How Do You Calculate the ROI of Meetings & Events?

For organizations that invest significant resources into hosting events, understanding and measuring the return on investment (ROI) is critical. Event ROI demonstrates the specific business value, revenue impact, and bottom-line returns that an event generates. Calculating this metric helps justify event budgets and optimize future event strategies. Here’s a straightforward approach to quantifying your event ROI.

Define Your Core Objectives
Before you can measure ROI, you need to establish the key business objectives for your event. Common goals include revenue generation, brand awareness, customer acquisition, professional development, etc. Isolate the 2-3 most important objectives that successful achievement of ROI will be based on.

Calculate All Event Costs
Make a comprehensive list of all costs associated with producing the event. This includes obvious expenses like venue rental, AV/production, catering, travel, etc. But also factor in less apparent costs like staff time, promotion/marketing, swag, opportunity costs, etc. Total up all investments made.

Project and Track Goal Attainment
For each core objective, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics you’ll use to quantify success. For revenue goals, this could be deals closed, sponsorships sold, etc. For awareness, it may be website traffic, media impressions, etc. Establish benchmarks for these KPIs to define what qualifies as a successful outcome.

Assign Goal Values
Translate each successful outcome directly into a measurable dollar value based on your specific business model. For example, each new customer’s lifetime value, each qualified lead’s value, the revenue generated per sponsorship sold, etc.

Calculate ROI Ratio
Once you’ve tracked and tallied the total dollar values achieved, divide that sum by your comprehensive event costs to determine the ROI ratio. An ROI above 1.0 indicates a positive return. Many businesses look for minimum ROIs of 3X-5X their investment.

Augment With Contextual Data
While the core ROI ratio is a powerful efficiency metric, augment it with additional success indicators like overall attendance, audience engagement, satisfaction scores, social amplification, etc. This added context enriches your perspective.

Be Patient and Persistent
For larger events focused on pipeline/revenue generation, the full ROI impact may not be apparent immediately. New prospects and opportunities can take months to mature into closed revenue. Monitor and measure ROI holistically over an extended period.

Consistently applying an ROI mindset for events allows you to construct sophisticated event portfolio strategies rooted in financial accountability. Continually optimizing to improve ROI year-over-year is what separates best-in-class event marketers.