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Designing Events Corporate Newsletter |
The Lines Are Drawn: ROI vs. ROO
Todays’ discussion about the value of meetings
moves to a new plane. Instead of focusing only
on the Return on Investment (ROI), Executives
are beginning to focus on Return on Objective (ROO).
Our opinion… measuring the true value of
meetings often requires that you use a
combination of both.
ROI typically expresses the worth of a meeting
in monetary terms – the number of dollars gained
or lost as a result of the meeting after you
account for all associated expenses. ROO, on the
other hand, measures whether the objectives of a
meeting have been met, such as whether sales
representatives can recall the selling points of
a product six months or a year after a sales
training meeting.
Since the goals for hosting meetings and
conferences typically expand far beyond monetary
reasons alone, simply looking at the financial
aspect
of your meeting is incomplete when measuring
value.
We highly recommend that senior staff determine
very specific objectives and get the buy in from
all key players within your organization at the
beginning of your planning process. Your overall
goal then, and a means to measure the success of
the meeting, should directly relate to comparing
the results found through financial reports,
surveys, growth, and much more. Event managers
need to be able to provide credible data
supporting the value of the meeting.
When determining how you are going to measure
the results of your meeting, understand that the
answer is not one size fits all. For some
client’s, we find that ROI is the best
measurement means, for others, it’s ROO and
still others it is a combination of both.
One of the most important aspects of our job as
meetings planners is to help our client’s
determine how they will measure the success of
their meeting. At the very beginning of the
meeting planning process, we sit down with our
clients and work with them to figure out what
they want to accomplish during the meeting and
how to best measure that. It’s imperative to
take this first step in order to effectively
determine how successful your meeting turns out
to be in the end.
Proving the case...
How is the value of your meetings typically
measured?
| Corp. Planners | Assoc. Planners | |
| Attendee satisfaction | 82.8% | 91.2% |
| Management’s personal experience | 59.1% | 33.8% |
| Incremental revenue gained | 36.5% | 50.7% |
| Quantity of ideas/action plans created | 37.9% | 28.4% |
| Knowledge or skill gained | 27.6% | 11.5% |
| There is no measurement | 4.9% | 2.0% |