5 Steps to the Perfect Year-End Review for #EventProfs

How can you cap off your year in the best possible way? No, not the Christmas party (although that is our first choice too!), we’re talking about a year-end review. Conducting a proper audit of 2015 in December or January will help your team start 2016 on the front foot.

Taking the time out to meet with the whole team will help you to reconnect, set goals and plan your tactical execution for the year ahead. This is essential for any event organiser if you want to build on successes, avoid repeating mistakes, and ensure your whole team is on the same page when making decisions.

Let’s dig into the 5 things you should look at in your end-of-year review.

Review

The first thing you’ll want to do is to look back at 2015. Ask your team to come with plenty of ideas before the review meeting takes place, so that it gets off to a flying start.

In the 2015 review meeting, you should look at 3 things in particular.

Successes: Whether it’s reaching attendee numbers, saving money on a venue, or providing stellar customer service, make sure everyone in the team finds at least one achievement they’re proud of. Celebrate achievements as a team and see how they can be catalogued as best practice, to be repeated and improved upon next year.

Improvements: Nobody is perfect. Focus this part of the meeting on processes, not people. How can mistakes be avoided, processes improved and which tactics simply didn’t work as well as you had hoped?

Return on Investment: Think about efficiency – of time and resources. Has something you did produced good results, but taken an inordinate amount of effort to achieve? Is it really worth doing again? This is where looking at ROI can really help you prioritise better, above looking only at absolute results.

Reconnect

The next stage of the review moves up from tactics and processes to one of values and strategy. Here you should look at two critical components:

Mission: Take the time to remind yourself and your team about why you do what you do. Having a clear mission or purpose invigorates everyone, makes the day-to-day grind worthwhile, and helps get us through tough spots.

Customers: Who is your customer and why do they come to your events? Now is a great time to really think about your target market and how well you know them. If you have been collecting demographic data through 2015, review your results based on the audience you have been targeting. Has it shifted? Re-evaluate your ideal customers for the year ahead.

If you haven’t been collecting data to date, now is the time to start! Read up on how to create custom questions for your event attendees and start collecting this information for future use. Consider what data will be most useful to you. It could be age and location data, or if your event is information based you could look at what their biggest challenges are or what they hope to learn from your event.

Strategy

Now you’ve looked back, it’s time to take those reflections and start looking forward to 2016. This time we start at the top: your strategy. Let’s break it into four parts.

Customer Needs: All good strategy needs to start with the customer. Not their demographics, but their needs. What does your event provide they can’t get elsewhere? If you overheard your customer trying to describe your event(s) to a friend, what would you want to hear them say about you or that event? Your strategy should then be to create a company and event that would match their description.

Company Needs: While it’s top priority to cater to your customer, you can’t forget about your own needs either! What do you care about? Is it growth and profit, brand awareness, connecting your community or support for a cause?

Metrics: Once you’ve answered the above two questions, you need to put in place metrics that keep everyone focused on your agreed strategy. For example if you care about growth, maybe you’ll focus on month-on-month ticket sales and not talk much about cost; if you care about profit — cost-per-acquisition may be much more important.

Set Goals

Everyone needs something to aim for! So it’s time to agree on some goals, which we’ll again break into three parts:

Audacious: If you’re really going to break the mould and be an exceptional company, running the best possible events, and attracting the most ambitious and capable staff then your goals should be big, ambitious and exciting.

SMART: You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound. While it’s important to have stretch goals (as described above), they should still be SMART, so you don’t chase the wrong things, or set everyone up to fail.

Milestones: It’s also important to break goals down into small chunks so you can see incremental progress or course correct if the progress isn’t there, before it’s too late.

Create a Plan

Last but certainly not least, you need to turn all of your brainstorming and ideas into an actionable plan. How will you execute your strategy and achieve your goals? Think about these three things:

Team: Does your current team posses all the right skills needed to execute on your vision? Do you need to hire more people or upskill staff?

Tools & Tactics: What specific ideas do people have? This is a great time to brainstorm specific tools to implement and campaign ideas to test for next year.

Processes: Go back to your notes on successes and mistakes from 2015. Can you put in place specific workflows, reviews processes, or collaborative tools that will help you sustain best practices and avoid bad ones?

Got all that? Great — You’re probably all set for the best year yet! Time to crack open the champagne and celebrate…

Why not go one step further and get it all down on paper with Eventbrite’s One Page Event Plan, which helps everyone in the team stay on the same page (literally!) when they’re at their desk. Just download it below (no email required).