For too long, event leaders have been stuck in “execution mode,” pulling off the impossible without always getting the credit, influence, or strategic seat they deserve. The fact is, events can fuel serious business growth—but without clarity or a clear path forward, it’s hard to tell if you’re truly making progress or tapping into their full potential.
That’s where the Event Maturity Model comes in.
The Event Maturity Model is a strategic framework to help you build event programs that drive revenue, deepen relationships, and elevate your brand’s role in the market. It gives you a clear way to assess your current strategy, spot growth opportunities, and position events as a core driver of business success.
Boom, look at that. You’ve got yourself a compass now. 🔥
The Event Maturity Model consists of five stages, each with three progression levels (Activation, Expansion, and Mastery), so you can track where you are and how to level up.
As you move through the stages, your events evolve from tactical execution to strategic growth levers, all the way to shaping something bigger: community, conversation, and the future of your industry. At that point, events aren’t just what you do—they’re part of who your brand is.
First, this framework isn’t your typical step-by-step “how to plan an event” checklist. It’s not necessarily linear. Think of it more like a mindset shift—a way to zoom out and see your events not just as one-off tactics, but as powerful programs that can grow, evolve, and drive big-picture impact. It's about leveling up how you think about events, so you can level up how you do them.
Second, this isn’t about rushing to Stage 5 (which, full transparency, is boss level. It’s rare, and few get there—but that’s what makes it worth aiming for).
Rather, it’s about mastering each stage, building upon each one as a stronger foundation for the next. No matter where you start, there’s value and opportunity at every level.
In fact, you might find yourself at different levels in different stages; that’s not only okay, it’s expected. As you master each stage, you’re on your way to building a high-impact, revenue-generating, community-focused event ecosystem.
You can host as many events as you want. But there are certain things that need to happen pre-, during-, and post-event to effectively drive ROI and long-term gains. The Event Maturity Model covers all of those pieces.Stefanie Ordoveza, Head of Events at Guild
The Event Maturity Model is for leaders who run revenue-driving events. If you’re ready to shift from running events to running an event ecosystem that powers business, customer loyalty, and brand leadership, you’re in the right spot.
It’s designed to help you connect your event work to what your exec team cares about most: pipeline, retention, and market influence.
Wherever you sit, this model gives you the language and strategic lens to build your leadership. Use it to grow intentionally, so you can create events (and a career) that make a real impact.
Let’s go.
Let’s deep-dive into each stage of the Event Maturity Model, and what different levels of adoption look like within each. We’ve included some sample goals and things to consider for each stage to help you identify where you are and how to level up.
You can't drive event success if nobody shows up. With your event ideas in hand, Stage 1 is all about drawing people to your live or virtual events, boosting registration numbers through great UX that feels easy and personal. As you master this stage, you're not just packing the house. You're gathering juicy attendee data to inform future personalization.
Here’s what Stage 1 looks like across different levels:
At this level, you’re focused on creating a simple, frictionless registration experience. You likely haven’t incorporated any major personalization yet; you’re mainly trying to boost conversions and reduce drop-off.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Create a seamless, mobile-friendly registration form (no personalization through conditional logic yet)
Design a clean event website experience
Auto-send confirmation emails only (no segmentation yet)
At this level, you’re starting to prioritize personalization and data collection. You’re using conditional logic and personalizing registration paths, capturing richer data (e.g., roles, industries, interests) that can be used to tailor the attendee experience later on.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Introduce multi-step registration workflows (e.g., expand from asking basic info to asking role-specific questions or industry details)
Personalize their registration experience (e.g., by role, by company, by registration type)
Collect preferences for sessions or tracks
At this level, you’re aligning with sales and marketing to capture strategic registration insights that inform sales engagement. For example, you might integrate questions to uncover buying signals for the sales team, or maybe marketing wants to understand specific challenges your C-level audience is facing.
You’re using registration as a true insights tool. You’re also weaving these insights into your event content and marketing strategy.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Collaborate cross-departmentally to ask the right questions during registration
Learn your attendees' goals and priorities through value-based questioning
Personalize follow-ups based on registration data
Sample KPIs to Measure
Registration conversion rate
Abandonment rate on registration forms
Completion rate for registration fields (data richness)
Personalized registration path adoption rate
No-show rate
Stakeholders by the End of This Stage
Event Marketing
Demand Gen
Sales
Get aligned with sales and marketing to implement conditional logic and ask specific questions based on attendee information. Use this to create different registration paths for different attendee types, like sponsors, speakers, attendees, and your staff. You can also use this data to inform unique experiences on the day of the event.
We created personalized registration paths where our attendees can submit all their information and also opt into specific programs at the event. For example, we might have a founders' session for startups and investors. So if someone fills out ‘startup’ when they’re registering, we can then use Swoogo’s conditional logic to add a question later in the registration that says, ‘Hey, we noticed you said your company is a startup—you might find this session for startups interesting.’ It helps us create a much more tailored experience.Matt Baum, Senior Manager, Product & Operations at HLTH
Stage 2 is where you shift from collecting basic registration data to dynamic, behavioral attendee insights before, during, and after the event. You’re capturing actionable data throughout the event lifecycle, which equips you to deliver more personalized experiences, strategize event content, and arm sales and customer-facing teams with real-time intelligence.
Here’s how Stage 2 plays out across progression levels:
At this level, you’re gathering attendee preferences (e.g., interests, current challenges, preferences) from registration only. You use this data to tailor pre-event communications.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Use attendee interests to inform event content
Strategize session formats based on attendee preferences
Send pre-event emails tailored to interests
Capturing data doesn’t stop at registration. Now, you expand your efforts to capture live behaviors on the day of the event. For example, you’re tracking the sessions they attended, meetings they booked, and content they consumed. You feed these insights to sales after the fact, letting them know, “Hey, Dwight Schrute attended lots of beets sessions. Be sure to bring up beets with him.”
