So your event is over. The band has gone home and you swept up the floor. Someone played “Closing Time” by Semisonic.
What now?
First and foremost, celebrate! You survived! Feel good about your accomplishments.
To make the most of your event, you now have to move into the post-event process. Here are the 5 steps you need to go through to make sure you fully understand the success of your event, its impact on your business and what you’re going to do next.
Meet With Your Team
Sit down with everyone and have a group post-mortem meeting where you can discuss everything that happened. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Write it all down. For any problems that came up, create solutions. Write them down. Let everyone have an opinion and discuss every aspect of the event that you can think of.
This kind of full-blown analysis is where you can start to see how successful your event was, how smooth it was and how many issues came up. Don’t forget to discuss and determine solutions for any problems that came up in the planning and preparation stages as well.
Survey Everyone You Can
Create surveys asking for opinions of everyone involved to make sure you get a full 360 degree set of opinions and understanding of how your event went. Ask the vendors about how much business they did. Ask the sponsors if they fully understand the benefits of partnering with you. Ask your attendees if they enjoyed themselves, learned things, or tapped into any of the take-aways you wanted them to get.
Combine all the survey data into hard numbers. What percentage of people involved want to work with you again? What percentage of attendees want you to host the event again? These numbers are just as important as your profits and expenses. Remember to ask questions as specifically as you can.
Thank Everyone
Events are a massive amount of work for anyone involved. Thank each of them. Thank your attendees for coming – without them your event would be a total disaster. Thank your volunteers and staff for working and helping you along. Thank your sponsors for paying for (or supplying much needed items for) the event.
Send out thank you cards, emails and phone calls very soon after the event. Make sure people know exactly how much you appreciate their contributions.
Write a Post Mortem Report
Write a report that contains all of the data you’ve collected, summaries your expenses, profits and revenues, and discusses everything you covered in your post-event meeting: your wins, your losses, and what you want to improve for next time. It’s too hard to remember all of it, so write it down and seriously analyze everything that happened. It will put you one step ahead for future events.
Get Ready to Do it Again
Get ready to do it all again! Start planning your next event. Take time to relax and recharge, but gear up and start planning for the next event – whether it be in three months or a year, stay ahead of your time table by planning early.
Comment and tell us about your post-event rituals: how do you celebrate your wins?