What's your post event strategy?
You’ve just thrown a successful, sell out event. You couldn’t have imagined it going any better. Congratulations! But before you take a well deserved step back to relax have you thought about your guests and completing their experience post event?
The inspiration for this post came from a #EventPlannersTalk Twitter chat a couple of weeks ago. Post event engagement came up as being a crucial factor to extending an event lifecycle and building loyal relationships with attendees, however the focus is often on promotion and the event itself, and then engagement and communication following the event is almost non-existent.
No matter what type of event you have organised, engaging with your event attendees following the event itself can be extremely valuable. Even if you haven’t got another event planned in the near future there are still huge benefits to reaching out to your attendees. Why? Communication and engagement following an event helps to make your attendees feel valued.
How can you continue engagement following your event?
Social Guests at your event most likely shared images, content and thoughts via multiple social channels. Take time to follow, repost/retweet and publicly respond to attendees who made a lot of effort to share during or after the event.
Email An email scheduled to attendees a day or so following your event that’s personalised to them can go a long way. Perhaps you could personalise it based on the ticket type they purchased (i.e. early-bird or VIP). If you held a community event, you could share the highlights, for example, money raised for the community, photos and details of upcoming events or activities. If you have another event coming up you could segment your attendee data and send details of this event to those who would be interested in it. Our easy-to-use tagging feature enables users to organise and segment their attendee data in this way.
In this example, you could send only those in Customer Services an email for your next training event on handling customer queries.
Reports Did you carry out an on-site survey of some sort? Publish your findings on your website or blog, or keep it private to event attendees by emailing or mailing them your report.
Blog Write up an event summary and publish on your blog. Share this content across your social channels and even include a link in your email to attendees. If you held a music event, your blog will likely include lots of photos and maybe even a thank you or quote from your headline act. For a seminar or workshop, you might summarise key points from speakers and trainers or the top takeaways.
A mix of just 1 or 2 of these channels can heighten interest and extend your relationship with attendees. It can also be the stepping stone to finding advocates for your events or brand.
Choosing the right event registration tool can help make post event engagement much simpler. Many tools simply focus on the registration and payment collection piece of the pie. Mitingu provides its users with a full circle tool enabling event organisers to create and promote an event, register guests and collect payment, schedule during-event engagement, as well as create post-event engagement and build an insightful database of attendees and non-attendees.
Image Credit:
©Drew Coffman via Flickr