Event professionals are being encouraged to take part in a vital research project that will provide the industry with an up-to-date overview of the event landscape and potentially help shape future policy.

The Outdoor Events Survey, supported by funding from the Purple Guide Grants Scheme, will enable industry trade bodies to represent the sector more confidently with robust evidence, confirming the positive economic impact that the outdoor events industry and its supply chain have.

Claire Drakeley, senior lecturer at the University of Northampton and The Power of Events’ project strategic lead for research, insights, and policy, launched the Outdoor Events Impact Survey at The Showman’s Show.

She explained: “The survey will provide valuable information to support the outdoor event industry’s leading trade bodies’ engage with the Government, armed with accurate up-to-date statistics. It will also provide invaluable data for event organisers.

“This groundbreaking survey has been a year in the making. We encourage everyone involved in the outdoor sector to download and register on the Events Industry Insights App (free) now and provide their information to build a comprehensive overview of the socio-economic impacts of this vast sector.”

Event professionals have until December 20 to take part.

Drakeley continued: “We are relying on industry-wide participation, so we have designed an easy-to-access survey on the Power of Events App to make this as time-effective as possible, recognising that everyone is under time pressure.

“We want event organisers to submit data for their event. We don’t mind if there’s duplication. We will de dupe it at the analysis stage, and we’re not asking for organisational data, just event data. So the turnover of the event project, the number of people employed in the event itself and so on… your supply chain budget. We’re not asking for a massive breakdown, and it shouldn’t take longer than about ten minutes to complete.”

Later this month, event suppliers will be asked to submit data, too so that Drakeley can build a huge picture of the scale and scope of the sector. Again, further evidence to present to Government.

But what if an event organiser has ten events in their portfolio? Should they cherry pick the events to submit data on?

“The more the merrier,” Drakeley added. “The idea is that we have it in a framework that we can replicate year on year, we can progressively build on that data, and then we can look at trends and all those kinds of exciting analytical things.

“This first survey will give us a good baseline. We will use the survey data and map secondary research to back up how many festivals there are, how many agricultural shows, and so on. We want to make sure we’re generating as full a picture as possible and look at the industry’s social impact just as much as our economic impact.”

Drakeley is also urging event organisers to send her economic impact reports and event evaluation studies to further bolster the data.

“There’s about 18 questions in the survey, and that includes turnover, that includes name of event, location and so on. We don’t want to dive too deeply because that would be intrusive. But we also need to get enough consistent data across the sector to make it really meaningful and valuable.”

The report’s findings will be shared across the industry and they will be free to access.

“We want everyone to be able to use the information so they can make their case for where they sit in the outdoor events industry, how they can use it with local government, with suppliers, with sponsors, with their host communities and so on. They need to demonstrate that they’re part of this bigger thing and importantly, we’re going to use that for national Government conversations as well and we’ll build on the info, year on year.”

To take part, click here.