How to Follow Up After Your Wellness Event: 5 Steps to Meditate On

Your wellness event has wrapped up, and your workload has just dropped about 45 kilos. But you’re not done yet!

The good news: Much of the follow-up work is to look over what’s already been done. You’ll also need to solidify your relationships in the wellness world.

Follow up after your wellness event and move forward with a new arsenal of info. To help you make the most of your experience, we’ll be covering these five simple steps:

• Thank-yous
• Getting feedback
• Scanning data
• Tweaking the budget
• Debriefing

1. Thanksgiving

This is one of the easiest steps. But as you follow up after your wellness event, it’s also one of the most important. There will be plenty of people who deserve a show of gratitude.

Mass email is a way to extend those thank-yous directly to everyone involved. For something more public, use social media accounts or create a page on your website. These can double as messages of gratitude and promotional recaps.

Here are some of the groups you’ll want to thank:

Attendees

Pretty self-explanatory! For guests, a mass email and web page or social media thank-yous can really seal the deal.

Event team

Your team represents a continuing relationship. A good deal of research and care goes into a solid wellness event, and your crew members were the vital organs of your event’s healthy anatomy. Gift bags and goodies are a really cool way of showing your gratitude.

You can give them out at the debriefing (more on that below).

Venue

Build long-term contacts by extending a thank-you to your venue. A good relationship is also important here, since you may want to use this location in the future. Be sure to leave the venue in spotless condition. In terms of gratitude, you can’t beat that.

The wellness trend is growing, so you may well have competition soon. Get friendly with your venue while the getting is good!

Partner organisations

Your partners are important, too. Organisations like Red Cross, for example, are key relationships to build as you curate a good reputation in the health industry.

Thank-yous are one way of showing that you’re sincerely all about wellness (and not just using partnerships for personal gain). To that end, you’ll also want to share some of your important post-event data with partners, which we discuss further down.

Tip: Write stellar thank-you messages with this guide to grateful emails.

2. Feedback loop

The more vocal your guests, the more you learn. Hopefully, your wellness event was a hit. That said, even the best event organisers can learn a thing or two from feedback.

Wellness-centred questions

For wellness events, you want to focus on the guests’ view of wellness and how it relates to them. Was your event content able to reach them in a meaningful way?

Try some of these questions:

• Do you feel you came away with important new info about wellness?
• What was the most important wellness tip you picked up during the event?
• How did you feel about wellness before and after the event? Has your attitude changed?
  • If so, how has it changed?
• Do you plan on implementing health or wellness changes in your life after this event?

Monkeying around with the data

As you prepare your post-event questionnaire, there are tools to simplify or even enhance the process. MailChimp is helpful email-based software that can show who receives and reads your survey. It can tell you how many guests have:

• Opened the survey
• Followed the link
• Unsubscribed from your updates

Tip: Build your perfect follow-up survey the easy way using online tools like the SurveyMonkey.

3. Data digging

There is a load of good info to sort through after your wellness event wraps up. Be sure to review some of the following:

• Tickets sold
• Revenue
• Positive vs. negative feedback
• No-shows vs. fulfilled tickets
• Health-screening info
• Gym or fitness memberships purchased

Tip: Here’s a good look at what post-event data you should focus on.

4. Bending the budget

Unless you are a business prodigy, chances are that your budget could be tweaked. Finish up your finances with some of the following:

Profits

How much did you actually bring in? Between ticket sales, food, merchandise, and fitness memberships, there is plenty to weigh.

Don’t forget to account for wellness gurus, sports equipment loaners, venue management, and of course, your event team!

For the future

What could be improved? Is there a way to cut venue costs? For wellness events, the outdoors may be a cheaper option.

How about marketing: Could you find a way to spend less on the promotional aspect?

Or if you hired cleaners, what was the ratio of mess to cleaning fees? Now that you know how much mess is left behind, you can fine-tune the cleaning budget for next year.

Tip: Building a new budget doesn’t have to be daunting when you have the right tools.

5. A brief history of your event

Ring the bell, tap a glass with a spoon—however you do it, get your team together one last time for a debrief.

This is the perfect time to read out feedback and sum up event data:

• Did you achieve your goal(s)?
• Were guests engaged and active?
• Were there any parts of the event that failed to grip your event-goers?

Your team’s perspective is important here. For fitness elements, did guests seem energised? For more meditative exercises, were they able to walk away with a feeling of improved calm?

Share the impact

Want to properly follow up after a wellness event? Let your team know where they made a difference.

Your event crew is literally doing this for the guests’ health! Make sure to share any data about awareness raised or other benefits to guest wellness. Sharing stories of satisfied event goers can be a huge motivator for next year.

Tip: Debriefing is an important step, so build a plan for your meeting and stick to it.

Back to square one

Follow up after your wellness event with this final step: Do it all over again!

Only this time, you have experience under your belt. Let us know about your own results and follow-up tactics in the comments section below.