Condensing months of planning into a few days of activity is enough to overwhelm anyone. Conferences and events are essential touchpoints for your community to connect, so it’s important that you take it right, which means the event is valuable to both attendees and your organization.

How do you know if an event is successful? here are five basic elements to measure success.

Know your key performance indicators (KPIs)
The first step in measuring success is knowing what your goals are in the first place. One of the best ways to do this is to categorize the event’s objectives by stakeholder:
• What does your organization need to accomplish (such as a certain percentage of new members or a specific financial goal)?
• What do your participants need to accomplish (eg training on the latest developments in the field or growing their professional networks)?
• What do your sponsors need to accomplish (such as a certain number of leads generated or a specific volume of website traffic)?
Identifying these goals will help your organization decide what needs to be measured or what these KPIs should be.

Social listening
Even in face-to-face meetings, much of the action happens online. Review your conference hashtag and analyze the comments. While it’s important to know how many people were talking about your event online, quantifying their experience is especially meaningful. Sentiment Analysis monitors your social media mentions and quantifies them as positive or negative. An easy way to do this is to make a list of keywords (like “good”, “excellent”, “inspiring”, “useful”, “extraordinary”, “love”, “best” and others) and negative keywords (“disappointing”, “boring”, ” not relevant, “, There There are several tools that can help you in this process, both in relation to your conference and for longer term community listening.

Conduct post-event surveys of participants
Polls let your community know that you care about their experience and that their opinion matters. According to Markletic event research, 90 percent of event planners use surveys to measure satisfaction. Combine that with the fact that 85% of event planners see satisfaction as a key performance indicator, and it’s clear that a post-event survey is a must. Ask your participants what they liked but also where there are opportunities for the event adapt or grow. Open ended questions can seem overwhelming to the audience, but giving people a space to share suggestions can lead to creative ideas for your next event. And if you’re worried about low turnout, encourage respondents to get a discount for your next event.

Conduct speaker surveys after the event
Also be sure to check out the experiences of your attendees who presented, moderated, or chaired your event. Did they get the support they needed? Did their speech inspire valuable questions or help them find others? collaborate with? You can use this data to encourage more people to speak up next year by telling them how many presenters found new opportunities as a result of their presentation.

Post-event engagement
Depending on the nature of your event, some documents may be posted online once the event is over. Do your participants return to these documents to refer to what they have learned or to make new connections? It’s important to monitor web traffic and your audience’s engagement withrequest conference material. Understanding how your attendees use these videos, posters, and other additional information will help you identify the most valuable topics or types of sessions and materials going forward.

These five tips can help you think effectively about your events and ensure that they are the valuable and memorable experiences you need for your audience while being financially viable for your organization.

Sami Benchekroun is co-founder and CEO of Morressier, which provides conference management software, virtual conference solutions, and more.