Justification Toolkit > Calculate ROI for Attendance

As an industry professional, how do you propose any allocation of resources in your organization? You need to understand two components to make decisions:

• Expense (the “investment”)
• Return on Investment (ROI)

This outline provides some easy-to-use tools to help you calculate the investment and identify your return.

Understanding Your Conference Expenses

Conference expenses are affected by a number of factors. Before you can even begin to justify conference expenses, you need to calculate what those expenses are. To do so, use the following Expenses Worksheet to develop a cost estimate for attending your selected conference.

Expenses Worksheet

Understanding the Benefits

Let’s face it: Many benefits from conference attendance are hard to quantify. For example, many experts agree that the top benefit of conference attendance is networking value. Where else can you find so many industry contacts facing the same issues as your organization? Are there solutions you’re not aware of?

Although networking is undoubtedly the most important aspect of a conference, it is also the toughest for which to quantify any value.

On the other hand, if an employee came to you and said, “I want you to fund me $2,000 and I don’t know what it’ll do for you,” then you would likely scoff at the offer...and maybe even mumble a few colorful metaphors about his/her suggestion.

When you propose attending The Summits, don’t focus on how much you want to go; focus on what you will specifically bring back to the organization as payback for the investment.

Some specific details you’ll need to identify include:

• Session content. What sessions have particular relevance to your organization’s work?
• Vendor contacts. Will the conference showcase vendors with tools you use or are evaluating for potential future use? Is this an opportunity you’ll be able to compare competing tools?
• Best practices. Will there be training sessions in areas that will immediately benefit your group?

Quantifying the Benefits

Although you might understand the benefits of The Summits that interests you, your manager may not. Therefore, to be most effective in justifying The Summits, you need to clearly articulate the connection between your organization’s knowledge requirements and the conference program. DO NOT assume that your manager will be able to automatically make those distinctions.

To support this process, use the following Benefits Worksheet to help you focus on the benefits. Use whatever makes sense for your particular organization, and omit the rest.

Benefits Worksheet

It’s all in the Selling

After you have identified the specific knowledge benefits, you’ve provided both the expenses and benefits your manager needs to decide the value of your proposition.

Salespeople work the same way. They don’t let customers infer the value of what they are selling, they make that leap for them.

Sell your conference attendance!

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