Sustainability ranks last. That’s your opening.

/in , ,

Based on the ICEN Annual Benchmarking Report 2026/27.

A new survey of in-house corporate event professionals has an uncomfortable finding for anyone in our corner of the industry. Sustainability comes last.

The ICEN Annual Benchmarking Report 2026/27 asked 115 corporate event professionals to rank their planning priorities. Sustainability, which it defines as CO2 tracking and waste reduction, came 9th out of 9. Only 16% rated sustainability requirements and reporting as a significant challenge for the next 12 months. It was the lowest of every challenge listed.

It would be easy to read that as “nobody cares”. We think the rest of the report says something more useful.

The real problem is measurement

Look at what teams are worried about. 85% rate budget pressure and cost scrutiny as a major challenge. 82% say the same of proving ROI and commercial value. The objection event teams hear most often is “we can’t measure the ROI”, reported by 45%.

Senior leaders aren’t the obstacle. 79% of respondents say their senior stakeholders believe strongly in the value of events. But only 13% find budgets easy to approve. The report’s diagnosis is that events have a currency problem, not a value problem. Leaders agree events matter, but they won’t sign off without numbers they trust.

Most teams are stuck at the same point. 83% measure registrations or attendance, and only 34% attribute revenue. Attendance tells you who turned up. It doesn’t tell finance what the event delivered.

Sustainability has the same problem

Carbon data for events has a lot in common with ROI data. It’s often collected late, can be estimated, and reported once the event is over. It rarely uses a method the finance team recognises. That makes it easy to rank last, because it feels like an extra task rather than a source of evidence.

The report points to what changes this, and it applies to carbon as much as to pipeline:

  • Write the definition down. Teams with a documented engagement scoring model rate their pipeline evidence 3.71 out of 5. Teams without one rate it 2.82. Informal tracking sits close to having no model at all.
  • Connect the data. Teams whose event data flows into their CRM rate their evidence 3.78. Teams moving data by hand rate it 2.48.
  • Measure the whole portfolio. Easy budget approval is 22% for teams running 30 or fewer events a year and 4% for teams running 60 or more. The report’s answer is one set of measures applied to every event, rather than a separate story for each.

The report calls for a standard rather than a tool. A shared, documented method is what makes numbers credible to the people who control budgets. We agree.

What this means for responsible events

We read the findings this way.

Stop using sustainability as a separate agenda. If carbon and waste (not the most exciting of factors) rank last in a list of priorities, a standalone sustainability pitch will keep ranking last. The priorities that rank first are content quality, ROI and measurement, and delivering on wider business KPIs. ESG (NOT carbon) data earns its place by serving those: consistent, comparable and defensible evidence about what an event cost and what it delivered.

Treat carbon AND social value like any other event measure. You’re already delivering social value in delivering events as they are. You’re just not measuring it and showing it as brand-generated value. Both social and carbon should use an agreed method and be reported after every event. It should be comparable across a programme, and someone should own it. That is the same advice the report gives for ROI.

Plan for the portfolio, not the one-off. For teams running dozens of events a year, a single flagship impact report doesn’t help. A consistent method across both factors every event does – and demonstrates your team and event value.

Expect the gap to close. The report shows sustainability reporting as a low-ranked skill and training budgets as scarce, with only 19% of organisations running a structured programme. Regulation and client disclosure requirements aren’t waiting for event teams to catch up. Teams with a measurement habit in place will be better placed when the questions come. Which they will. Seen it from several global corporates this month alone.

A note on the data

This was a small sample of 115 respondents, weighted towards finance and banking (47%) and technology (26%), and to the UK (52%). The sustainability question was narrow, so it may understate interest in wider reporting requirements. So the report is not a verdict on the whole market.

The takeaway

The profession is asking for defensible numbers. Sustainability sits low on the list partly because it hasn’t yet been presented as one.

At event:decision, that’s the case for measuring carbon and social value as rigorously as anything else: a documented method, consistent across events, and clear enough to stand up in a budget conversation. When teams can show that, a sustainable and responsibly delivered program stops being an extra and starts being part of the evidence.

If you’re building a measurement framework for your events programme, we’d be glad to talk.

 

Venues: stop describing your credentials, prove your performance

/in ,

Event. Sustainability. Performance. Measurement. Hotel. Venue. RFP.

Every venue RFP response looks the same. Meeting space capacity. Room count. Awards won. A line about “committed to sustainability.” None of it is evidence – it’s marketing.

A shift is happening on the buyer side. This week alone we’ve seen three global corprates as for sustainability data, not credentials but data on performance. Corporate and agency planners can now ask for ESG performance data before a venue makes the shortlist. Not a policy statement. Not a certification logo. Actual numbers, from actual events, benchmarked against what “good” looks like in the sector. A venue that can’t produce that data isn’t being ruled out on quality – it’s being ruled out on evidence.

