Post-event follow-up: what's still open after guests leave
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Your event's over. Everyone's gone home, and you've decided you'll pack up and deal with the rest of it later, once you've caught up on everything you missed in your business while you were away.
By the time you get to it, though, the small details are gone. The things you'd have sworn you'd remember have faded, and those are exactly the details your next event needs.
So it's worth looking at what's actually still running after your guests leave. There are three things, and how you follow up with your guests is only one of them. The window on all three is shorter than it feels, and one of them closes the minute you drive away.
Prefer to watch? The full breakdown is in the video below. Otherwise, let’s dive in.
The venue has the hardest deadline of the three
Start with where you still are, which is the venue.
The last guest leaves and somebody's still breaking down the room. There are name badges nobody collected, somebody left a sweater on a chair, and three power strips that belong to you are still plugged in somewhere. So you do your final walkthrough, making sure you're not leaving anything you brought with you, because once you're off the property it's either left there for good or it's a phone call and a shipping fee to get it back.
At the end of the events I used to work on, at the global law firm where I ran retreats and conferences, we'd bring everyone together while we were all still on property. It didn't matter which team you were on: events, IT, marketing and business development, communications. Whoever was the most senior person there, or the person running the event, would give a special thank you to the people who'd made it happen, and then we'd have a toast.
For some events it was "We made it." For others it was "Woo, we barely survived it, but we got there." Both of those are honest reactions to an event, and that toast at the end was something we always remembered.
Photograph the setups at the start
While you're still on site, there are a couple of things only you can do. The first one actually starts before the event does: take photos of every setup at the beginning, while it's all still in place. I promise you, you will not remember how you laid out registration come March.
Write down who helped you, by name
The second is writing down the names of the venue staff who went out of their way for you, before you get in your car. Then do something with those names over the next couple of days.
If your event was at a hotel, tell your hotel contact who those people were. You can say it in person before you leave, or put it in the email when you're wrapping everything up with them. Those people often get a shout-out from their own managers, and at larger events I've seen hotels hand the host a pin to give to someone who went above and beyond, which earns them a bonus or a treat.
If it's somebody on your own side, someone from IT or marketing or anyone who came in and helped you out, send a note to their manager saying they went above and beyond. That puts something good in their file for when they're up for review, and all it costs you is a paragraph.
Most of these have a hard deadline, since they depend on you still being there. You can reopen almost everything else about your event. You can't reopen being on that property.
Your guests have left, and they're still traveling
That deadline ends when you drive away. The next one is already moving without you.
Your guests have left, but plenty of them aren't home yet. When I worked in corporate, we were often responsible for travel in and out as well, which meant keeping an eye on the travel situation. If a flight got canceled or somebody was having trouble getting to the airport, that usually came to us. If you've arranged transportation from the venue to the airport, that's still yours until everyone's actually on it.
That part usually lasts a day.
Where post-event follow-up actually gets decided
The part that's shorter than people expect is guest communications.
Once your guests have left, you want something going out to them that thanks them for their time and for coming, and tells them what's next. You've built something with these people over the last few days, and it can fade quickly. So whatever you promised them, the photos, the video, the materials, make sure it goes to them in a timely manner.
This is where how you follow up after an event actually gets decided: by whether anything reached your guests while the event was still fresh for them. The invoices, the notes, and the clean-up will all still be there next week. The freshness of the experience in your guests' minds won't be.
If you're already thinking about your next event, the free Event Pulse Check walks through the whole picture, from the decisions at the very beginning down to the day itself, and gives you a personalized read on where your planning stands. It takes about five minutes, and the results come back straight away.
The bills will wait for you, and your memory won't
The first two have other people attached to them, so they tend to get done. The third one is the money and the record, and while somebody might chase you about the money, nobody's coming after you for the record.
This is the one that runs longest, because your bills aren't finished yet. Final invoices from the venue, the caterer, and your other vendors start coming in. Some arrive the next day, and some take a while to actually get sent to you. If you've ever compared a final invoice to the number you were planning against, you know they don't always match, and the event costs that standard budget templates leave out are usually why.
Honestly, all that has to happen right now is that someone keeps an eye on the inbox and pays those invoices on time. That matters most with a vendor you want to use again, since they're far more likely to take you back as a client if you paid them on time this year.
Then there's what you remember: what went well, what didn't, what you want to add, and what you want to change. Those are the things that disappear fastest, since they only exist in the memories of the people who were actually there.
That's the whole problem with doing it later. An invoice is going to appear, you'll know it's there, and you'll take care of it. Your memory of Tuesday afternoon doesn't show up in your inbox, and a couple of days later it's already fuzzy.
So before you go on vacation, before you take the days off you've earned, write something down. It doesn't have to be organized, and it doesn't have to be neat. It just has to be somewhere other than your memory before it's gone. If you already capture decisions in writing while you're planning, the way the event planning form that replaced nine emails does, this is the same habit pointed at the end of the event instead of the middle.
What the next two weeks look like
So those are the three things. The venue, and everything you can only do while you're still standing in it. Your guests, and the short window while the event is still fresh for them. Then the money and the record.
The money keeps arriving for weeks, on somebody else's schedule. The record goes the other way. It's the first thing to disappear, and it's the only one of the three that depends entirely on you.
Put together, that's a few hours spread over the next two weeks, and it's the part of the whole process that makes the next event easier to plan. If you want the bigger picture of where this fits, it's the last stretch of an event planning checklist that runs from the first decision to the debrief.
That's the difference between an event you can build on and an event you just had.
If your next event is already on the calendar, take five minutes with the free Event Pulse Check and see where your planning stands. If your last one just ended, open a note on your phone tonight and write down three things you'd change. It doesn't need to be more than that to count.
