Before we get into some of the ways you can track event attendance, we’re going to start off with the question: ‘why track attendance in the first place?’
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”
– Peter Drucker
To analyze
One of the main reasons why universities should be tracking event attendance is to be able to analyze and draw insight from student behavior. Often, this is easier said than done.
As with any analysis, gathering data must be straightforward and relatively resource-light if it is to be done regularly. If not, the return on investment for doing the analysis in the first place trends towards zero. That’s when you get into the territory of “yep, we want to know what’s happening, but who has the time to find that out!”
The level of analysis is important too. For example, knowing who turns up for a campus event is useful but being able to track who attends individual sessions can provide you with the right insight to know where your event dollars should be spent. This level of understanding allows you to weigh up attendance levels of specific events or sessions against how much they cost to run.
You can go deeper still with your analysis. By feeding attendance data into your CRM or applicant tracking system, you can calculate whether or not attendees ultimately enrolled – a macro success metric for most schools.
This analysis lets you uncover those niche, low-attended events which are labor-intensive, but that have actually resulted in a high percentage of attendees going on to enroll.
To action
As well as being able to make smarter decisions on what events and sessions to run, tracking attendance also allows you to take other informed actions. For example, by knowing if a student actually turned up or not lets you modify your communications with them in the future.
Statistically speaking, attendees are more likely to enroll than non-attendees and they should be treated as two different groups for marketing and communications purposes post-event. Communications to non-attendees could focus on encouraging them to re-register whereas staff could engage in one-to-one calling campaigns for those who did attend the event.
So, what 3 ways can you use to track event attendance in order to let you analyze and take appropriate action?
Going old school: pen and paper