When you’re planning a virtual event, it can be easy to get caught up in the (many!) details involved. What platform will you host it on? Which speakers will you invite? How will you attract attendees to the event and spread the word?

However, there’s one detail that marketers should be thinking about early on — yet often forget about until much later on: the post-event report.

In today’s data-driven world, marketers need to justify every decision they make and every dollar they spend. Putting on a virtual event isn’t cheap, and creating a strong post-event report can help you prove the return on investment (ROI) of your event. It can also give you the numbers you need to draw a bigger budget, better speakers, and grow the crowd for your next event.

Below, you’ll find everything you need to put together the perfect post-event report. Take a look early on, so you can make sure you’re tracking every metric you need before, during, and after the event.

What is a post-event summary?

A post-event summary (also known as an event report) is an internal document that’s used to provide stakeholders with data on how your event went. It includes your original goals and any metrics that illustrate the performance of your event. The metrics you include can help prove the event’s ROI, be used to predict necessary budget for future events, and be used to help market future events.

Why measuring the efficacy of your event matters

Most businesses report spending over $10,000 on each live event they host. And while most marketers would love to be able to host events solely to surprise and delight their customers and communities, the reality is that they need to be able to justify the cost of virtual events.

“Events cost money, energy, time, and resources,” Jasmine Jenkins, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Crossbeam, says.

“It’s important to dig into the hard ROI of your events: how many deals did this event source? How much revenue did we influence by launching this event? How many leads did you gain? As event marketers, we can get caught up in the minutiae of the details of running an event, but we need to keep top of mind that this is our ‘why.’”
Jasmine Jenkins, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Crossbeam

Of course, every team will have different goals for their events. Some will want to turn an actual profit from their events, while others will simply want to generate leads, educate their existing customers, or increase brand awareness. Either way, tracking the metrics that correspond to your unique goals will help you understand just how effective your event was, and provide you with the data you need to run even better events in the future.

What should my post-event report include?

Your post-event report should be concise, but include all of the details stakeholders need to understand your event and its performance. 

Executive summary

Your executive summary will basically summarize the rest of your post-event report in under a page. Since it pulls on information included within the rest of your report, you’ll likely want to write it last — but it should be placed at the start of your document.

Your executive summary should include:

  • Your event’s objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • A summary of the event budget
  • Any important insights garnered from hosting the event
  • Recommendations for future events

Event objectives

In this section, you’ll share the objectives and goals you set for the event. Make sure your goals are as specific, time-bound, and measurable as possible. For instance, rather than simply stating that you want to “Generate leads,” explain that you want to “Generate 200 qualified leads” or “Have 10% of participants book demos within a month of the event.”

This will give stakeholders context into why you selected certain KPIs to measure the efficacy of your event.

In this section, you should include:

  • Your goals for the event
  • The KPIs used to track progress towards each goal
  • Your target audience

Event summary

In this section, you’ll want to give stakeholders all of the practical information about your event — from where it took place to how many sponsors took part. If you want to provide readers with even more context, you can also include an event agenda or program in your appendix.

In this section, you can include:

  • Event name
  • Event date(s)
  • Event length
  • Event location
  • Number of sessions
  • Number of speakers
  • Number of sponsors

Participant data

This is where you’ll want to start digging into the data from your event. You can pull participant data from your registration forms, your virtual event platform’s analytics, as well as any participant surveys that took place before, during, and after the event.

In this section, you can include:

  • Your target demographic
  • Number of registered and attending participants
  • A breakdown of participant registration by country, industry, department, and/or customer persona
  • How many sessions participants joined
  • Level of audience engagement
  • Attendee satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS) post-event

Metrics

The metrics you choose to feature in your post-event report should tie directly back to your event objectives and KPIs. You can format this section by re-stating your goals and KPIs followed by your event results.

Depending on your goals, here are a few metrics you may want to measure and include:

  • Number of event registrations
  • Number of attendees
  • Number of speakers
  • Number of sponsors
  • Number of social media posts and engagements before, during, and after the event
  • Analytics from your event’s landing page (visits and actions taken)
  • Total reach of your event team’s social media and email marketing efforts
  • Number of new followers on social media
  • Number of leads generated
  • Number of targeted actions taken by registrants and attendees (such as demos or sales calls booked or purchases made)
  • Most popular sessions
  • Least popular sessions
  • Attendee engagement in surveys, polls, and chat boxes
  • Attendees’ NPS or satisfaction levels
  • Sponsorship NPS or satisfaction levels

When it comes to certain metrics, you’ll want to track numbers long enough to see accurate results. 

