Your event is over. You’ve gathered all your data and feedback from participants and attendees. You’ve pulled together a post-event analysis to determine your event’s successes and areas for growth, and now it’s time for the final step: the event debrief.
What is an event debrief?
An event debrief is a meeting an event manager conducts with the rest of their event planning team (and possibly other stakeholders) after an event has concluded to review the event and discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what should be replicated or done differently next time.
An event debrief is an essential component of a smart, well-conceived event strategy, helping you measure the success of each event to inform your future planning.
How do you write an event debrief?
The document you’ll use to organize your event debrief acts as both the record of all event analysis and a useful tool for keeping your debrief meeting on track. This generally starts with a list of event debrief questions, which will act as a kind of meeting agenda and ensure you touch on all the important elements of your event.
To help get you started, the following questions are a great starting point for your event debrief template.
9 Essential event debrief questions
You may have other specific points you need to discuss depending on whether you’re discussing in-person, hybrid or virtual events. However, these are some essential event debrief questions you should try to address regardless of the event type:
1. Did we meet our goals? / What was our event ROI?
Your event goals should be established from the beginning, so you should have no trouble pulling them from your planning files. Did you get the attendance you wanted? Did you meet all your KPIs? Did you stay within budget and meet revenue targets?
After any event, you should know which of your major and minor goals were met. This will help you determine, prove, and report on your event ROI to all major stakeholders.
2. Did we track the right KPIs for this event?
If you have trouble determining how well you met your goals, take a look at the KPIs you chose to use. Could you have used different metrics to help track success? Were there KPIs you overlooked that would be useful for next time?
3. Did we stay on budget?
As any event planner knows, this is a BIG one. If you stayed on budget, that’s great! But it’s not the end of the conversation. Break down how you managed your budget, where you found opportunities for cost savings, which areas could have been cheaper with better planning or different decisions, etc. Even after a major success, there are things to be learned for next time.
Of course, if you went over budget, there’s probably much more to be learned, and you might have some explaining to do once you get in front of your event stakeholders. This is where you’ll need to figure out where things went awry. Was it for something that was out of your control or something that should have simply been planned better? Is it possible that the budget was unrealistic from the beginning?
Many planners are having to make sacrifices and tough calls, caught between wanting to create the perfect attendee experience while balancing the need for cost savings and improved profitability.
Need some help saving on your events? Check out these cost savings tips, and consider how your event technology can help you cut costs on things like venue sourcing or setting up a virtual event platform.
4. Did event planning and logistics go smoothly?
You selected your venue, scheduled demonstrations, anticipated logistics, and worked with venue staff and vendors to bring your event to life. Did all these things go smoothly, or were there complications? If you were met with challenges, could you have improved any processes, foreseen any issues, or better controlled any outcomes?
Perhaps your event venue came with some unexpected (and unwelcome) surprises, or the vendors you chose were difficult to work with. Or maybe you’ve never had better partners, and you want to continue using a particular venue or vendor for your future events. These are things you’ll need to know as you move on to your next event.
5. How did our marketing tactics perform?
A huge part of what makes an event a success is the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. After you’ve launched your event marketing campaigns, be sure you’re measuring their success at every stage to understand how you can improve your marketing efforts for future events.
6. What do our engagement metrics tell us about our audience?
Attendee engagement metrics are not only a great way to determine how well you captured the interests of your audience but also a means of nurturing leads and guiding prospective customers, clients, or partners through your marketing and sales funnels.
How many attendees checked in to each of your event sessions? How many appointments did attendees book, or how many exhibit booths did they scan into? For virtual session content, what percentage of attendees stayed for the full length of a presentation?
All these engagement metrics (and many more) will give you a better understanding of attendees’ interests and how well your content aligned with their expectations. Your most popular sessions will be just as easy to identify as your least popular, and you’ll be able to identify topics to avoid or pursue for future events.
7. Were there any surprises in attendee demographics?
Your event will naturally attract professionals from specific industries based on your event goals and theme, but it’s important to look into attendee demographics after each event to understand if anything is different than you’d expect and how demographics may be shifting.
Are new companies attending or exhibiting? Are there professionals from unexpected industries or verticals attending and finding value in your content? Did you have a higher number of attendees with disabilities than you anticipated? How far did the average attendee travel to make it to your event?
8. Did team members and event staff meet expectations?
Without pointing fingers too hard, discuss how employees’ roles played a part in an event’s success. Did everyone do what they were supposed to? Should someone play a different role next time or take on additional responsibilities?
Don’t forget to take stock of venue and vendor staff as well, as these are the people who can make or break your event. Did you receive any positive or negative feedback from attendees related to event staff? Would you work with your chosen event partners again in future based on staff performance?
9. What can we learn from attendee, sponsor, and stakeholder feedback?
Feedback from attendees and all event stakeholders can be a great indicator of an event’s successes or failures. Using post-event surveys, you’ll be able to extract strengths or weaknesses you hadn’t considered and reveal things about your event that raw event data might not immediately suggest.
