Calculating ROI for management conferences

I received a question recently from a communicator who wanted to measure the impact of her company's senior management conference.

She already planned to measure outcomes like improved understanding of strategy, but she wasn't sure how to look at the return on investment (ROI) since a lot of money had been spent on the conference.

Identifying behavior changes            
My suggestion to her was to identify what occurred during the meeting that should result in management actions. That's because the only outcome that has a monetary value is behavior change. There's no money attached to greater understanding or deeper feelings of engagement until those influences on the head and heart move the hands and feet to action.

Depending on the company’s strategy and the content covered in the meeting, some of those financially beneficial behaviors might be managers:

1. Working more productively.
2. Reducing accidents.
3. Improving quality.
4. Increasing the rate of revenue growth.
5. Cross-selling.
6. Reducing costs from waste, duplication, or lack of coordination across business units. 
7. Changing their management practices in a way that improves employee retention.

Now she’ll need to do some research to identify how much those behaviors changed after the conference, and identify how much credit the conference itself can take for the changes. One way to do that is to survey conference participants about their behavior changes, if any, and how much credit for the change they would ascribe to the conference.

With many behaviors, a survey wouldn’t even be necessary. She could work with whoever keeps track of a particular behavior (such as accident rates, employee turnover, cross-selling, etc.) and have that person run a report showing the numbers before and after the conference for the group managers who attended the conference versus the group of those who were invited but missed it.

Until next time,

Angela Sinickas
President, Sinickas Communications, Inc.
angela@sinicom.com

And finally...
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