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

event:decision  |  Matt Grey

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 we do.

The trouble is that it’s also trained them to expect far less than we deliver. So it’s worth walking the analogy all the way to the point where it breaks.

Uber: 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.