Event Success

CHAPTER 5The Event Data Maturity Curve

From our perspective, the biggest gift the pandemic offered was furthering the events industry along the event data maturity curve, a framework for understanding how the industry has progressed toward maximizing the value of data.

Identifying the Four Steps of Event Data Maturity

Events have long stagnated behind most other industries in the use of data, but they are finally starting to catch up. The first step in the event data maturity curve is improving the availability of data, which is more robust today thanks to holistic tools, event applications, and the digitization of events in general. We call this step data capture. Event organizers can see which sessions an attendee signs up for and which company an attendee represents. Email marketers can see which contacts open their emails and which links they click in those emails (if any). In short, because of the availability of more technologies and their growing sophistication, we now have a lot more data to work with.

The second step in the event data maturity curve for event organizers is to connect that data to business systems—such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, the sales technology stack, digital marketing platforms, and association management systems—in order to enrich those systems. We call this step data integration. Insights into attendees and their ...