“One thing that helps is not only looking at numbers right after the event,” says Charlie Riley, VP of Marketing at Send Technology. He continues:

“Painting the picture for long-tail opportunities is key. Most people will want to see the immediate results, such as the number of connections made and demos booked. But an important metric to set the tone and help truly track an event’s success is aligning your deal stage back into the date of the event.

If you have a long sales cycle, showing how you will report on deal stage progression by 60 days, for example, will show not only the immediate success of making connections at the show, but the additional sales and marketing efforts that helped nurture a marketing qualified lead (MQL) into a deeper stage of the sales funnel.”

Budget

Here’s where you’ll break down the line items in your budget and how much each portion of your event cost — from speaker fees to the amount spent on your event software, marketing, and gear.

In this section, you’ll also want to explain whether the event came in over or under budget and why.

Conclusion and recommendations

Finally, you’ll want to summarize your post-event report and dive into what went well and where there was room for improvement.

In this section, you may want to include:

  • Feedback and suggestions from attendees, speakers, and team members
  • Reflections on topics and speakers that were more popular
  • Recommendations for future events

Formatting

When formatting your post-event report, start with a title page and then include the sections above chronologically. Make sure that your writing is clear and straightforward, and that stakeholders can easily scan your post-event report for important takeaways.

“I always aim to make the report easily digestible by using bullet points,” says Milo Cruz, Chief Marketing Officer at Freelance Writing Jobs. “This helps me strategically summarize the entire event while ensuring that all critical data are accurately and concisely presented in the report.”

Talking up your results 

If you’ve laid out clear objectives and associated KPIs in your post-event summary, your results should speak for themselves. But according to Jasmine, you shouldn’t stop there: find ways to share your event results outside of your standard post-event summary.

“People want to understand, right after the event, how you did in terms of attendees, registrants, and engagement, so finding a way to share that is important,” she says. She suggests sharing these initial results soon after the event through whatever communication tool is most popular at your organization — whether that’s Slack, email, or an All-Hands meeting.

Then, even after you’ve shared your post-event summary, continue to point out any wins associated with your event. If your company has a Slack channel that’s updated with won deals, point out any that were influenced by your event. And don’t forget to update the company with your full results a couple of months after your event (since many metrics, like influenced revenue, won’t show you the full results of your event just two weeks after your event).

“I don’t think that sharing your results should be a one-and-done deal,” Jasmine says. “You should constantly be sharing your big and small wins up to 90 days post-event. Especially working remotely, there’s so much noise — but if you have these different milestones throughout a certain period with your team, it keeps the excitement going and keeps your event top of mind.”

Okay, but how long should my event report be? 

The length of your post-event report will generally depend on your event type, size, length, and the complexity involved in putting it together. However, Marc Bishop, Director of Business Growth at Digital Web Solutions, recommends keeping your report between two and ten pages long.

“A good rule of thumb is to aim for a report that is comprehensive enough to cover all the essential aspects of the event but not so lengthy that it becomes overwhelming or tedious to read,” Marc says. “It’s all about finding the right balance.”

What kinds of imagery or visuals should an event report include?

While you don’t need to include imagery or visuals in your event report, including a few select images can help your stakeholders more easily visualize the event and its results.

Don’t overwhelm your report with images, but do include any visuals that can support your data, such as:

  • Graphs and tables that show off key metrics
  • Screenshots of social media engagements, chat boxes, survey results, or testimonials
  • Key moments during the event that show off audience sentiment and engagement

“In addition to highlighting quantitative metrics such as registrants, live attendees, recording views, and asset downloads associated with webinars, I also show snapshots of qualitative feedback including screenshots of survey quotes and chat comments,” says Kisha Velázquez, a content marketer who runs events for companies like Google, Bill.com, and QuickBooks Online. “Direct feedback adds soul to your data report and summarizes the audience’s sentiment and reaction to your content. That’s the beauty of polling attendees and using post-event surveys.”

How to standardize your post-event reporting

For most event marketers, writing up a post-event summary can be time-consuming. Since event marketers work on such a wide variety of events — that each differ in size, intent, setting, and audience — it can feel like marketers are starting afresh every time they work on a new report.

This is why having a post-event summary template can be so helpful for event marketers. Understanding your event’s objectives ahead of time is important, so that you can then cherry-pick the metrics to measure before, during, and after your event. Then, all you need to do is follow your template in order to create the perfect post-event summary.

How to use reporting when marketing future events

While your post-event summary is a necessary tool to help sell your events internally, it’s also an incredibly useful tool to help market your future events to potential attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors. Here’s how you can use your post-event metrics to market future events.

