Measuring the impact of events; beyond the quantitative
For more than a decade, the events sector has been talking about legacy and impact. Yet for most of that time, ‘impact’ has been almost entirely synonymous with economic performance; contribution to GDP, visitor spending, hotel bed nights, and the familiar metrics that are easy to quantify and package for public reporting.
Meanwhile, the outcomes that matter most to communities including social, environmental, cultural, and knowledge-based benefits have often been acknowledged but rarely measured with any rigour. This gap isn’t new. In fact, it reflects a long history of measuring events in ways that captured only a fraction of their value.
A Brief Look Back: How We Measured Impact Before 2010
Before the 1990s, event measurement was almost exclusively economic. Governments and tourism agencies relied on input–output models to assess spending and job creation. These tools were useful for tracking financial return, but they were never designed to describe deeper outcomes such as community wellbeing, sector development, or long-term social change.
From the mid-1990s onwards, academic researchers, notably Donald Getz, Leo Jago, Margaret Deery and others began exploring the broader social and cultural impacts of events and tourism. Their research touched on resident perceptions, community pride, disruption, cultural expression, and wellbeing. The Olympic movement also started experimenting with the concept of ‘legacy’ particularly around urban development and community benefits.
But despite this emerging research, little of it translated into mainstream industry practice. Most organisers and destinations continued relying on anecdotes and post-event summaries because structured, accessible frameworks simply didn’t exist.
Beyond Tourism Benefits
Measuring the social legacies of business events was groundbreaking research commissioned by Business Events Sydney in 2010.
2011: A Turning Point for Business Events Measurement
A genuine shift arrived in 2011 when Business Events Sydney commissioned Beyond Tourism Benefits, a groundbreaking research project led by Professor Carmel Foley at the University of Technology Sydney. It was one of the first major global studies to articulate, with evidence, the broader value of business events. The research identified outcomes across:
Knowledge exchange
Research collaborations
Talent attraction
Trade and investment
Community and sector development
Innovation and industry advancement
It provided the first clear lexicon for what we now recognise as event legacy and impact. More importantly, it shifted thinking from tourism outputs to societal outcomes. For many destinations, this was the first time the true long-term value of conferences and events had been captured in a structured, credible way. It provided language and legitimacy to identifying and measuring broader event outcomes.
Other business events destinations have followed with initiatives from MeetDenmark, Copenhagen’s Legacy Lab, Destination Canada, and Sarawak’s Legacy 360 to name a few.
Despite this progress, the business events sector has remained largely narrative-driven. Legacy was often described rather than measured. Without practical, affordable tools, many organisers found it difficult to track outcomes in a repeatable or transparent way.
The Pandemic Accelerated What the Sector Had Been Avoiding
COVID-19 forced a global reset. Increasingly, the value of events had to be justified in far broader terms than attendance numbers or visitor spend. Communities wanted to see local benefits. Funders and governments wanted evidence of contribution. Organisers needed to demonstrate outcomes such as:
Employment pathways
Local business growth
Supply-chain development
Research or innovation spillovers
Community engagement and wellbeing
The shift from outputs to outcomes became impossible to ignore. Events could no longer rely on feel-good stories alone; they needed structure, clarity, and proof.
Why Structure Matters Now More Than Ever
The event industry’s challenge isn’t a lack of intent. It’s resourcing and capability.
Impact measurement requires:
clear definitions of what ‘impact’ actually means
agreed outcomes before the event begins
tools to measure both quantitative and qualitative data
the ability to align event outcomes with local priorities
teams skilled in planning, data collection, and evaluation
Without a framework, impact becomes subjective and inconsistent. With one, it becomes actionable. A structured approach allows organisers and destinations to move from retrofitting stories after the event to intentionally designing for outcomes from the outset.
This is not only about satisfying funders or governments. It’s about ensuring events genuinely contribute to people, place, and planet and that we can understand, improve, and communicate that value with integrity.
What Comes Next
This historical context matters because it shows how far the sector has come; and how much further we still need to go to be measuring the qualitative aspect of events.
Over the past decade, we have been learning, researching, testing, and refining practical ways to make impact measurement accessible and meaningful for event organisers and destinations. What we hear regularly is impact measurement is challenging to implement, inconsistent, lacking common frameworks or methodologies, and it is expensive. We wanted to offer a solution which we believe will bridge that gap.
In early 2026, we will be launching our new structured resource Legacy by Design to help the sector move from stories to strategy and from aspirational legacy to evidence-based impact.
We will be sharing the first of several case studies on how our resource can be used, and why it is becoming increasingly important to demonstrate the impact of events beyond the quantitative.
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