And what business leaders should be measuring instead.
Loren Maisels, CMP – Founder & President, LOMA Agency
For years, event success has been measured with familiar metrics: attendee satisfaction, Net Promoter Score results, and post-event surveys asking whether participants enjoyed the experience. While those indicators can be useful, they rarely answer the question that matters most in today’s economic environment: what business value did the event create? Positive sentiment alone is often insufficient when financial leaders are evaluating investment decisions.
That challenge is becoming increasingly relevant as organizations grapple with employee burnout, disengagement, and productivity pressures. According to a Manulife Canada report, mental fatigue and burnout contribute to productivity losses equivalent to 46 working days per employee each year. Against that backdrop, leadership teams are being asked to justify every investment, including meetings, conferences, retreats, and employee gatherings.
Leadership teams now want a clearer line between the event and what it contributed to the business.
The Problem with Measuring Only Sentiment
There is nothing inherently wrong with post-event surveys. The problem arises when organizations mistake satisfaction for impact.
Event professionals often hear comments such as, “The energy was amazing,” “Everyone loved the food,” or “The room had great buzz.” While those observations may signal a successful attendee experience, they do not necessarily demonstrate business outcomes.
This disconnect exists because many organizations begin measuring success after the event rather than before it. Without predefined objectives, there is no meaningful baseline against which results can be evaluated.
ROI Starts Before the Event Begins
Event ROI conversations need to happen long before attendees arrive onsite. Organizations need to define clear business objectives and the metrics that will indicate success before any logistics planning occurs.
For customer-facing events, those objectives may include:
● Advancing sales opportunities through the pipeline
● Accelerating existing deals
● Generating qualified leads
● Increasing brand awareness among key audiences
The appropriate measurement framework depends on the intended outcome. An executive roundtable may be evaluated by pipeline progression, while a customer summit might be assessed through account expansion opportunities or retention indicators. The key is establishing those metrics in advance and tracking them over time.
Importantly, events often produce results that emerge gradually. Relationship-building does not always lead to immediate revenue attribution. Organizations must recognize that many event outcomes materialize over time through ongoing interactions and strengthened business relationships.
The Employee Experience Opportunity
The same principle applies to internal events.
Organizations increasingly invest in retreats, leadership summits, learning experiences, and culture-building initiatives to address workplace disengagement and strengthen employee connection. Yet many still rely primarily on satisfaction ratings to determine success.
A more useful approach is to measure change. Before the event, organizations should establish benchmarks by surveying employees on specific cultural, engagement, or alignment indicators. After the event, those same areas can be measured again to see whether perceptions or behaviours shifted.
This pre-and-post methodology moves the conversation beyond whether employees enjoyed the experience. It focuses instead on whether the event advanced key business priorities.
In an era when hybrid work has reduced opportunities for spontaneous collaboration and face-to-face relationship building, that distinction matters. Today’s workforce increasingly values opportunities for genuine human connection, particularly as employees spend more time interacting through technology and digital platforms. In-person experiences can play an important role in addressing disengagement and strengthening workplace culture.
Ultimately, finance leaders are not evaluating events in isolation. They are evaluating investments against business outcomes.
HR teams may be satisfied with strong attendee feedback, but CFOs are typically looking for evidence that an event contributed to measurable organizational objectives. What resonates with one stakeholder may hold little value for another.
The organizations getting the most value from events are no longer asking whether attendees enjoyed themselves. They are asking whether the experience changed something that matters.
As budgets tighten and executive scrutiny increases, that distinction may be the difference between events being viewed as discretionary spending and being recognized as strategic business investments. And when the next CFO conversation happens, a survey score alone is unlikely to be enough.
Loren Maisels, CMP, is the Founder and President of LOMA Agency, a Toronto-based experiential event management agency specializing in strategic creative experiences for clients across HR, technology, healthcare, non-profit, and professional services. Visit lomaagency.com to learn more, and connect with LOMA Agency on Instagram and LinkedIn.
