-event overview the results ought to speak for themselves. According to Jasmine it's not enough to just stop there. Find ways to present your results from your event outside of the standard post-event summary.

"People would like to know shortly after the event has ended, how you did on the basis of attendance registrations, attendees, and engagement, so sharing that is important," she says. She suggests sharing these initial results soon after the event through whatever communication tool is most popular at your company, such as Slack, emails or an All-Hands conference.

Then, even after you've posted your event's post-event report keep highlighting any successes associated with your occasion. If your company has an Slack channel, which is updated regularly with won deals, highlight any deals which were affected by the events. Don't forget to provide the business with all of your results a couple of months following your occasion (since numerous metrics, such as the impact on revenue, don't give your the entire outcomes of your event until two weeks following your event).

"I don't think that sharing your results shouldn't be just a one-time event," Jasmine says. "You must always be sharing your successes, both small and big for up to 90 days after the event. When you work from home, there's always a lot of buzz. But when you've got these various milestones throughout a certain period with your team, it keeps the excitement in the air and keeps the event in mind."

Okay, so what length should my event report be?

The length of your post-event report will generally depend on your event's type, size, length, and the amount of work involved in putting it together. But, Marc Bishop, Director of Business Growth at Digital Web Solutions suggests keeping the report between 2 and 10 pages long.

"A good rule of thumb is to aim for the report to be sufficient to encompass all the essential aspects of the incident, yet not so lengthy that it's overwhelming or tedious to read" Marc says. "It's the matter of finding the right equilibrium."

What types of images or images should an event report include?

While you don't need to include imagery or images in your event report, including some of the images you've chosen can assist your participants to visualize the event and its outcomes.

Avoid overburdening your report with images, but do include any visuals that can support your data, such as:

• Graphs and tables which show the most important measures
• Screenshots from social media interactions, chat boxes, survey results, or testimonials

"In addition to highlighting quantitative metrics such as participants, registrants recordings, views recorded, and downloads of assets that are associated with webinars, I also provide pictures of qualitative feedback, such as pictures of surveys' quotes as well as chat feedback," says Kisha Velazquez who is a content marketing specialist who manages events for businesses such as Google, Bill.com, and QuickBooks Online. "Direct feedback adds soul to your report, and it summarizes your audience's reaction and sentiment towards your material. That's the beauty of polling the attendees, and using surveys after events."

What are the best ways to improve the post-event reporting you do

Most event planners, writing up a post-event summary can be time-consuming. Event marketers are involved in an array of events -- that each differs in terms of size, purpose or purpose, location, or audiences -- it may appear as though they're starting afresh every time they work to write a report.

That's why having a post-event summary template can prove extremely useful for event organizers. Understanding your event's objectives prior to the event is crucial, so that you can select the most important indicators to track before, during, and following your event. Then, all you need to do is follow the guidelines to come up with the perfect after-event review.

What is the best way to utilize reporting to promote future events

Although your post-event report is a necessary tool to help sell your events internally It's also a beneficial tool in helping to market the future event to prospective guests, sponsors, as well as exhibitors. This is how you can utilize your event's post-event statistics to advertise future events.

for advertisers and sponsors

The collection of metrics about your attendance characteristics, engagement levels and overall reach could help you entice prospective sponsors to attend your next gatherings. Also, it helps you make the case for expanding their collaboration.

To illustrate, take a the time to look over the Dublin Tech Summit 2023 Partnerships page.

On it, Dublin Tech Summit doesn't only highlight their number of attendees (8,000) and their number of attendees (8,000) -- they mention that 35% of the participants are decision makers, 30 percent of them are managers and 58% work at enterprises. In the case of many tech companies, that's the exactthe persona they're targeting -- making partnering with the Dublin Tech Summit an easy yes.

For future attendees

Your past success events provides the ideal promotional material for your upcoming events. You should highlight the amount (and the quality) of speakers that attendees could be expecting, the volume of discussion topics that typically occur at your events and also the opinions you've heard from past attendees.

If you're seeking some examples, Web Summit does a beautiful job of this. Their website lets them showcase the speakers as well as women, startups or investors as well as media members that attend their meetings as well as in their Web Summit for Startups page there are plenty of quotes from past startups which have attended the conference:

They also released their 2017 "By the Numbers" trailer for Web Summit also highlighted a ton of the fun stats related to their summit like the number of people attending as well as startups, speakers, coffees drank, and the number of average miles per participant.

Sharing this type of social proof makes potential attendees feel confident about attending the event, and also drumming up enthusiasm.

For future bragging rights

Accurately tracking your event's key factors can aid Future You in innumerable ways. Tracking your events' successes can help you pitch new events to executives or build a convincing argument for your event and even assist you to find your next event-related advertising position.

Note it all down!

A checklist for memorable events summary report in 4 steps

1. Know your KPIs

For setting your KPIs Begin by defining the goals you've set for your occasion.

"Your measurements will differ depending on what your purposes are," says Jasmine. "For example, suppose that you set two objectives for the event you planned: to increase conversions from the free tier to the premium level, as well as to boost your current customers' product usage. In light of these goals, you'd want to track some metrics of the day.

Selecting the best metrics will weave together the narrative of your experience that is the whybehind everything you do.

"At the conclusion the day, each business has to ask"Should we try this over again? Should we assign more budget to this? Do we need to hire more staff to support it?'" Jasmine says. "The metrics you select really aid in answering those concerns and establish your arguments."

2. Collect all the data

Once you've identified your KPIs ensure that you're tracking them -- in the lead-up to, during as well as after the conference. The metrics you want to track can be pulled from your customer relationship management software (CRM) or the platform you use to host your events, as well as any other tools you employ to monitor the registration process, engagement as well as actions of attendees.

You can also dive into your event's the viewer's level of analytics by . If you publish your event afterwards, you can also dive deep into the analytics of the people who are watching your videos as well as how they're accessing the videos, and how they're interacting with them.

3. Analyze and synthesize

For your post-event report to be as digestible as possible You'll need to select your most crucial details, metrics as well as feedback that you can include. Your report's reader should never be confused while looking over your summary of the post-event- they should understand exactly the information you're providing and clearly see the data you use to back up your points.

4. Make your report look good

There are millions and one ways to format your post-event summary -in the end, the method you choose to structure is based on your preferences and your organization's way of sharing information.

Jasmine describes how she loves to share her post-event summaries with the help of both as an 8-slide Google Slides presentation and a Notion page.

"The presentation is the "TL;DR version, which executive can view, giving them an overall view of our event performance," Jasmine explains. "And then if anyone wants additional details they can refer them to our Notion page on the day."

On of the events Notion page Jasmine provides a complete list of analytics for the event and information, in which she highlights the most important feedback metrics and KPIs. She also links to additional data (including every metric, the chat transcripts, promotional events, and feedback) in order for readers to go deeper into the information independently.

Jasmine is sure to include many screenshots of her presentation in order to back up her arguments and to capture the intangible elements of the gathering. "I am able to take screenshots of qualitative elements, such as photographs of the event and feedback from attendees," she says. "And then I also have screenshots of the report that shows our information."

After you've completed your initial post-event report, you can save the report , and be sure to utilize it as a template to create a new eventchanging out the metrics when necessary to align with the latest goals or any changes.

Prepare to host your next gathering

At , we make it simple to monitor the key performance indicators prior to as well as after the event by using our advanced analytics and robust set of integrations.