Calculator
What does a connection actually cost you?
Cost per head is the number most event budgets are judged on, and it flatters every event ever run. These are the three numbers underneath it.
What it cost
Net cost of the event
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Per person who attended
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The number that goes in the report.
Per person who met someone new
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Per conversation that continued
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The only one of the four that measures an outcome.
Calculated entirely from the figures you entered. We do not publish benchmark attendance or conversion rates, because we have not measured them and a made-up average is worse than no average.
Why cost per head is the wrong number
Cost per head divides the bill by everyone in the room, which assumes the room worked for all of them. It never does. A proportion of any event is people who already knew each other, people who came for the speaker and left, and people who stood near the door for an hour.
Divide by the people who actually met somebody and the figure moves. Divide by the conversations that were still alive the following week and it moves again, usually by a multiple. That third number is the one a sponsor is really buying, and it is the one almost nobody calculates.
What to do with the answer
If the gap between your cost per head and your cost per continued conversation is large, the problem is rarely the venue or the catering. It is that people could not work out who was worth talking to while they were there.
That is the part The Gantry addresses: Rooms open 14 days before the event so attendees can read who is going and decide in advance, and stay open 7 days afterwards so the follow-up has somewhere to happen. For event owners it is free, so it does not appear in the calculation above at all.
How to run a networking event people come back to goes through the rest of it.
Founding members
The first rooms are being built now.
We're opening The Gantry with a small group of members and event owners across the Midlands and the South East. Leave your email and we'll be in touch about the next Room near you.
Event owners: tell us the event and the date, and we'll set the Room up with you.