Event Intelligence

Special event planning is both art and a science. Events that appear flawless on the outside often face a litany of disasters (big and small) behind the scenes. At Wilsonwest, we’ve been in the business over twenty years. And though I can’t say we’ve seen everything, we’ve experienced quite a lot.

Below are five stories and three lessons learned when it comes to special event planning and disaster management.

Cindy Wilson

Cindy Wilson

Photo Credit: cygnoir via Compfight cc

“If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Road Will Get You There.”

– The Cheshire Cat, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of corporate event marketing can be a challenge. Too often, ROI feels nebulous, intangible. But it doesn’t have to be.

In fact, measuring your event marketing ROI is a key component of the Wilsonwest four-step process: Insight, Innovate, Implement, and Interpret. So I thought I’d share three tips for measuring event ROI.

1. Establish clear objectives and benchmarks. Measuring the impact of your event starts long before the big day (or night), during the goal development phase. [tweet this] If you don’t know what your goals are, you’ll never know if you achieved them. So be clear on what you want to accomplish. Do you want to generate leads? Build your brand? Educate people?
2. Decide what data you need to capture to measure your objectives. There are lots of ways to capture data. But we like to go beyond the usual surveys and questionnaires. Yes, we use them. But we also observe. Are people engaged in the sessions? Asking questions? Leaving early? And if engagement seems low, why? Was the speaker boring or did we choose the wrong topic?
3. Determine when you’re going to gather data. Some data may have to be gathered after the event – e.g. when sales or appointments are generated. Other will be collected during, or even before the event.
   
   

   “We LOVED working with the WIlsonwest team and would recommend your services without hesitation.”

After the event, we conduct a full event audit. It includes the surveys, interviews, our own observations, and any goal achievement data the client might provide, e.g. whether they got the desired appointments or sales after the event. Once that information has been processed during our client debrief, we can map the event to the desired outcomes and determine a more measurable ROI.

But it’s not over yet. Next we have to take what we’ve learned and use that knowledge to help drive the next event, the next insight. Corporate event marketing is a cycle, and success comes from building on our successes, and learning from our challenges.

If you’d like to learn more, call us at 415.282.4560, or e-mail us at cindy@wilsonwest.com

Cindy Wilson

Signage by Silverlign Group

We interviewed Andrew Cambouris, Creative Director at Silverlign Group, about how they work to design effective communication for C-level events, such as Cisco’s CIO Summit. Silverlign is an integrated marketing and design agency based in Silicon Valley and part of the eBay family of companies.

Though we do much more than events at Silverlign, there’s a sense of excitement before each event that I love. There’s the rush of getting everything pulled together, and that first day when we see participants interact with devices and find the sessions and give feedback. With an event, you get first hand insights into how the users experience it, and I think that’s unique in marketing and design.

Our first C-level event was for Cisco in 2007 – the CIO Summit. We were hired to help identify and brand the Summit, and that included all the touch points: the invitations, signage, badges, program guides, evaluations, etc.  We’ve been doing the CIO Summit ever since, and just wrapped up our third year of the Cisco CEO-CIO Leadership Council (CCLC) event.  

Our branding approach to C-level events like these is to be ubiquitous and consistent. [Tweet this!] Branding starts with the invitation and flows through every touch point going forward [Tweet this!] – from the ride signs at the airport, to the welcome letter on their bed in the hotel room, to the badge and signage at the hotel. Consistency is key, especially when the participants for these events are repeat visitors.

That said, consistency doesn’t mean boring. From a creative standpoint we always try to push it. But the design and branding remain coherent, and there’s value in that because we’re branding the events themselves.

Below are some guiding principles we follow when designing communications for C-level events.

1. Know your audience. As soon as you can dial into the audience, it helps you understand why we do things the way we do. For example, the CCLC event has some brand flexibility, but we try to keep the design very upscale and conservative from a color standpoint. And that’s part of knowing this audience and understanding the CEOs don’t care about flashy bells and whistles.
2. Know your venue. When you understand where the event will take place and what kind of audience will be there, you can dial into the design to sync up with the audience and the venue. For example, we created new signs for the CCLC at the Sanctuary Hotel that used custom dark wood frames inspired by the hotel’s decor. We knew the Sanctuary would be used multiple times, so we invested in signs that would fit well in the hotel. We didn’t want to just create a sign that looked cool, we wanted to make sure that everything jelled with the guests’ experience with their environment.
3. Keep things simple and direct. Over time we evolved the CIO Summit’s weighty paper conference agenda into a mobile device. But while mobile is more compact, it isn’t necessarily easy to use. Many popular event devices are packed with buttons and small elements that are cool but cumbersome. So our approach for the C-level audience was to simplify. For example, we used HTML5 to ensure the devices had big buttons and large typography. This goes back to the demographics of this audience – most CEOs are in their forties and sixties. We know young designers love small typography but that doesn’t work for this audience.
4. View the event holistically, including all the peripheral materials. There’s more to an event than the brand and graphics. Other partners are involved, such as Wilsonwest, and it’s important to understand the other touch points your partners at the event are creating. Because if you work in silos, the experience will be disjointed.  So, for example, we provide a quick style guide for the graphic elements we’re branding, the colors, etc., and provide it to our partners so when they create their set or signs it all aligns together.

 For more information on Silverlign Group, click here.

Cindy Wilson

Mary, Margaret Thatcher, and Me

In the late nineties, Mary and I were involved in a Financial Services Conference in Paris, where Margaret Thatcher spoke about Britain’s position on the Euro.  We were tasked with managing her arrangements – from greeting Baroness Thatcher upon arrival, to finding her a Parisian hair stylist (the latter was the most challenging of our duties, as the hair dresser had to be vetted by Scotland Yard).

Mary and I debated what would we ask the baroness, if given the opportunity.

And we were.

Margaret Thatcher invited us for a gin and tonic after the event. But instead of talking geopolitics, she turned the conversation to us. She kept the conversation light, even asking about Mary’s earrings, and we left feeling like we’d had a drink with a real person – not a celebrity.

Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” From our whirlwind meeting with Margaret Thatcher, it seems she had a knack for putting others at the center of the conversation. And we won’t forget it.

Cindy Wilson