Event planners should consider a post-event survey to be as much a part of wrapping up an event as cleaning the venue or paying the performers. They provide invaluable and customized information which can show you what your perfect event looks like. Putting together a post-event survey is a process in itself, which we explained in another blog post.

Once you send out your perfectly optimized survey, you’ll start getting back the information you need. Awesome. What exactly do you do with all of it, though? Well, one of your questions can allow you to understand one of the most important metrics for any company, their Net Promoter Score.

1. What is a Net Promoter Score?

Here is one of the most important questions in your survey:

“How likely are you to recommend our event to a friend on a scale of 0 to 10?”

This simple question has incredible implications once you begin to compile the data. Obviously, it shows how much your attendees appreciated the event. Taking the data even further, you can calculate your Net Promoter Score. A Net Promoter Score is a measurement of how likely customers are to recommend your event. From this value, you can easily grasp an understanding of how satisfied the attendees were. For evidence of how telling your friends about something demonstrates satisfaction, text your old room mate who just got back from Europe.

2. How to calculate a Net Promoter Score

The net promoter score categorizes customers into three types. Detractors (who answered 6 or lower) are those who were very dissatisfied or unimpressed with your event. The mouths of detractors are known for expressing opinions that may end up dissuading others from buying tickets themselves. Passives (score of 7 or 8) had no particular issue with your event, but could likely go to another one if it’s on the same weekend. Promoters (score of 9 or 10) are the ones who enjoyed your event so much that they can’t shut about it. They are the ones who make plans to bring more friends next time. In a world where we are bombarded with advertisements suggesting we do things we may or may not enjoy, the word of a friend is the best advertisement that money can’t buy.

To calculate the actual Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of your attendees who answered as detractors from the percentage of promoters. The resulting metric will be on a scale of -100 to 100. The higher you are on this scale, the more people that are out there bragging about your event.

3. What does this all mean?

As there is no such thing as a perfect event, you will never have a score of 100. That of course does not mean you shouldn’t aim for as close as you can get. High scores mean that your event was outstanding, but low ones do not necessarily imply that it was a failure. For some context, Netflix has a NPS of 13 according to NPS Benchmark. Walmart, as another notable name, enjoys a nice score of 40. Both of these are very successful companies, and neither is anywhere a perfect score.

Every event will have at least a few detractors, so you shouldn’t get hung up on them. The point of the Net Promoter Score is not for you to convince a detractor to be a promoter. In all reality, the lower a detractor scores the less likely they will ever be an advocate of your brand. The point is for you to keep your promoters, while upgrading your passives.

This means that the most important thing to see in your Net Promoter Score is growth. Having a score in the teens doesn’t mean it’s time to hang up your event organizer hat. It just means you have a chance to improve for the next event. You want to see your promoters grow, because the more of them that are out there, the more seats you will fill.

If you want to truly utilize your Net Promoter Score, then you need to be consistent in keeping it. One value, no matter how good, does not mean anything by itself. Every event needs to have a survey, and every survey needs to create a Net Promoter Score. With the Net Promoter Score as an ever shifting value, you can use it as a constant finger on the pulse of your event’s success. We walk that talk here at Xorbia. After our client’s wrap up their events, we use Delighted to see how our services worked for them. For those wondering, our last calculated Net Promoter Score was a 77.

 

Updated on July 7th, 2017