That’s the gap many don’t realise you’re competing on. You can have the most impressive building, the best chef, the best events team in the region, and still lose the RFP to a venue with a worse product and a better scorecard – because the scorecard is what the buyer’s finance and sustainability sign-off actually asks for.

Credentials are a description. Performance is a measurement.

“This is what Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, eBay & the like have been monetising for years. Time the M&E sector caught up.” says event:decision’s Matt Grey

A brochure says “we care about sustainability.” A performance score says: this specific event, hosted at this specific property, benchmarked against the sector ‘this well’. One of those is copy. The other is proof a procurement team can smile at.

That’s what Impact: VenueLens does. It takes the events you’ve already hosted and turns them into a portfolio-wide responsibility-focused scorecard – the same kind of evidence corporate buyers already collect on their own events, applied to the venue side of the relationship. Instead of describing your credentials at RFP stage, you hand over a Social Value Yield score and a benchmarked performance history. Buyers can shortlist on that. Yes, your rate counts, but now you can prove your performance also.

A cost objection doesn’t survive the maths.

Take a fairly typical two-day residential event: 75 delegates, one night’s accommodation, meeting space and catering. Run the numbers on a realistic per-delegate spend and the total budget lands somewhere between £27,000 and £43,000 depending on the tier of venue. Measuring that event’s performance costs from as little as £49.

Less than the cost of a single coffee, per head, across the whole event.

That’s roughly 65p per delegate. Less than a fifth of one per cent of total spend.  Whatever objection a venue’s finance team raises about the cost of measurement, it isn’t really about the cost – it’s £49 against a five-figure event budget.

The RFP has already changed. Most venues haven’t.

None of this is a future trend. It’s happening at the shortlisting stage of RFPs right now, for buyers who already measure their own events and expect the same discipline from the venues they book. The venues that can answer that question with a number win business the venues that can only answer it with a sentence lose.

Stop describing your credentials. Prove your performance.

What can Uber, Airbnb and Checkatrade teach us about event performance?

/in , ,

event:decision  |  Matt Grey | How event agencies, suppliers, venues and hotels can deliver more sustainable events and be seen to be doing so.

 

When we explain Impact to a new brand, agency or venue, there’s usually a moment about ten minutes in where someone says “so it’s like a rating.” And they’re closer than they realise – because the rating economy has already trained everyone in the room to understand exactly what event:decision’s Impact will do for you.

The trouble is that it’s also trained you to expect far less than we deliver. So it’s worth walking the analogies…

The record belongs to the driver

Every Uber trip belongs to the passenger. They booked it, they paid for it, they went where they wanted to go. When they get out, the trip is theirs, and it’s over.

But the rating accrues to the driver. It follows them from trip to trip, builds into a rolling average across recent journeys, and becomes the thing that determines whether they keep working. No single passenger owns it. It’s the driver’s asset, assembled from thousands of jobs that were never theirs.

That is precisely the structural problem Impact solves for event agencies and production partners. Your client owns the event. They own the brief, the budget, the outcome and the carbon inventory it feeds into. When the last case goes on the truck, the event is theirs and it’s over. Without something to catch it, your performance goes with it.

Impact is the rolling average. It’s the record that accrues to you across every event you touch, regardless of who owned each one.

Airbnb: the score has structure

Airbnb went further than a single number. Guests rate a stay across separate categories – cleanliness, accuracy, communication, check-in, location, value – so the host doesn’t just learn that a stay went badly. They learn which part went badly.

That’s a scorecard, and it changes behaviour in a way an overall star average never does. A host who sees a weak cleanliness category knows what to fix on Monday. Sustained performance across those categories earns Superhost status, which is a badge a guest recognises without needing to understand the methodology behind it.

Impact Reviews work on the same principle, at considerably greater resolution: performance assessed across 30+ factors, delivered as an Event Scorecard, UN SGD alignment and a unique Social Value Yield (SaVY) for each and every event. Same logic, more levers.

Checkatrade: vetting is what makes a score mean anything

Here’s the one most people skip. Checkatrade’s value isn’t the score. It’s that the trade was vetted before they were allowed to be scored at all.

Strip out the vetting and you have a review site – which is to say, a collection of opinions of unknown provenance, and worth roughly what opinions are worth. The vetting is what converts sentiment into evidence, and evidence is what a homeowner is actually buying when they use the platform.

Every procurement team asking for your sustainability credentials is making the same distinction, whether they articulate it or not. They can tell the difference between a claim and a verified assessment, and they have stopped paying for the former.

Where the analogy breaks

All three of those systems share a limitation: they measure how people felt about the job. Averaged opinion.

Impact doesn’t ask anyone how they felt. It assesses the event against the most comprehensive checklist of sustainability factors available in this sector, the same way every time. That’s the difference between a review and a review body.

