Since joining the team I’ve been thinking about how the effect of a Weave can be measured.

How do you measure the ROI of engagement?

What is the ROI of a TED conference?

A study released in September 2009 by Oxford Economics USA claims to be the first to measure the ROI of face to face events in the context of business travel.

It came to some interesting conclusions:

• Both executives and business travelers estimate that 18% of current business would be lost without in-person meetings
• Both executives and business travelers estimate that roughly 40% of their prospective customers are converted to new customers with an in-person meeting compared to 16% without such a meeting
• More than half of business travelers stated that 5-10% of their company’s new customers were the result of trade show participation

Whilst being an interesting read, this study focuses on the benefits of meetings to sell something. It does not talk about the ROI of conferences or meetings where the objective is to do something other then sell.

“Weave was very conducive to bridging the gap after our client’s re-organization.”

We have lots of testimonials and positive feedback from the events that we have helped with weaves but as yet we have not found a framework for analyzing the ROI of a meeting that was focused on engagement, sharing information or aligning values. We would like to find one but it seems we may have to develop our own methodology.

How would you measure the ROI of networking at a leadership conference?

The costs of a meeting are easy to measure although not all are included in a corporate calculation (time away from family or having a terrible cab ride to the airport being two examples). It’s calculating the returns that prove to be the problem. In the trade show or the conference space, the ROI calculation is straightforward. Did the activity result in sales and if so how many. The Phillips methodology goes further and measures, satisfaction, reaction, learning, application and impact. However this seems to miss out the benefits of employee alignment around a vision or strategy, internal networking, increasing knowledge in you sector or increased familiarity with your colleagues. The advantages of new techniques such as coopetition could also have returns that are difficult to isolate and quantify.

Over the next few weeks will be working on this issue to search for an answer. If we can’t find one, we’d like to see what we can do to help fill this gap. We intend on doing this in a collaborative way so if you have anything to share or say on the subject we’d really appreciate your views.

How do you value inspiration?

How do you measure the ROI of engagement?