Evaluating Event Effectiveness Across Alternate Platforms

Organizations are rapidly adopting new technologies and have justified their return on investment by examining new attendee rates, "click throughs" on links, and company-specific metrics. Despite advances in technology and growing consumer dependence on electronics, the meeting and events industry has been slow to adopt IT advances for fear of cannibalization. The purpose of this study was to gather foundational knowledge of how various event platforms, such as face to face and online, can affect overall event effectiveness. Variables examined include attendee satisfaction, loyalty, and content retention. This research used a multimethod approach in which one experimental study and one field study were conducted. The researchers analyzed three meeting platforms in each study: face to face, online, and online with moderator. The findings suggest that meetings with more difficult content should utilize in-person or online with moderator sessions to increase attendee satisfaction, loyalty, and content retention. For meetings with less difficult content, the findings suggest that it is not cost effective to pay for a moderator in the online session. This research has important implications for improving the quality of meeting attendees' experiences while achieving an organization's set objective. Additionally, this study has implications for event-related areas to include exhibitors, sponsors, and audio-visual providers.