And once you have consistent assessment rather than sentiment, four things become possible that no star rating can do:

A score with context, not just a number. A 4.8 tells you nothing about whether 4.8 is good.

Impact benchmarks you against sector peers, by region and by event type – so you know how you performed against the people you’re bidding against, not against an abstract ideal.

It tells you what to do next. Ratings are a verdict. The Intelligence Hub shows you which sustainability factors your organisation actions most often and which you consistently miss, across your whole portfolio. That’s a gap analysis, and it’s a workplan rather than a judgement.

It puts a number in currency. SaVY Social Value Yield – expresses the portion of your event budget that could generate social value if the event performed perfectly against every social indicator. It’s headroom, not a retrospective claim: the value sitting unclaimed in money you’ve already committed. Carbon tools taught the industry to convert activity into tCO₂e. This does the same job for social performance, in a currency your finance director thinks in.

The framework alignment comes free. Every review question maps to one or more UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the aligned SDGs appear on the Scorecard. We’re deliberate about this: alignment is the byproduct, intelligence is the product. It’s the receipt that makes the findings credible to a procurement team – not the reason to do the work.

The version to remember

Uber taught us that a record can accrue to the provider even when every job belongs to someone else. Airbnb taught us that a score with structure changes behaviour. Checkatrade taught us that vetting is what turns a score into evidence.

Impact takes all three, adds a peer benchmark, a gap analysis, a figure in pounds and a framework mapping — and hands the whole thing to you rather than your client.

Your client keeps the event. You get to keep the record.

Your performance data walks out the door

/in ,

Measuring event carbon footprints has inherent value.

It gives your client something to keep. As an agency or supplier, it demonstrates your expertise.

Here is something that rarely gets said out loud in an agency, because it sounds ungrateful.

You measure the carbon footprint of an event. You chase the flight manifests, the hotel nights, the freight, the venue energy. You build the number, you check it, you write the report (or rather, event:decision does) It is good work, and it takes real effort.

Then you hand it over – and it’s gone.

The figure belongs to the event, and the event belongs to the client. It goes into their Scope 3 inventory, their annual report, their procurement pack, their investor deck. Wherever. That is exactly as it should be; it is their event and their emissions. But when the file closes, nothing has accrued on your side of the door. You have made your client measurably better informed and left yourself precisely where you started.

Do that forty times and you have forty clients who know more about their events than they did – and an agency that knows no more about itself than it did before the first one.

The thing an agency / supplier actually owns

You do not own your clients’ emissions. You never will, and should not try to.

What you own is the pattern of decisions you make across every event you touch. Where you site things. How you brief production teams. Which venues it goes back to. Whether the social value in its work is designed or accidental. That pattern is the only real asset in this industry that a competitor cannot copy, because it is made of your judgement rather than your rate card.

And almost nobody is capturing it. Not because agencies & supply partners do not care – most now care a great deal – but because every measurement exercise has been framed around the client’s deliverable rather than your record. When the reporting is built one event at a time, for one client at a time, in whatever format that client asked for, there is nothing left over that can be compared, added up, or learned from.

Impact. The benchmark that keeps value on your side

Impact scores an event on environmental, social and governance performance in one consistent methodology – which means, for the first time, your events become comparable to each other.

That gives an you something it has never had: a portfolio view. Every event you deliver, scored the same way, sitting in one place. Across formats, across clients, across venues and supply partners, and across years.

How does your ESG performance compare with industry, in region, by client sector or event-type?

How many UNSDGs the event aligns with.

What is the Social Value Yield of the event?

The client keeps their number, as they should. You keep the record.

Three things follow from that, and they are the three things agencies actually spend money trying to do.

1.  Understand

Before you can sell anything, you have to be able to see it.

Most agencies & suppliers are guessing at questions they could be answering. Are we consistently stronger on conferences than on incentives? Is our governance weak because our processes are weak, or because our documentation is? Did the sustainability push last year actually move anything, or did it just cost us a fortnight of everyone’s time?

A portfolio of comparable scores answers those in a nano-second. It also does something less comfortable and more useful: it shows you the events you would rather not look at. That is where the improvement is, and it’s invisible in a world of one-off client reports.

2.  Win new

Every agency & supplier in a pitch says it is committed to sustainability. Everybody nods, and nobody in the room believes any of it, because a commitment is cheap. 

Now imagine answering that slide with a distribution.

“This is our portfolio average across ESG. This is our spread – here is our best, here is our worst, and we are showing you both. This is what we improved over three years and by how much. This is the score we would expect to deliver on an event like yours, because we have the base rate for events like yours.”

In a procurement process that scores ESG – and there are more of those every year – that is a supremely better answer than your competitor’s.

It is a different category of answer. One side is making a promise. The other is showing its record.