For sponsors and advertisers

Collecting metrics on your attendee demographics, levels of engagement, and total reach can help you entice new sponsors to your future events. It also builds the case for increasing their level of partnership.

As an example, take a look at Dublin Tech Summit’s 2023 Partnerships page.

On it, Dublin Tech Summit doesn’t only highlight their number of attendees (8,000) — but they share that 35% of those attendees are decision-makers, 30% are managers, and 58% work at enterprise-level companies. For many tech companies, that’s exactly the persona they’re targeting — making partnering with the Dublin Tech Summit an easy yes.

For future attendees

The success of your past events makes the perfect marketing fodder for future events. Highlight the number (and caliber) of speakers attendees can expect, the number of discussions that usually take place at your events, and the feedback you’ve heard from past attendees.

If you’re looking for an example, Web Summit does a beautiful job of this. On their website, they highlight the number of speakers, women, startups, investors, and media members that attend their conferences, and on their Web Summit for Startups page, they feature plenty of quotes from past startups that have attended:

These are the same types of quotes that you can gather from attendees in a post-event survey. 

Their 2018 “By the Numbers” trailer for Web Summit also highlighted a ton of the fun stats related to their summit, such as the number of attendees, startups, speakers, coffees drank, and average miles walked per attendee.

Sharing this type of social proof helps potential attendees feel confident about attending your event, while also drumming up excitement.

For future bragging rights

Accurately tracking your event’s key metrics can help Future You in innumerable ways. Keeping track of your events’ successes can help you pitch new events to executives, build a case for your promotion, or even help you land your next event marketing job.

Write it all down!

Checklist for a memorable event summary report in 4 steps 

1. Know your KPIs

To set your KPIs, start by thinking about the goals you have for your event.

“Your metrics are going to differ depending on what your goals are,” says Jasmine. “For instance, say that you had two goals for your event: to influence conversions from your free tier to your premium tier, and to increase your existing customers’ product usage. Based on those goals, you’d want to track certain metrics from the event.

Choosing the right metrics weaves together the narrative of your event — the why behind everything you do.

“At the end of the day, every business has to ask, ‘Should we do this again? Should we assign more budget to it? Should we hire more people to support it?’” Jasmine says. “The metrics you select really help you answer those questions and build your case.”

2. Gather all the data

Once you’ve identified your KPIs, make sure you’re tracking them — before, during, and after your conference. These metrics can be pulled from your customer relationship management software (CRM), your event hosting platform, and any additional tools you use to track registration, engagement, and actions taken by attendees.

The more your tools integrate with one another, the easier it will be for you to track the metrics you need. For instance, with Vimeo’s virtual event platform, you can create custom registration forms, landing pages, and emails all from within Vimeo — and then seamlessly export new leads, email engagement rates, and advanced attendee analytics to popular marketing platforms like Marketo, HubSpot, or MailChimp.

You can also dive into your event’s event- and viewer-level analytics through Vimeo. If you upload your event to Vimeo after the fact, you can also dive deep into analytics to understand who is watching your videos, how they’re accessing them, and how they’re engaging with them.

3. Analyze and synthesize

To make your post-event summary as digestible as possible, you’ll want to cherry-pick the most important notes, metrics, and feedback to include. Your report’s reader should never feel confused when they’re reading your post-event summary — they should understand exactly what you’re telling them, and be able to easily see the metrics you use to back up your points.

4. Make your report look good

There are a million and one ways to format your post-event summary — ultimately, the way you decide to format it will depend on your preferences and your organization’s way of sharing information.

Jasmine explains that she likes to share her post-event summaries as both an eight-slide Google Slides presentation and a Notion page. 

“The presentation is the ‘TL;DR’ version that executives can see, so they get a holistic view of our event performance,” Jasmine explains. “And then if anyone wants more specific data, I point them to our Notion page on the event.”

Within the event’s Notion page, Jasmine creates a full menu of event analytics and insights, where she points out key feedback and KPIs — but also links to additional data (including all metrics, promotional activities, chat transcripts, and feedback) so that readers can further explore the data on their own.

Jasmine makes sure to add plenty of screenshots to her presentation to help back up her arguments and capture intangible aspects of the event. “I have screenshots of any qualitative elements, such as event photos and attendee feedback,” she says. “And then I also have screenshots of the reports that show our data.”

Once you’ve created your first post-event summary, save your report and make sure you use it as a template for the next event — swapping out metrics as needed to match any new or updated goals.

Get ready to host your next event

At Vimeo, we make it easy to track all your key metrics before, during, and after your event using our advanced analytics and robust suite of integrations.

Learn more about Vimeo’s end-to-end virtual events platform.