The Post-Event Strategy: Eight Things You Should Be Doing After Every Event

Ask for feedback.
Attendee feedback is not only a measure of success, but a way to improve your next event and optimise long-term event strategy as well as understanding your target audience better. After all, the audience is a key stakeholder in creating positive brand experiences.
Send out a survey to receive key statistics and testimonials from your guests. This can include thoughts on the venue, the catering, the session topics.
Tip – keep surveys short and sweet and consider offering an incentive, such as a prize draw, to encourage more responses!
Keep the conversation going.
Did you know: for every day you don’t follow up after an event, you’ll see about a 20% drop off in engagement.
If your exhibition or conference was successful, your guests will be buzzing and your business will be seen as a leader in your field, or in the topics you discussed — so it’s important to keep your brand at the top of their minds and continue to deliver relevant content and drive value post-event.
What are the next steps you want attendees to take to meet your event objectives?
Some examples for different businesses: Send out a call to action that could be to promote an upcoming similar event, encourage them to sign up for a free trial, register to a hub of online content from the event or invite them to ask questions to your sales team.
Collate the highlights
The benefit of hiring a photographer or videographer in the planning stage, is that you can showcase the best bits post-event in a highlights reel or website page. Guests can relive the experience or see what they missed out on. This can also be key for marketing your next event or the annual repeat of your last event.
Tip: repurpose your event site to be a hub for post-event that’ll keep attendees coming back for more. This could be the place for statistics from the event, a photo-booth gallery and driving users to content.
Send a thank you!
This small and slightly unexpected gesture to appreciate and connect with guests is the start of building a positive relationship. For this reason, the best kind of thank you is personalised.
Tip: Why limit leads to just those at the event? Also send out a ‘sorry we missed you’ to no-shows with links to your post-event page, relevant content, or highlights.
Calculate ROI
Return on investment may be a simple formula, but every organisation has different event objectives and measures the success of a conference or exhibition differently.
It’s key to demonstrate the success of the event and results from your post-event communications to stakeholders. This could be attendee experience, sales, or attendee registration.
Collect marketing material.
An engaging event means people will have lots to say on social media. If you’ve used an event hashtag, now’s the time to check out what people have been saying. Testimonials and endorsements are a great tool to have on hand for marketing future events.
Measure your event’s carbon footprint.
A goal of the event may have been to have less of an impact on the planet and champion sustainability. At Broadsword, we offer carbon measurement for events which tracks carbon usage from the planning stage of event for key factors such as waste, energy, production, travel, transport, and catering. This can all be collated into a carbon footprint report to share in your debrief and you can decide to make your event carbon neutral by choosing a climate positive project to invest into.
Tip: Sustainability shouldn’t be an afterthought. To plan your next event with the lowest carbon footprint possible, implement sustainable initiatives from the pre-planning stage such as choosing eco-friendly venues.
Debrief the team.
Sit down with the team involved to get their feedback. The purpose of this would be to evaluate if your objectives, proposed timeline, and budget were achieved, share the successes and to have an open discussion about what could be done better next time, identifying the reason for a problem and exactly how to improve.
Events create an opportunity to form communities that continue to engage and connect with your brand long after the event itself is over.
Post-event activities such as evaluation, communication, and feedback mean you can make the most out of this opportunity and your events can continue to evolve.
If you need help creating an event strategy, get in touch.