3.  Develop existing

The greatest value is in the accounts you already have.

When last year’s event has been scored the same way as this year’s, the annual conversation changes shape. You are not presenting a report on what happened; you are presenting a direction of travel, with the two or three things that moved it and the two or three that did not. That is a planning meeting rather than a debrief, and planning meetings are where scope grows.

It also gives you a legitimate reason to widen. If one event scores well and three others in the same client’s programme have never been looked at, that is a conversation about consistency, not an upsell. If the drag is coming from venues or production partners rather than from your own decisions, Impact VenueLens and AdVantage take the same methodology out into the supply chain – and you are now the agency helping your client fix their whole programme, rather than the one defending a single number.

None of that is available to an agency whose sustainability work leaves the building every time the invoice is raised.

Two honest conditions

It only works if you measure the ordinary ones. 

A portfolio made of your best three events is marketing, not data.

The value is in the base rate, and base rates need the awkward events in them – the ones with the long-haul flights and the venue you had no say over. An agency that only scores its flagship work will produce a beautiful average it cannot use for anything.

And agree the data question up front.  Your client owns their event data. What you need is the right to retain your own performance record in anonymised, aggregated form – your scores, not their commercial detail. That is one line in a contract, and it is far easier to include at the start of a relationship than to request at the end of one. Almost no client objects; most have never even  been asked.

The point

Carbon measurement is not the problem here. It is necessary, it is increasingly non-negotiable, and the number genuinely does belong to the client.

The problem is that it has been the only thing on the table – so the entire industry has spent years building assets for other people. Measure a footprint and you have given your client something. Score an event on Impact, and every event after it, and you have finally built something of your own: a record of how well you do this work, which is the one thing you can take into a pitch, into a renewal, and into next year.

Your client keeps the number. You should get to keep the proof.

Try event:decision’s Impact. You’ll be surprised at the value you receive.

Social Value is moving upstairs

/in ,

By Matt Grey, event:decision

On 20 July, Andy Burnham was sworn in as prime minister. Days earlier, setting out his priorities at a policy speech in Manchester, he had pledged to overhaul public procurement in favour of social value and hinted at a national rollout of the Preston-style community wealth building model he has championed for a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester. Guy Battle, chief executive of the Social Value Portal, called it potentially “the biggest opportunity for the Social Value movement since the Social Value Act 2012.”

For the events industry, that should be a bigger story than it currently is. Social value is not a new idea, but it is about to be enforced, weighted and quantified in ways it never has been before – and events, whether organisers realise it or not, sit squarely inside that system.

A decade of law, and now a lever

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 already requires English and Welsh public authorities to consider how a contract might improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the area it serves. The Procurement Act 2023 hardened that into a duty: contracting authorities must “have regard to the importance of maximising public benefit” when awarding public contracts. And since February 2025, Procurement Policy Note 002 has made it mandatory: central government procurements must give social value a minimum 10% weighting in award criteria, rising further wherever a supply market is judged mature enough to bear it.

Burnham’s stated ambition goes further still. In his own account, he wants a definition of social value that moves beyond jobs alone to cover local supply chains, support for the third sector and broader place-based benefit – applied with the same rigour nationally that he built into Greater Manchester’s own Good Growth Fund. The direction of travel is unambiguous: social value is moving from a soft scoring criterion to a hard, auditable line item in how public money gets spent.

Why this reaches events

Two things make this relevant to brands, agencies and the venues and cities that host them.

The first is direct exposure. A growing share of conferences, exhibitions, awards ceremonies and public-facing events are commissioned through frameworks and contracts – NHS trusts, local authorities, combined authorities, universities, arm’s-length bodies – where a social value score already sits alongside price. An agency that cannot state, in a live and defensible way, what it contributes in supply chain spend or community engagement will simply score worse before cost is even compared. In some procurements, it may not get to the table at all.

The second is indirect, and arguably more interesting:

events are themselves potent generators of exactly the outcomes social value policy is designed to reward. 

Local spend, footfall, skills, temporary and permanent jobs, apprenticeships, civic pride in a host city – conferences and exhibitions produce all of it. The Social Value Portal’s own benchmarking across the public contracts it supports finds an average uplift of roughly 37p of social value for every £1 spent. Greater Manchester Combined Authority weighted social value at 15% on its major waste contract with SUEZ; STAR Procurement, working across several Greater Manchester and North West councils, has generated more than £183 million in validated social value since 2014. Once that same logic is extended to public-sector-linked events, the agencies that can produce a number will win business that the agencies offering only a narrative will not.

The measurement gap nobody has filled

Here is the problem: no dedicated social value framework yet exists for events. The National TOMs Framework and the Social Value Portal’s TOM System – the closest thing the UK has to a standard – were built for long-duration contracts: construction, facilities management, waste, care. They assume years of headcounts, apprenticeship starts and spend data, not the compressed timeline of a three-day conference or a single awards dinner. Search as we might, there is no equivalent framework built for the way events work. So, we built one.

