1. Prove Your Success
"Looking to get more money for an event program is like asking for more allowance before you've done your chores," says Allison Saget, author of The Event Marketing Handbook: Beyond Logistics & Planning (Kaplan Publishing, 2006). But presenting compelling data that shows an event's return on investment can help you make your argument. Just ask CareerBuilder.com. Last year, the Chicago company worked with Swivel Media to produce a six-month, 43-city mobile marketing tour so successful that the company is not only doing it again this year, but expanding it. Company executives created several different ways to track Web activity that originated from the tour, including taking photos of event attendees at each stop and giving them a code that allowed them to retrieve the photo from the Web site; Careerbuilder.com then tracked how many people entered their code. "Presenting the data was the best way for us to increase our resources and make our case," says Andrea Winitsky, the company's event marketing manager.
2. Tell a Story
While the numbers can be important, don't rely solely on them to make your argument. Instead, to get the OK to do more or bigger events, author and marketing guru Seth Godin recommends selling the story behind them. "When your boss asks you to justify the ROI, if you engage in that conversation you're walking into a sucker's bet," he says. "What they're really saying is, 'It makes me nervous to invest in this, so tell me a story that won't make me nervous.'" How to do that? "Pick someone who just became a customer, or became a world-class employee, and talk in detail about their value—and then talk in detail about how the event you created caused that to happen," he says.
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