You’ll want to compile a good mix of survey question types to gauge how your event was received. While long-form responses can take a while to sift through, it’s worth asking open-ended survey questions that allow respondents to share details you might not have considered.
10. How did our event technology impact the event?
The right kind of event management software should make things easier on you, your attendees, vendors, speakers, and other stakeholders. It should streamline planning, help keep things organized while the event’s happening, and gather all the data you need to analyze its success (and ensure all that data is collected in one place with the help of tech integrations).
What’s more, all of your event tech should be helping you cut down on manual processes and create a smooth experience for everyone at every stage, from how you submit event RFPs to how attendees interact with your mobile event app.
If your event tech can’t do all of this for you and more, or your current tech stack actually made things harder for you, consider making a change for your next event.
11. What parts of the event were most successful?
Once you’ve gone through some of the more specific questions, ask yourself and your team more broadly about what went well. Perhaps your teammates have observations you hadn’t considered or made notes that didn’t come up in reviewing any of the previous questions.
What appears to be a small detail could have major impacts on your event, and this is your opportunity for a wide discussion of all the best parts of your event, from the perks of your chosen venue or location to inspiring takeaways from free-form discussions or networking sessions.
Make the most of this question by asking your team to think about it before your event begins—that way, they’ll be making observations throughout the event and can report back during your event debrief.
12. What parts of the event were not successful?
A much less fun question than the previous, but still critical. Not everything will go to plan or be as popular as you anticipated, and talking about what didn’t work can help you decide to eliminate certain elements of your event or tweak them to make them better in future.
This is the point in the conversation when you’ll also have an opportunity to hear different opinions and understand what elements of your event might not suit everyone’s tastes.
For instance, maybe the majority of your team loved the live entertainment on night one, but it didn’t receive a great turnout from attendees. Was this an issue with promoting the event, or is there an issue of preference you hadn’t considered based on demographics, the event’s timing, overlapping experiences, etc.
13. What are our action items?
This is the most important thing to ask in an event debrief. You and your team should always come away from an event debrief with concrete items to work on. After all, there’s always something that can be better next time, some higher numbers that could be met, or things that could at least run a little smoother.
This is also a good opportunity to discuss current event trends and different event theme ideas to possibly change things up for your next event. Review each of the previous questions to see which major red flags came up, big wins you achieved, and any details that can inform your next steps as you perfect your future event strategy.
How to create your own event debrief template
Once you’ve created your list of event debrief questions for the first time, you can continue to use it as the basis for a template for future debriefs.
In addition to the questions, you should have all relevant event information gathered in the document for discussion. This includes:
· Your pre-event brief, with the planned goals, budgeting, KPIs, etc.
· The post event report, which shows all needed event data (i.e. attendance tracking, session data, and lead generations)
· Feedback from participant and attendee surveys
· Feedback from stakeholders
So, in the document, include sections where you can plug in your essential documentation, feedback, and data points from before, during and after the event.
What should a debrief template look like?
To make your event debrief productive, an event debrief template should be formatted to include both the information you came with and the space you need to add the impressions and insights that are provided during the event debrief itself.
If you have a tool to help you track and report on event insights, great! That will make it simpler to pull together all your notes and data into a debrief presentation.
How to debrief after an event
To get accurate and thoughtful impressions, you want everyone on your event planning team to still have the event fresh in their mind. You’ll also want to use your valuable insights to inform future events, so if you’ll be planning another event shortly after, it’s imperative you schedule a debrief quickly. Best practice is to try and get an event debrief on everyone’s calendars within a week of the event concluding.
You may also decide to invite others from outside your central event planning team to participate in your event debrief if you feel the additional insights would be beneficial. You might include representatives from the company or companies that sponsored your event, as well as staff and vendor partners. These additional people can offer their own data and on-the-ground insights.
How do you structure a debrief?
Using the list of essential questions above, you can logically structure your debrief into three general segments:
Identify the facts of an event
This is the objective view of your event: This includes anything of note that happened, how much the event cost, attendance numbers, demographic details, marketing success rates, and so on.
Feedback and insights
Using all the information available to you, it’s time to get into explaining the significance of your findings. Why did things happen the way they did? Why did different elements cost what they did? Why did attendees go where they did during the event? Which marketing strategies worked best, and why?
Action items and opportunities for improvement
Finally, take your data, feedback, and team’s impressions to create a list of event ideas and other actionable items to make your next event better than ever.
Post-event debrief essentials
The global events industry is expected to generate $1.46 billion in revenue by 2028, showing an amazing 23.1% annual growth rate from 2021-2028. Figures like that show the incentive that event planners have to grow and improve their events using essential tools like post-event debriefs. It also shows what kinds of financial rewards are at hand for those who conduct these debriefs well and come away with actionable insights
Of course, it’s necessary to actually act on those insights. After all, coming up with solutions and improvements on paper doesn’t mean much if they aren’t then put into practice.
This is the main point of an event debrief: to learn how to make your next event even better and more successful than the last.