That gap will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in event carbon measurement over the past five years. Carbon started as a nice-to-have in RFPs, became a default question, and is now often a contractual requirement. Social value is on an identical curve, a few years behind, and it now has a prime minister who has spent a decade putting it into practice pushing it forward.

The opportunity, if the industry moves now

Brands and agencies that build the capability to quantify social value per event will not just be ticking a compliance box. They will walk into pitches, public and private, with a story AND a number, at precisely the moment the market starts asking for one.

No need to calculate that social number from scratch. It’s what our own Impact suite at event:decision was built to produce.

Impact: Event gives corporate event owners and their agencies a Scorecard benchmarked across environmental, social and governance performance, event by event, against sector peers – and, alongside it, a quantified Social Value Yield (SaVY): the answer to the “how much is this actually worth” question, expressed as a £ figure or a percentage of budget, in the same way a carbon tool converts activity into tCO2e.

For agencies, this means walking into a pitch with real delivery data and peer benchmarks already in hand, before a client’s procurement team has even asked the question – and keeping that intelligence to sharpen the next bid, and the one after that.

The same logic runs the other way for the hotels and venues that host and supply events, not just those that commission them. Buyers are increasingly shortlisting venues on performance, not just capacity and day rate, which is why Impact: VenueLens lets a hotel or venue turn what it actually delivers into benchmarked, evidenced intelligence it can drop straight into a bid – proof of performance rather than a page of credentials – that buyers struggle to align with their own event.

AV and production partners sit in the same supply chain: Impact: AdVantage does the equivalent job for power, freight, crew travel, skills transfer and kit utilisation, surfacing the credible wins hiding in a supply chain before a client asks about them.

And associations and destinations choosing between venues, or building the case for a bid city, are exactly the audience this was built for – a comparable, evidenced number wins a social-value-weighted procurement process in a way a glossy digital brochure never quite does.

The industry doesn’t need to build this from nothing

event:decision’s Impact suite already benchmarks event performance against sector peers, evidences it against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and quantifies social value in a language a client, a budget-owner or a procurement officer can use to compare one events proposal against another – the same discipline we’ve applied to carbon for years: measure it properly, report it credibly, and use it to win business rather than merely survive an audit.

The organisations that start measuring now – whether they’re the in-house team commissioning the event, the agency delivering it, the venue hosting it, or the AV partner powering it – will help set the standard. Everyone else will spend the next few years catching up, exactly as many did with carbon.

Client gets the proof. You keep the intelligence.

/in , ,

 

Every Impact: review ends the same way. A Scorecard is generated, a client opens it, a box on an RFP gets ticked or a board paper gets its evidence slide. That part is real, and it’s the part everyone remembers, because it’s the part with someone else’s name on it.

It’s also the smaller half of what just happened.

What the client actually gets

One event. One moment in time. A benchmark against your sector, a gap analysis, a Social Value £$ amount, an SDG map – all of it true, all of it useful, all of it scoped to the programme that client just paid for. The day you send it, its job is done. It answered a question, closed a loop, won or defended a piece of business.

That’s the transaction. It was never supposed to be the whole story.

What you actually get to keep

Every one of those reviews is also a data point. Not in your client’s system – in yours.

It lands in the event:decision Intelligence Hub, sits alongside every other event you’ve ever run through Impact, and starts doing something a single Scorecard never can: it compounds.

The review answers a question for one client. The Hub builds an asset for one organisation – yours.

That’s the part built to be kept, not handed over: organisational data across the full set of Impact factors, not just per event but rolled up as your pattern – the factors you action most, the ones you consistently miss, benchmarked against your sector as a whole. A Social Value Yield by event, and your organisational total. An SDG position that’s yours across your whole portfolio, not just the one event someone happened to ask about.

None of that appears in the report you send to the client. It isn’t supposed to. It’s the layer underneath – and it’s the layer that’s actually yours to build.

Three seats at the table, the same asset

Agencies and corporate teams — Impact: Event. Every review sharpens your position against every other agency in the sector, whether or not that particular client ever asks for a comparison. The client you’re pitching next month has never seen the ten events you measured for someone else – but you have, and that’s exactly the evidence you walk in holding. The intelligence doesn’t belong to whoever commissioned the review. It belongs to whoever ran the portfolio.

AV and production partners – Impact: AdVantage. This is the seat that normally has no data of its own at all. The agency owns the client relationship; the power, freight, crew travel and kit choices you actually make usually disappear into someone else’s report, credited to someone else’s name. AdVantage gives you your own aggregate record – where the credible wins are hiding in your own supply chain, across every job you’ve run, not just the one you’re currently invoicing for. That’s an asset you can put in front of the next agency that hires you, independent of whichever client happened to be in the room last time.

