EIBTM, the European Incentive, Business Travel & Meetings exhibition, which wrapped up in December in Barcelona, has just announced the winner of its 2009 Best Event Evaluation award.

Troi Helsinki, a Finland-based event-management company, took the prize for its measurement of the return on investment from the annual meeting of a data-security company client, F-Secure.

The meeting, F-Secure’s Global Channel event, brought together 200 of the company's international distribution channel partners. Troi Helsinki used pre- and post-event feedback combined with on-site feedback to evaluate attendee satisfaction, learning, and application of that learning. Four months after the event, Troi Helsinki showed that knowledge gained from the conference was being used within organizations in areas ranging from client servicing to internal training.

Troi Helsinki used tools and techniques of the ROI Methodology. Both a planning strategy and an evaluation tool, the ROI Methodology is centered around designing for and then measuring specific actions that will be taken by participants as a result of conference attendance. First developed by Jack Phillips, PhD, and Patti Phillips, PhD, at the U.S.-based ROI Institute, the methodology is taught in Europe by the European Event ROI Institute.

“In these hard times, evaluation is more important than ever,” said Dr. Elling Hamso, managing partner of the European Event ROI Institute, in a press release from EIBTM. “Everybody is talking about ROI, but many don't know how to move from the rudimentary measures of satisfaction to something more meaningful, perhaps even the financial return on investment. This award encourages companies that have this evaluation skill to show others how they do it, which is why I think it is such an important award. All meeting planners need to understand how their meetings create value for stakeholders and how to measure the effectiveness of the meeting for this purpose.”



Mari Sylvia Wesanterä, senior marketing manager and event manager for the operator channel at F-Secure, said, “We know evaluating the event is a good and necessary investment. The evaluation planning made the meeting better, without a doubt. By defining clear objectives at different levels, the meeting format and content became more focused and the post-event evaluation told us how well we had succeeded in spending the budget effectively.”


EIBTM and the European Event ROI Institute recently partnered to roll out the ROI Methodology to the meetings and event industry in Europe.