The Event Isn’t Over When People Leave

The Event Isn’t Over When People Leave

The real Return on Experience begins when people get home.

The lights come up. The badges come off. Everyone goes home.

Now the event gets interesting.

For experience designers, the temptation is to evaluate success while people are still there. Did they “like” the experience? Did they stay until the end?

But the economic value of an experience is largely determined by what happens after people leave.

Do they remember it? Talk about it? Share it? Buy something? Sign up for next year’s event?

The brain mechanisms that produce these behaviors begin working before the event is even over.

The Brain Decides What Is Worth Keeping

We experience far more information than the brain can retain. Processing an experience and forming a memory of it therefore requires selection.

Experiences that are assessed as valuable receive preferential processing. Valuation must occur continuously because the brain has limited resources and seeks to deploy them where and when they will help the organism survive and thrive.

This means every minute of an event does not have equal value.

Some moments disappear almost immediately.

Others stick.

My lab discovered the brain’s valuation network for social-emotional experiences, which I named Immersion because people appear to get lost in peak Immersion experiences. Immersion is a one-second neuroelectrical signal that captures the value of an experience. In 2017, I started a company so anyone could measure Immersion anywhere awesome things are happening.

Years of scientific research and client use have proven that the Immersion signal has consequences long after an experience ends.

A brain structure called the hippocampus encodes experiences into long-term memory—and it must do so selectively.

What gets saved?

Peak Immersion experiences.

Brain regions involved in processing emotion are directly connected to the hippocampus, prioritizing valuable experiences to be saved as memories. Moments that produce peak Immersion are thus the moments that will be remembered.

And it gets better.

Peak Experiences Create a Desire for More

The Immersion brain network primarily utilizes two neurochemicals, dopamine and oxytocin. 

Dopamine does several things in the brain, including motivating actions such as purchases and increasing curiosity. Importantly for experience designers, dopamine also creates the desire to repeat peak Immersion experiences.

This is what produces raving fans.

They remember the venue, the people, the music, the keynote speaker—and your brand.

That's why an extraordinary concert makes us look for the artist’s next tour date. A remarkable restaurant experiences makes us make another reservation. And an exceptional meeting makes us register for next year.

The best experiences don’t simply produce satisfaction.

They produce desire.

What Happens Monday Morning?

Imagine two attendees leaving the same conference.

Both tell the post-event survey that they “liked” it.  Easy peasy.

One goes home and barely thinks about it again.

The other tells three colleagues about something she learned, connects with people she met, posts a photograph, visits a sponsor’s website, and registers for next year’s event.

Those attendees clearly did not have equivalent experiences.

Yet a traditional survey would tell you that they did.

The difference is revealed by behavior.

And all behavior starts in the brain.

Design for What Happens Next

This changes the question experience designers need to ask.

Not:

Did people like our event?

But:

Did we create moments valuable enough to the brain so that people want to repeat it?

What You Need to Do

Measure Immersion.

That’s how you discover which parts of your event created memories and desire. It’s how you identify the demographics of your raving fans—and the people for whom the event was underwhelming.

The easy-to-use ImmersionLive kit makes measurement frictionless.

When you badge an attendee,  wave a wearable from the kit over an iPad and you’re collecting data. Retrieve the wearable when the event is over and, in two minutes, clearly organized data, graphs, and AI-enabled recommendations appear on the iPad.

No app for attendees to download. No complicated setup. No waiting days for somebody else to analyze your event.

Your data. Right there. With actionable insights.

You can’t reliably “wow” attendees unless you can objectively measure when the wow actually happened.

ImmersionLive shows you “wow” versus “ow” so you can create more of the former and eliminate the latter.

Because an extraordinary experience doesn’t end when someone walks out of the event.

It changes what people do next.

Use this link to schedule a demo of ImmersionLive today and ensure your next event wows the attending brains.

FAQs

How do you measure the true ROI of an event?
Event ROI goes beyond attendance and satisfaction. Looking at what attendees remember and what they do afterward, including sharing the experience, engaging with sponsors, or registering again, provides a stronger indication of the value the event created.

Why aren’t post-event surveys enough to measure event success?
Two attendees can give an event the same satisfaction rating but behave very differently afterward. Measuring the moments that generated the greatest neurological value can reveal differences that traditional self-report surveys may miss.

What makes an event memorable?
The brain selectively prioritizes experiences it considers valuable. Peak Immersion moments are more likely to be encoded into long-term memory and can increase the desire to repeat an experience.