Venues and hotels – Impact: VenueLens. Most venues get judged the same way every time: a brochure, a certificate, a site visit. VenueLens replaces that with a benchmarked hosting record built from every event you’ve ever hosted – not the one the last RFP asked about. When the next bid lands, you’re not describing your credentials from scratch. You’re presenting a track record the buyer never had to request, because you’d already built it before they asked.

Three different seats, three different relationships with a client – and in every one of them, the report goes out the door and the data stays home.

SaVY: a number for them, a running total for you

Handed to a client, Social Value Yield is one figure attached to one event – real, defensible, worth putting in the report. Held by you, across every event you’ve measured, it’s your organisational total: the compounding, evidenced answer to “how much social value has this business actually created” – a number most competitors can’t produce for a single event, let alone a whole portfolio.

That gap is the whole point. Anyone can eventually match a single client’s request for a single number. Almost nobody else is building the total.

The part worth remembering

Sustainability measurement in events has mostly been sold – and bought – as a client deliverable. It is one. But treat it only as that, and you’ve built a very expensive photocopier: every review perfectly serves the client in front of you, and nothing you produce gets any smarter, any more comparable, or any more valuable the next time around.

Build it as an organisational asset instead, and the same reviews do a second job nobody’s paying for directly: they make your next pitch, your next RFP, your next board paper stronger than your last one – regardless of which client is reading it.

The report leaves the building. The data doesn’t. That’s not a limitation of the Impact suite – it’s the reason to use it.

Want to see what your own portfolio’s aggregate would already show? Talk to us about Impact: Event, AdVantage and VenueLens at hello@eventdecision.com

The Value You’re Already Creating (And Can’t See)

/in , ,

| event:decision | July 2026

Every event you deliver has an iceberg problem. What the client sees – the room, the stage, the delegate badges, the feedback score, the headline attendance number – is the tip. It’s real, and it’s the part everyone photographs. But it’s a fraction of the mass. The rest – the value the event delivers within its infrastructure and delivery – sits below the waterline, entirely real, and almost never seen.

What’s above the waterline

Ask most event teams how they measure success and you’ll get a strikingly narrow answer. When the Events Industry Council (EIC) surveyed the industry on exactly this question, all eight available answers were commercial: leads, revenue, awareness, deal size. Not one social metric. Not one environmental one. That’s not because operators aren’t creating anything else – it’s because nobody’s ever asked them to look below the waterline, so nobody has.

What’s underneath (and it’s bigger than you think)

Two things sit beneath every event you deliver, fully formed and entirely uncounted.

The first is environmental: every flight, hotel room, kilowatt hour, meal and metre of freight your event consumed had a carbon cost, whether or not anyone wrote it down.

The second is social – this one is hugely positive and larger than you think. event:decision’s own analysis puts the social value an event generates at 10–30% of its budget; the relationships built face-to-face, the skills transferred, the local jobs supported, the spend that landed in the host city’s cafés and crews. Scaled across the sector’s $1.3 trillion of direct spend, that’s the “$260bn blind-spot” the industry’s own flagship economic study admits “goes unmeasured, unreported, and therefore undervalued.” On a single £500k event programme, that’s £50k–£150k of value delivered and never once put on the table.

Even the destinations selling events for a living have the same gap. The Business of Events’ Global Destination Report 2026 found destinations believe deeply in the sustainability and legacy case for their business – but “almost none can evidence it.” One European city representative admitted sustainability “is not yet usually the first thing clients ask for,” and only becomes persuasive “when concrete measures are presented.” The report’s own fix — fund “a small number of repeatable impact studies” — is, in effect, a call for exactly the measurement infrastructure Track and Impact already provide.

Created everywhere, claimed nowhere

The value isn’t missing. It’s unclaimed. Every event you ran this last year generated it – and then it evaporated, as far as anyone can prove: no number, no line in the report, no mention in the client’s board paper, no credit in your next pitch. Created in full. Claimed at zero.

“The social value was real – the relationships, the skills, the local spend all happened. But unmeasured value is unclaimed value.”

Until you can put a figure next to what you built, “we’re committed to making a difference” is a sentence every competitor also owns. A number isn’t.

Track surfaces the environmental mass you can measure in tonnes

Track exists to pull that environmental mass up above the waterline without adding to the planner’s workload. No data input, no spreadsheets, no conversion factors, no report-building.

Track is a managed service that does the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

You get the event’s carbon footprint, industry benchmarking against the 200+ events already measured, event-specific mitigation recommendations, and, where it’s genuinely needed, a certified offset route for whatever’s left. It measures before it mitigates, and mitigates before it ever reaches for an offset.

