The importance of recording free event data
Free events in the higher education space are commonplace, although ‘free events’ aren’t usually entirely free, and instead have associated cost. These costs come in the form of refreshments, as well as opportunity costs such as the organiser’s time or the guest speaker’s time. Asking penniless students to pay their way into an event seems morally questionable. Instead, many universities and partner companies offer a range of events to their students – from career guidance talks to social gatherings – that cost next to nothing.
Whilst free events are obviously great, it can be more challenging to measure attendance and engagement – (for one, someone who hasn’t paid for an event might not feel obliged to turn up despite having registered) - and to understand the impact your event is having on its attendees is therefore difficult. It is clear though, that regardless of the type of event or the expenses involved, it is important to understand the success and then use these insights to build better future events. Most methods of recording data are free and quite straightforward.
Before we look at the output of a free event, let’s consider our input: who is going to turn up? How can we maximise the number of people attending? How can we ensure that our attendees don’t just show up and leave, but actually engage with our event?
Firstly, offering freebies is a failsafe way to encourage attendance and get your attendees to stick around for longer too. Classic freebies such as food and drink work well – ‘there will be free pizza for all our guests’ is a sentence every university club or society has on repeat - or you could try tailoring your freebies to the event to make them more relevant for the particular audience. For example, if the event is centred around essay writing skills, then offering students a free notepad and pen to sketch their ideas out is both useful and applicable.
Secondly, you should always invite more people than you think and aim for 10-20% more than ‘capacity’. This allows for the almost-always dropouts and means that your event still looks as though it’s had a strong turnout even when 10-20% of guests inevitably don’t show. This links nicely to my next tip: create a sense of ‘FOMO’. The fear of missing out, otherwise known as ‘FOMO’ is pertinent in young people and no one wants to feel as though they’ve overlooked an interesting opportunity that their peers have gotten involved with. Starting with your pre-event communications, it’s crucial to build excitement and stress to your recipients that not turning up to this event would feel like ‘missing out’.
“We know that social media is a key tool for engaging our students so when we have upcoming events, we always do a countdown on Instagram and use language that suggests this event is unmissable. Another tool is the use of testimonials – quotes from students who attended a similar event previously and found it helpful or interesting provides an incentive for other students to show their face this time around.” – Student Engagement & Alumni Manager, Middlesex University.
Assuming your persuasive communications in the lead up to your event are successful, and people show up because they don’t want to be seen as missing out, the last thing you want is an empty event room which might make attendees feel as though they’ve been misled or the that the event has been incorrectly sold to them. If you lose the trust of your audience, this will affect not only your reputation overall, but the turnout at your next event(s).
The more people you have attending your event, the greater the buzz and energy in the room and thus, you can ostensibly say that those who didn’t attend did, after all, ‘miss out’. So, always underestimate the conversion from ‘registering’ to ‘attending’ and invite more people than you think!
“Even a picture of a full room on social media looks exciting and to people sat at home is a sign that perhaps they should have come along as well. As you can imagine, seeing just a few people dotted around is a clear marker that the event hasn’t been very successful, and this immediately tells people who didn’t show up that they made the right decision (not to mention those who did not wanting to trust the events team next time)!” – Events Manager, King’s College London.
Another way to create that sense of FOMO is to give the event a sense of exclusivity. Simply saying that there are limited spaces on the Eventbrite page of your event should go some way to making people feel like they are signing up for something interesting and exclusive. Equally, you can have a waiting list for when you reach your ‘maximum’ number of attendees, another way to tell your audience that this event is in high demand.
Now that you have several methods for catching the eye of your audience and hopefully encouraging people to turn up to your event, the next step is to capture some data that can tell you how well your event is performing.
A simple and effective way to measure your event attendance is to register guests as they walk in. This could be via an event registration tool e.g., a customised branded website, or a mobile ticket that attendees have scanned on entry, or it could be the more ‘old fashioned’ method via pen and paper at a registration desk. QPay have a simple ticket scanner built into their app which enable the event managers to scan the attendees’ tickets as they enter. This is a very straightforward solution to understanding your turnout, which is the first step to measuring the success of your event.
Once your attendees have arrived at your event, you can turn to qualitative data to get an insight into their thoughts and feelings. Someone from your event team can approach guests and ask them if they are enjoying the event, if it has been useful or indeed if they think anything is missing. Approaching people in this way is an easy route to getting some honest, on-the-spot feedback about how well your event is performing. Just make sure the person from your team who is tasked with this is friendly and non-judgemental, so people feel they can be honest if they have anything negative to say!
You can email all your guests a quantitative questionnaire to fill in after the event and reward their taking part by adding them into a prize raffle. However, this is bound to be slightly less accurate then asking people on the day, due to human error and forgetfulness. It is still useful though, as an additional method of recording data. To avoid a few days lag in people’s responses, and thus, peoples’ memory failing them slightly on what they thought of your event, you can also place feedback stations at the event, on the way out. A box for people to slip paper into with a few notes of feedback, or a system where guests can press a button to rate the event are both quick and easy ways to capture the general feeling.
If your event had a solid turnout and your data tells you it was successful, a real way to test this is to arrange a follow-up event. Email all of your attendees and inform them of a ‘part two’ – perhaps it’s another conference in the same theme but with different speakers, or a second essay writing workshop with more practical exercises this time. You will have already established that sense of exclusivity among your guests as you are only emailing those who came to the first event, and if the first event went as well as you thought, then the FOMO should be brewing when it comes to the follow-up. Retaining anything above 60% of your initial audience for a second event would, in my opinion, be a huge victory!
To conclude, any type of event needs to prioritise capturing data to focus the efforts of the team going forward; free events are no different here. Most of this data capture is free as well and can be incredibly insightful. Free events are hugely popular with students and can create a sense of community, build the reputation of your brand, and help with skills building and more. By being committed to both maximising the amount of attendees and recording the right data during and after the event, we can be confident that we are providing students with an incredibly useful variety of events to choose from, and can boast a track record of success.