Over the past few years, many methods of calculating the return on investment of meetings have been rolled out in an effort to give stakeholders tangible results and to answer the all-important question: Is this meeting worth it? The latest strategy, developed by George Eberstadt, co-founder of Boston-based event data management company nTAG, and presented in a white paper format at www.ntag.com, lays out a new process for ROI measurement.

“You will never deliver an ROI figure that is accurate beyond any question,” the report states. “On the other hand, don't let the challenge of coming up with perfect ROI measures stop you from delivering good ones.”

Eberstadt's process measures objectives against benchmarks. The five steps are: 1) establish your investment and objectives; 2) decide on the metrics you'll use to assess how well you met your objectives; 3) determine the break-even point for each metric; 4) collect the data; and 5) run the numbers.

What's the Break-Even Point?

The first step is pretty straightforward. To calculate the investment, add up all the costs — including food and beverage, hotels, equipment, travel, and so on — and then subtract all income generated from attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors.

The next job is to come up with a list of meeting objectives. For a user group, for example, the objectives might be to enhance brand perception, promote purchases, increase customer loyalty, and understand customer needs. Each objective should then be assigned a percentage based on importance. If the four objectives in this example were of equal importance, each would be assigned a weight of 25 percent.

To measure each objective, metrics need to be developed. For an objective such as increasing customer loyalty, the report suggests the metric could be improvement in a customer satisfaction score as measured by the difference between pre- and post-event survey scores. Another objective, understanding customer needs, could be measured by looking at the number of new product suggestions collected from customers at a product presentation. If an objective has more than one metric, assign a percentage weight to each.

Next, the report says planners should develop a break-even performance level for each metric so that they can determine if the objective has been met, exceeded, or lagged behind its benchmark. Planners should use their intuition and get feedback from executives and others to set the benchmarks. For improving customer loyalty, for example, the benchmark might be a 20 percent improvement in the post-event survey over the pre-event survey. The benchmark should be the break-even point for the objective. In other words, if the objective is met, the event would pay for itself; if it is exceeded, it would generate a return.

Data Collection

While quantifiable objectives, such as sales leads, are relatively easy to measure, surveys are useful to gauge changes in attendee perception, motivation, and learning. Ways to collect participant feedback include using the Web, on-site kiosks, paper and pencil, or electronic input devices, such as nTAG's electronic badges.

The final step is to run the numbers, the process for which is described in detail in the report. According to the white paper, this process works best for sales training, user conferences, customer events, executive meetings, and partner conferences.

A.

Enter your objectives and metrics, along with their weights.

B.

Multiply the objective and metric weights to find the overall metric weight.

C.

Enter the break-even points and actual results.

D.

Almost there! Divide the actual results by the break-even point to determine the ratio.

E.

Finally, multiply the overall metric weight by the ratio, and then subract 100%. The result is your ROI.

Objectives for User Conference	Objective Weight	Metric	Metric Weight for the Objective	Overall Metric Weight	Break-Even Level	Actual Results	Ratio	Weighted Difference
Enhance brand perception	25%	Immediate improvement in brand perception	100%	25%	10%	12%	120%	30%
Promote purchases and upgrades	25%	Qualified leads captured	60%	15%	100	150	150%	23%
		Improvement in intent-to-purchase score	40%	10%	10%	15%	150%	15%
Increase customer needs	30%	Improvement in customer satisfaction score	100%	30%	10%	10%	100%	30%
Understand customer needs	10%	Responses to product road map presentation	100%	10%	80	100	125%	13%
Grow event next year	10%	Year-over-year growth	100%	10%	5%	4%	80%	8%
	100%			100%				121%
								ROI = 21%

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