There’s a saying that goes “comparison is the death of joy.” While that may ring true in terms of your personal life, Event Planners in NYC must compare how well they’re doing by comparing the result of their events. The most strategic way to match how well your events company is doing is by benchmarking and matching your company with what others are doing in order to identify areas that can use improvement and boost your success.
The difficult part in benchmarking is finding a good model. Keeping that in mind, The Event Planner Expo team has created the standard scale below to help you determine where you fall as Event Planners in NYC. We’ll call it the Event Planner Expo Evolution Model. We’ve sectioned off this model into four levels. Now, it’s time for you to review all four levels and decide where your company falls on the maturity of your events program.
Level 1—Emergent
Emergent events and meetings programs are in the foundational stage. Here, many events and meetings are ad-hoc. Often, success is defined by the event simply happening. Specifically, emergent events and meetings programs haven’t excelled at all four key Centers of Performance: Event Strategy, Event Execution, Attendee Experience, Measurement, and Optimization.
Good news. For Emergent programs, rapid, large improvements can occur by honing the basics.
Level 2—Elevated
Here, elevated events and meetings programs are beginning to invest in core Centers of Performance.
Elevated events and meetings programs typically have in place a set of professional resources, processes and selective use of technology that enable pockets of excellence, and a limited ability to demonstrate event value. Generally, they fall short of Expert and Evolved events and meetings programs since their existing investments are often unable to prove impact. In particular, they can’t tie results directly back to key metrics, or scale to support additional events.
Level 3—Evolved
Evolved events and meetings programs demonstrate organizational excellence in at least three of the four Centers of Performance: Event Strategy, Event Execution, Attendee Experience, and Measurement & Optimization.
These programs have well-defined and rationalized events and meetings strategy and specialized resources to execute. Data and technology foundations are in place. These organizations leverage them to consistently deliver a limited set of high impact events. Evolved events and meetings programs use data to make decisions and technology to deliver excellence across the planning lifecycle. Technology and data enable them to measure the organizational impact of events.
Level 4—Expert
Finally, expert events and meetings programs demonstrate excellence in all four Centers of Performance: Event Strategy, Event Execution, Attendee Experience, Measurement & Optimization.
What separates events programs and Expert meetings from those who fall under the Evolved level is the ability of Event Planners in NYC to leverage data, resources, and technology to empower superiority at scale, across the total events and meetings program. Expert events and meetings programs happen to be crucial structural assets, that directly contribute in measurable form to your company’s mission and chief metrics.
To learn more about measuring your events program, it’s important that you attend industry networking events so that you can compare your practice with that of the best eventprofs in the business. Each year, the top Event Planners in NYC attend The Event Planner Expo and so should you! Join us this year and network with the cream of the event planning crop!
