We have known for a long time that data is fundamental in the world of events.
We need it when we design the event, when we have to anticipate what will happen so that we can steer it as well as possible.
We need it during the event, when it gives us a feel for how things are going and, thanks to the critical eye that comes with experience, lets us see possible crises coming and act in advance.
We need it after the event, when we have to report results to every stakeholder (clients, funders, sponsors or even ourselves), take stock of what went well and what can be improved, and put that knowledge aside for the future.
And then it starts again, because when a new event has to be organised the first — and wisest — thing to do is look back and learn from experience.
Anyone who has spent some time in event organisation, though, knows that however fundamental data may be, it is not always easy to control it and turn it from heaps of numbers and percentages into useful information that can be read at a glance and then communicated, shared and passed on quickly and without errors. This often happens because as the technology we use every day to organise events has grown, so has the volume of data produced, yet that data has rarely been organised and made usable to the same degree by human beings, who are only digital up to a point.
Everything digital is measurable
and so it quickly turns into data
Needless to say, we are for the third way, the balance between the two poles, and we will now tell you why.
What vanity metrics are, where they come from and (above all) what they are for
We all know that some numbers speak louder than others, and that they can affect our psychology strongly enough to make us take certain actions and avoid others.
A classic example is the like on Facebook. It certainly has no direct impact on a business in terms of sales, but that does not mean it is worth nothing. How much more appealing does a piece of content look to us once many people have already liked it? The same holds even when the content was NOT liked: the mere fact that it stirred interest makes it more interesting in our eyes than another one that drew no reaction at all. And again: at first glance, are you more likely to follow a profile with 10,000 followers or one with 10? If so many people have already decided to put that content into their media diet, there must be a reason. And that is where a kind of trust by proxy sets in: I trust because other people trust.
So there it is. Being able to pick out, from all the data available, the figures that best support an idea and prompt a behaviour is anything but irrelevant, including in the world of events. How many people have already registered for that event I have been looking at for a while? A lot? Right, then I am the only one missing. Click.
Need we say more?
There are also metrics that are not vanity metrics. They are usually called “actionable” metrics, because they can be used to make informed business decisions and act on them. To simplify, they are the other side of the coin from vanity metrics, but they are not necessarily more important. They are simply different, above all in what you can do with them, and they are the foundation of a discipline that is as fashionable as it is important if you want to play the game seriously: data-driven marketing.
Data-driven marketing: what it is and how to use it strategically
Data-driven marketing starts from the data available in order to understand and decide how to set up your marketing strategies and campaigns.
So is all marketing data-driven?
Essentially yes, unless the people taking the decisions base them on something other than data.
Experience and instinct are certainly important ingredients of any decision-making process, but they can rarely be the only tools, if only because the results are then impossible to measure. Data-driven marketing therefore exists to put every possible element — the data — at your disposal: to take decisions beforehand, to keep track of how activities and projects are going while they run, and to assess the outcome once they are over. Fortunately, as we said earlier, the more digital tools you use to design and deliver your activities, the easier it is to have the right data to set up and carry out every step of the strategy correctly. In those cases the biggest risk is having too much data, or having to spend a great deal of time retrieving it from multiple tools and platforms and then optimising it, because the same things have been measured against different parameters.
And now for the tactics
How do you avoid all this?
One good way is certainly to have a single platform to rely on for every function — or at least for most of them — so that the data produced all sits in the same place and speaks the same language, and is therefore immediately actionable. The other winning strategy is to design the collection of meaningful data together with the event, so that it genuinely serves the information you have to provide and the decisions you have to take. This not only shortens the time spent on analysis and on turning data into useful information, it also keeps some variables under control. Two quick examples. When you design a satisfaction questionnaire you can measure the answers, but you will never know how honest they are, so including control questions lets you keep that uncertainty in check when reliable data really matters to you. And if you need to know whether people are actually taking an active part in a training session, you cannot rely on how long they stayed in the room. Data measures a great deal, but not everything: it measures what people do, not how they do it. Having that clear beforehand, rather than after the data has been collected, can make a real difference when the time comes to put it to use.
Request a live demo using the button below and, if you would like to tell us something about your needs and about which data matters most to the performance of your next event, we can prepare to give you our best answers.