Impact surfaces the rest

Impact: Event does the same job for everything Track can’t put a tCO₂e figure on: the fair pay, the local hiring, the accessibility provision, the accessibility commitment, the community legacy – the value that goes completely unmeasured in almost every post-event report written today.

SaVY, our Social Value Yield metric, gives it the same treatment carbon got a decade ago: one number, in £ or as a % of budget, covering your event, your supply chain and your organisation.

And because clients are asking the ESG question earlier and harder every quarter – the latest RFP event:decision is supporting lists sustainability as a scored “must,” not a nice-to-have – having that number ready before you’re asked for it isn’t a differentiator any more. It’s table stakes.

Why this only works if it’s honest

None of this is worth anything if it isn’t true, which is why both tools are built to check what actually happened, not flatter whoever paid for the report. Independent, third-party measurement means an event’s environmental and social claims can actually be verified rather than simply asserted – which is exactly what protects you the day someone asks you to prove it. That’s the whole point of measuring in the first place: candour, not decoration.

The part agencies keep missing

Claim the value and something changes: it compounds. It isn’t one report for one client – it’s a benchmark, a body of evidence, and a running total that gets stronger every time you measure the next event. The client gets the proof. You keep the intelligence: the peer benchmarks, the year-on-year story, the case for your next three pitches. That’s the difference between creating value and being able to prove you created it.

Look below the waterline

You’re not being asked to run a more sustainable event, or a more socially valuable one, than the one you’re already running.

You’re being asked to look below the waterline at the event you already delivered. Most of what’s down there, you built. It’s just never been counted.

Put a number on what your next event is already creating – talk to us about Track and Impact at hello@eventdecision.com

We’re already doing these things…

/in ,

EVENT:DECISION  ·  SECTOR INSIGHT

 

Made for this moment: the event sector already delivers what the new PM wants

On 29 June, at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, Andy Burnham set out his vision for how Britain should be run: power pushed out of Westminster, growth nurtured from the bottom up, and a relentless focus on good growth in every postcode. Read it as an events professional and something jumps out immediately – it sounds like a brief our sector was born to answer.

Local spending. Fair pay. Skills for young people. Support for community groups. Every single one of the outcomes he’s reaching for, a well-run event already delivers – not once a year, but every week, in towns across the country. The event sector isn’t scrambling to catch up with this agenda. We’re already living it.

There’s only one thing standing between the sector and a starring role in Britain’s growth story: we don’t measure what we deliver, and we don’t shout about it. The good news? That’s a solved problem – and the solution already exists.

An open door: social value in procurement

The most exciting line in the whole speech, for us, is this one:

“We will make sure that all eligible public contracts are subject to proper social value weighting.”

Translated: if you create real social value, you’ll increasingly win the work – not just the lowest bidder. Events touch public money everywhere: NHS trusts, universities, councils, government departments and their agencies all run conferences, roadshows, awards and training, and commission agencies to deliver them. Every one of those briefs is about to reward the very thing our sector is best at. That’s not a threat. That’s an open door.

Local supply chains: we’re already the answer

Burnham wants an end to “chasing cut-price deals around the world” and a boost for “British-based suppliers.” That is the events business, exactly as it already works. A single event pulls in local caterers, AV and production crews, florists, printers, security, transport and hospitality – overwhelmingly British, overwhelmingly SME. When an event lands in a town, it spends that week in that town. We are the localism the agenda is calling for.

Skills and young people: a sector built to teach

If one theme runs through the speech, it’s skills – the Greater Manchester story of “a thousand extra work placements,” the push for real “parity between academic and technical” routes. Events is proudly vocational: you learn it by doing it, on site, alongside people who know how. Few sectors are better placed to give young people the hands-on start he wants. It’s already happening on every show floor – we just haven’t been counting it.

High streets and footfall: events bring places alive

He wants more “footfall on the high street” and thriving hospitality. Business events are footfall engines – they bring visitors who eat, drink, stay and spend, filling hotels midweek and giving a high street a reason to buzz. The visitor economy the speech wants to protect is one our sector generates, day in, day out.

Grassroots good, already flowing

Burnham wants delivery routed “through our community and voluntary sector.” Events already do this too – surplus food from an event going to local community groups rather than to waste is grassroots social value with a named beneficiary and a number attached. Real good, already flowing; it simply deserves to be recorded and celebrated.

The one thing to add: measure it, and shout about it

Notice the pattern. On every single one of Burnham’s priorities, the honest answer is “we already do that.” The sector’s challenge was never delivery – it was evidence. He’s asking for impact data strong enough for government and investors to back, and that is precisely the gap event:decision was built to close.

