In a sector as competitive and demanding as event organising, keeping everything in view matters more with every passing day — because it means being more effective, making fewer mistakes, saving time and money and investing in what most readily turns into satisfaction for attendees, for sponsors and for investors.

Anyone who organises events knows, though, that having control over everything is essentially impossible: events have become complex and the factors and variables have multiplied exponentially. So how do you hold those two opposing demands together? Ideally you would have a magic wand, but there are tools available, and they rest mainly on the data events produce — valuable sources of information for understanding what is happening and, often, for seeing a little of what is coming.

We have already written about data-driven marketing and the value of data in other articles on this blog, which we would happily point you to. Today we want to concentrate on KPIs — key performance indicators — which, for an event, measure how far and how well it is reaching its goals, and are the first means of reading a situation objectively and so judging whether and what to change. Among the main ones, in our view, some can be very useful for assessing an event before, during and after it takes place.