15 Athlete-Centric Approaches

Measuring the success of alumni events is crucial to understanding their impact, identifying areas for improvement, and tailoring future engagement strategies. It is always the time to think about measuring success – even as you start to plan an event. If you think about what outcomes you want from the event, then you also need to think about how to measure those outcomes. Here are some key metrics and methods you can use to measure the success of alumni events:

It’s a great idea when planning alumni events to consider not just how to do it, but how one will know how successful one is being. When you define success beforehand, it determines what the key metrics are. If your ultimate goal is more engagement, giving, or simply to have more connected to the community at large, these are key metrics and how to measure the success of your events:

1. Attendance and Participation Level

• Track attendance numbers against expected numbers.
• Heavy turnout is high participation and interest on the part of the alumni community and can be a sign of good outreach and relevance of the event.

2. Questionnaires for Feedback

• Utilize post-event surveys to gauge levels of satisfaction, recommendations, and attitude levels of participants.
• It provides strengths and weaknesses feedback and helps to plan events more effectively in the future.

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Ask the guests’ likelihood to refer the event to friends.
• This kind of measure is a simple but powerful measure of overall satisfaction and can fuel word-of-mouth expansion.

4. Social Media Engagement

• Track activity on the sites, such as likes, comments, shares, and event hashtag use.
• Social media tracking can serve as a measurement of how much the event resonated with the attendees and could sell itself to the non-attendees.

5. Return Attendance Rate

• Quantify proportion of alumni attending events in later years.
• Return visits over the long term are great for indicating value and rapport established by events.

6. Participant Demographics

• Take a look at participants’ demographics such as year that they graduated from, where they work, and what they do.
• Getting an idea of who comes in with helps with meeting people that are there and with being able to give a stronger pitch to more alumni in the future.

7. Follow-Up Participation

• Monitor follow-up activity in the form of greater use of alumni sites, social network activity, or participation in other institution activities.
• These are signs that the event prompted greater participation.

8. Alumni Contributions

• Track any increase in donations or financial gifts following the event.
• Active alumni give back to the institution, and events serve as a catalyst to philanthropy.

9. Media Coverage and Public Relations

• Count the number of times the event is highlighted in institutional newsletters, the media, and on the internet.
• Positive publicity adds to the profile and visibility of the institution.

10. New Alumni Contacts

• Budget the number of new business or social contacts made through attendance at the event.
• Networking is a natural outgrowth of alumni events and can be a key attendance builder.

11. Post-Event Content Engagement

• Monitor event-content such as photo galleries, summary videos, and blog posts for engagement.
• Continued high engagement indicates ongoing interest and facilitates reaching the event’s maximum.

12. Return on Investment (ROI)

• Look for the cost-benefit ratio.
• Track investment in terms of money and time invested in hosting the event versus quantifiable benefits such as level of engagement, donations, or exposure.

13. Alumni Testimonials and Stories

• Gather participants’ words and personal experiences.
• Display them on alumni sites, not only giving testament to the success of the event but also encouraging revisit patronage.

14. Post-Event Interviews

• Conduct in-depth interviews with a representative subset of the participants to gain a deeper understanding of their experience.
• These interviews provide qualitative feedback that cannot be achieved through surveys.

15. Benchmarking

• Compare the numbers of events today to similar events or industry standards at similar institutions.
• This can be utilized as a means of measuring success and where to expand or enhance.

Each alumni activity presents the opportunity to strengthen the relationship between alumni and the institution. Institutions can make their alumni activity more effective and create long-term value in each activity by specifying clearly defined goals and suitable, relevant measures of success.