Here’s how the sector turns “we did a lot of good” into a number a procurement panel can score and a client can be proud of:

  • Impact: Event – measures the full sustainability and social value of an event across 30 impact areas, mapped to the UN SDGs — turning a great event into a reportable line: £X of local spend, Y living-wage roles, Z work placements, W meals redistributed.
  • Impact: AdVantage — does the same technical production and AV supply, so a venue can evidence its own performance, SDG alignment and Social Value Yield – and win business by showing it, not just saying it.
  • Impact: VenueLens – buyers are shortlisting on performance, not just capacity and rate. Impact: VenueLens turns what your venue actually delivers into decision-grade intelligence: benchmarked against comparable spaces, evidenced across E, S and G, and ready to drop into any bid. Stop describing your credentials – prove your performance, and make it the reason you win the business.

Together they do the one thing the sector has always been missing: they let you prove the value you already create – in the exact language the new agenda rewards.

The takeaway

You don’t need to agree with a word of the politics to see the opportunity. The direction of travel – across every party – is towards rewarding those who create measurable local and social value. Events create that value every day. The sector isn’t behind; it’s perfectly positioned. All that’s left is to measure it and shout about it.

Carbon is becoming table stakes. Social value is the differentiator. And the event sector is ready to lead.

Shout about your (social) value. beam Annual Forum 2026

/in , ,

A few who attended this session have asked for a copy of the presentation. Here you are.

And a very short summary:

Every ESG conversation in events collapses into carbon. It’s measured, regulated, table stakes almost – and it misses what events already do brilliantly: generate social value nobody bothers to record.

That’s the argument in Matt Grey’s “Social Value Yield of Events.” His point: don’t confuse Event Social Value Yield (SaVY) this with CSR. A beach clean, a painting task, a garden clear. All great, but removable. The event happens without it. SaVY isn’t: the riggers, carpet layers, chefs and waiting staff are the event. Remove them, and there’s nothing left.

The numbers back it up. The UK events sector turns over £68bn a year, and 10–30% of any event budget defensibly aligns with social value – living wages, local suppliers, local food, skills development, access, and social enterprises. At the 20% median, that’s £12bn delivered annually and never claimed. One UK incentive agency measured just two events and surfaced £405,000 in social value they didn’t know they were generating.

The fix takes minutes, not months: capture it during delivery, report it while the news cycle’s still alive. Public sector clients already demand this data. Private sector clients will start asking soon.

“My advice: get there first!”, says Grey.

How? Demonstrate your value, tell more stories, deliver better business, win more.

The Global Destination Report Just Confirmed What We’ve Been Measuring All Along

/in , , ,

The evidence gap behind events’ sustainability claims

The Business of Events’ Global Destination Report 2026 paints a sector that has moved past pandemic recovery and into something harder: proving its value on terms beyond delegate counts and room nights (Davies Tanner / SFA Connect, 2026). Buried in the interview findings is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone working in event measurement – destinations believe deeply in the sustainability and legacy case for business events, but almost none can evidence it.

The report is candid about this. Sustainability is described as “the most visible part” of a widening value proposition, with destinations leaning on frameworks like GDS-Index and EarthCheck. Yet one European city representative admitted sustainability “is not yet usually the first thing clients ask for,” and only becomes persuasive “when concrete measures are presented.”

Legacy impact fares worse: interviewees across Europe, Canada and the UK say measuring knowledge-economy or innovation outcomes “takes time, research, and money” that funding models simply don’t prioritise.

The report’s own recommendation – fund “a small number of repeatable impact studies” tied to major events – is effectively a call for exactly the kind of measurement infrastructure event:decision already builds, with Impact: Event reviews.

Connectivity sharpens the point. Air access is now the most consistently cited competitiveness constraint, particularly for Tier-2 destinations, and the report links it directly to sustainability: destinations are starting to treat “access, price, and sustainability not as separate issues, but as linked parts of competitiveness.” Since flights typically dominate an event’s footprint, this is the tension our clients are increasingly navigating in real time – chasing international delegates for economic value while facing growing scrutiny on the emissions that travel represents.

There’s also a resourcing story underneath this. 58% of destinations say their teams are too small, and funding cuts hit sustainability programming, market intelligence and legacy design first – the specialist capabilities hardest to build in-house and easiest to lose when budgets tighten.  We’ve just witnessed this very thing within Visit Britain. That’s a structural argument for bringing in dedicated carbon and impact measurement rather than expecting it to emerge from stretched internal teams.

One caveat worth carrying into any conversation: the report finds economic ROI still dominates as the argument that moves governments, while sustainability and legacy are viewed as “less compelling” at the policy level, even as destinations themselves increasingly believe in them. In practice, that means credible sustainability data currently does more work with organisers and clients than with policymakers – useful context for how we frame the numbers we deliver. This was framed well at The Business of Events Policy Forum in July-26 by the MP Martin Rhodes. Yes, shout about big numbers, but more value comes from the story.

Source: The Business of Events, Global Destination Report 2026, produced by Davies Tanner, researched by SFA Connect.