Measuring return on investment (ROI) gives many meeting planners pause. They know it’s important but exactly how is it done? Unless there is a measurable outcome like in a training session, ROI can be a bit of a nebulous concept for most people. In our previous article, How A Lack of Engagement Can Kill Your Meetings, we offered 13 ways to engage your audience and acquire their attention. Now let’s take a look at ROI.
Measuring Engagement to calculate ROI
Measuring engagement is a good way to calculate your ROI for your meeting but it’s important to ensure you’re measuring the right thing for clearest results. Make notes about where you currently stand or consult someone who knows what past meetings at the company looked like. Then measure interactions and shares on social media or the company intranet as well as audience questions and in-person interactions with the content and presenter.
Next, use exit surveys to rate the effectiveness of the speaker. It is difficult to have an engaged audience with an ineffective presenter (although you can overcome a mediocre one and we’ll explain more about that in the next section). Finally, compare your results with what has occurred in the past.
Keys to Better ROI
Now that you know what to measure, you likely have a better view on your meeting ROI but how do you improve it if you’ve found it’s lacking or lower than you’d hoped?
Audience engagement is essential to a strong return on investment. That’s why you need to be aware of the following presentation attention killers. You want to make sure you do what you can to keep them from happening.
Avoid These Presentation Attention Killers
- The same old, same old. If your meeting lasts longer than 15 minutes, you need to change things up within the meeting. Create a disruption every 15-30 minutes.
- Monologues with no interaction.
- Droning on without dramatic pause.
- Using a meeting to handle what an email could do.
- Saving questions for the end.
- Bad WiFi connection.
- Lack of connective engagement tech.
While speakers have a large bearing on engagement, they are not the only ones affecting it. As a matter of fact, presentations are only the beginning. A connected audience can overcome a mediocre presenter as we can see in the next section.
Check out our free webinar on Meeting Attention Deficit Disorder where we provide great tips for attention-grabbing presentations.
Use Data for Larger ROI
Many meeting planners struggle with engagement or assume it’s something their presenters will take care of. But that’s not always the case. Engagement doesn’t solely reside in the hands of the people speaking at your meeting. It’s a pronged approach involving many areas. One of those areas is technology. Not only is tech engaging, as explained above, but it can also provide necessary data that allow you to analyze what gets shared and when.
With technology, in addition to measuring in-person interactions and shares, you’re able to track:
- Private messages sent
- Comments on slides
- Audience questions
- The number of users and way of access (from which social media, which device…)
- Interactions between participants
- Likes and comments on the Live Feed
- Sending of business cards
If you pay attention to your data, you have valuable insights into your audience and what they enjoy. ConnexMe can provide stats on when your attendees are most active, what pieces of content or the presentation received the most responses, how many people participated, how many messages and connection requests were sent, and much more.
People will engage with the content and one another if:
- The content is of interest
- Connecting is easy
Technology helps you achieve both because it makes the content easily accessible and allows meeting participants to shape and mold it according to their experiences. Gone are the days where an attendee will bring up a question, the presenter will say good question, and half the meeting participants will miss it because they couldn’t hear the question or the answer. By using the ConnexMe technology you’re not only able to capture your audience’s attention but you give them a platform from which to enjoy, digest, comment, and share the content.
In order to better understand how to capture their attention, you can use the platform to analyze what is of interest to your participants. You can watch their reaction to unveiled information as opposed to giving it to them all at once and losing the dramatic build up. Finally, you can provide a platform where they are exchanging with people in the room and not losing track of those connections to dark social like Facebook messenger or texting, which escapes data analysis. Knowing what engages your audience and how it captures their attention will help you improve future meetings as well.
Measuring engagement is a great way for event professionals to calculate their event ROI. Engagement is a measurement that should be apart of every event planner’s reporting metrics. The analytics that you can acquire via event technology will help you in your journey to planning interactive and engaging meetings.
