Creating an efficacious event without destroying a budget requires a great deal of knowledge and skill. A major international events’ business faced a difficult problem. Attendance at one of its most important events was declining: it was increasingly difficult to secure the “right” visitors (high impact opinion leaders), and, costs were soaring. Predictably, their partners were becoming more and more angry with the situation. Ozanne Analytics was employed to determine what might be done to help eliminate this problem.

Since this was an annual event, we were able to employ previous attendance information to provide the data required and develop a scorecard for each potential visitor. The ROX Predictive Scorecard employs sophisticated proprietary modeling to parsimoniously determine a score for each potential attendee designating the probability that each will attend the event.

The scorecard revealed two extremely important expectations:

1. A large percentage of previous visitors had a zero likelihood of attending the event.

2. Opinion leaders, those most important to the event’s perceived success in the eyes of the programs paying exhibitors, had very low likelihood of attending.

Ozanne Analytic personnel worked with the event sponsor to address these issues. In so doing, several approaches to improving efficacy and controlling costs were pursued.

Among these approaches:

1. No contact with those unlikely to attend – often they had either been accidental visitors, changed positions or industries, or were not interested.

2. For those virtually certain to attend, improve the efficacy through ongoing interest specific content.

3. For others, improve the efficacy for both the sponsor and the visitor through various types of contact based upon areas of interest and attendance likelihood.

4. For the opinion leaders whose importance was critical to the events success, personal high level contacts and a specific efficacious event within an event was planned and executed. As a result of these efforts, all but one of these high impact opinion leaders attended the event.

For an investment of $35,000, the event saved $0.5 million alone by not mailing to those who were virtually certain not to attend.

The efficacy of the contacts made with attendees prior to the event led to increased attendee satisfaction while exhibitors were elated with the attendance and discussion with the key opinion leaders. The “problem” is that expectations for future events – both competitive and sponsor – increased dramatically. Not a bad problem to have.