What a year of client
experience should show.

One evening you can judge close to the day, against whatever it was for. A year you can only judge against what it was meant to do, and that’s the part nobody wrote down in January.

Attendance is the easiest number and the least useful

Seventy of eighty invitations accepted. Forty-two in the room. A hundred and sixty hampers out the door by the second week of December. Those are the numbers that reach you, because those are the numbers the arrangements throw off by themselves.

They tell you how much. They don’t tell you who, and they don’t tell you whether anything about those relationships is different now to how it was in February. A full room of the wrong forty-two costs the same as a half-full room of the right twenty, and photographs better.

What a year should be able to account for

If you decided the year in advance, you can answer four things at the end of it, and the answers are names and dates rather than categories.

Which relationships the year was for, named, and few enough to be real. Which of them were in a room, in a conversation or on the receiving end of something considered, and which were not. What you understand about those businesses now that you didn’t understand twelve months ago. And what came off the calendar to make room for the rest, with the saving visible rather than quietly swallowed.

None of that needs a system. It needs the decision made early and the record kept as you go, and that’s a different habit to running the arrangements well.

A return that isn’t only financial

The financial return is real and it’s slow. Try to pin revenue to one particular evening and you’ll either measure the wrong thing or measure nothing, and then quietly decide the whole category can’t be measured.

What shows up first is quieter than revenue and more useful than attendance. A client who takes the call. A referrer who sends a second matter without being asked. A donor who gives again with no campaign behind it. A renewal nobody had to chase. A piece of information — a succession plan, an acquisition being weighed up, a frustration with an incumbent adviser — that arrived over a long dinner and was never going to arrive by email. And your own people, who watched the organisation hold a room well and think differently about where they work.

None of that is a consolation prize for missing the commercial outcome. It’s the early shape of it, and you can see it if you’re keeping the record.

Why the record usually doesn’t exist

Every supplier sees their own piece. The caterer knows the night ran smoothly. The gift supplier knows the order shipped on time. The venue knows the room was full. Not one of them can tell you which relationships moved over twelve months, because not one of them was ever shown the twelve months.

Inside the business it’s all there, just scattered. An inbox, a spreadsheet carried over from last year, a card statement, and whatever the person who ran each thing happens to remember. Someone determined could put it together in late January. Almost nobody does, because by then the first function of the new year is already being arranged, and the person who’d do the reconstructing is the person arranging it.

So the year closes without anyone reading it, the next one gets built off the same list, and the only evidence any of it worked is that nothing obviously failed.

The report you can actually use

A useful account of the year is short, and uncomfortable in places. It names the relationships that were warm in February and are warmer now. It names the ones that have had nothing but invoices for three years and were never on a guest list, and that’s a finding rather than an oversight. It gives you what the year cost in total, across every category, not line by line in four different places. And it tells you what to drop next year, which is the part that makes it worth reading.

If the decisions were made in advance and the record was kept, that takes an afternoon. From a folder of photographs it can’t be done at all.

Where the argument doesn’t hold

One event with a single commercial purpose — a capital raise, a product launch, an opening — you judge on its own terms, close to the day. It doesn’t need a year’s reading and shouldn’t wait for one.

And none of it applies if you already run a disciplined client programme, with a marketing function that holds the record and reports it to the board. You’ve got what’s being described here, and you should be sceptical of anyone implying otherwise.

It applies to the organisations in between. A base of relationships worth protecting, a real annual spend spread across events, gifting, hospitality and sponsorship, and no single account anywhere of what that spend did. Across professional services and property, most family enterprises, and the better-funded end of the not-for-profit and care sectors, that’s most of them.

The year is the unit

Book occasions and you get a report on each occasion. Every one of them accurate, and none of them adding up to anything, because nobody set out what the sum was meant to be.

Hold a year and you can describe the year. Which relationships it was for, what moved, what you learned, what you let go. Only one party is in a position to write that, and it’s whoever held the direction and kept the record from the start. Not whoever delivered any part of it.

The relationships that carry you are never hard to name. What’s hard, at the end of a year, is saying what happened to any of them. And the money went out either way.

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GD Events Group is a Sydney practice for the design of strategic experiences — corporate events, hosted environments and gifting, curated journeys and strategic experience programs. About the practice.