Goal Inspo and Examples
Track badge scans and session check-ins
Send post-session surveys ("Was this valuable?")
Session attendance triggers targeted nurture follow-up
Refine target personas based on behavior (e.g., correlate job titles or industries with session choices to spot behavior trends by persona)
At this level, you’re delivering dynamic, personalized experiences based on real-time insights—before, during, and after events. Every interaction informs you on how to tailor next steps. You’re curating entire event journeys based on persona, and extending that personalization into post-event engagement (e.g., serving up custom on-demand content) and future event targeting.
Capturing and delivering on that full-funnel journey also means bringing your content to those who couldn’t attend (but wished they could), such as through on-demand content. This also helps generate interest for future events, as well as capture more insights for future personalization.
You’re delivering real-time or near-real-time insights to sales and offering more tailored intelligence at this point—but this is still geared toward fueling your sales team's post-event lead follow-up, and not yet about proactively weaving sales insights into your event strategy.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Craft valuable, personalized communications for the entire attendee journey: pre-event, to day-of, to post-event
Serve up personalized content hubs based on sessions attended
Let attendee insights guide your next event’s content and structure
Collect specific reasons for declines or no-shows from registrants (e.g., time/location, experience, content relevance, format)
Combine registration data, session attendance, poll responses, and post-event content interaction into a unified view for future targeting
Personalize the next invite based on past attendance and engagement style
Equip sales with follow-up content tied to attendee behavior (e.g., session attendance)
Sample KPIs to Measure
Email engagement (tracking performance across segmented audiences)
Engagements day-of (sessions attended, interactions)
Lead scoring improvements based on event engagement
Post-event survey data on personalization effectiveness
Stakeholders by the End of This Stage
Sales
Marketing Ops
Use registration data to personalize what your attendees see after signing up. It could be a custom event agenda, or an on-demand content hub built around their personal preferences—something that makes them think, “Wow! They actually used all that info I gave them during registration to send me content that I’m genuinely interested in!”
Because Swoogo lets you design for both web and mobile, we put QR codes throughout the event space, on badges, and just leveraged that landing page as the hub for all event information. Sometimes you don’t necessarily need a mobile app, say for a half-day event, but we can push attendees to the landing page that they’ve been interacting with throughout the event to get them to engage easily.Brendan Shuff, Director of Event Technology at Event Strategy Group
In Stage 3, you’re moving beyond engagement metrics to directly proving events drive business outcomes like pipeline, opportunities, and closed-won deals. You’re partnering proactively with sales, marketing, operations, and customer success to ensure your event goals are tied to business metrics and can be successfully tracked and attributed.
Yes, you’re tracking event-specific metrics like registration count, but you’re also more strategic from the top—curating your attendee list based on prospects whose business you want to win, and customers whose business you’re hoping to retain and grow. You don’t blindly want thousands of attendees—you want the right ones.
Teams that are strong in this stage have a strong handle on their tech, tracking those goals effectively with a CRM solution and creating a cross-departmental feedback loop.
At this level, based on your event types and audiences, you’re collaborating with sales, marketing, and customer success as a true partner, working with them early on to set basic pipeline, revenue, retention, or expansion goals. This collaboration guides the quality of attendees you want to invite.
At this point, your main focus is showing events’ impact on pipeline. Your processes and feedback loops are still semi-manual.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Develop shared goals with sales, marketing, and customer success on new business and customer growth that you want to drive from your events
Track “event-sourced” leads
Follow strong debrief process with sales post-event to share actionable intel and develop opportunities identified at event
Incorporating your CRM, integrations, and operations team is fundamental to expanding in Stage 3. You’re scaling attribution with less manual effort, using a CRM to automatically track leads, pipeline influence, customer growth, and retention goals leading up to and after your event. Organizations in Stage 3 also lean into a marketing automation solution to set up email nurture campaigns for registrants, attendees, and site visitors who dropped off.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Connect event software with your CRM and marketing automation solution
Set up a campaign ID or tracking solution for your event(s) to effectively track attribution
Auto-attach event touchpoints to opportunity records
Automate email nurture campaigns
Pull campaigns from your martech tools to your event invitation lists
Create pipeline dashboards showing event influence
At the mastering level, you’ve established trusted attribution models that show event ROI across new business and customer growth (impact on pipeline, deal velocity, and customer expansion). By now, your team is also super comfortable using your CRM solution to share real-time insights with other teams. You’re able to confidently map events’ impact on revenue.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Set up attribution reports showing $X pipeline sourced vs. influenced
Sales insights dashboards show attendee behavior and deal acceleration impact
Event-driven revenue is used in quarterly business reviews (QBRs)
Sample KPIs to Measure
Influenced pipeline (new business, upsells, renewals)
Sourced pipeline (new leads created via events)
Opportunity conversion rates for event-engaged leads
Closed-won revenue attributed to events
Event-influenced customer expansion rates
Stakeholders by the End of This Stage
Sales
Customer Success
RevOps
Integrating your CRM with your events platform will not only show you all of your leads’ event interactions and drive sales conversations, but it will also allow you to see the full picture of all your marketing efforts in one place. You’ll see how attendees are engaging with you, your events, and your other marketing content in the context of their whole journey. Swoogo integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot to automate the bulk of your data syncing.
Some folks see ‘revenue’ and think solely of ticket sales, but it’s important to remember that 'revenue' can be all-encompassing. There’s the opportunity to engage with new leads, in-pipeline accounts as well as retain and expand existing deals too. This is where viewing events as a pivotal part of your GTM/sales strategy can really unlock revenue potential!Stefanie Ordoveza, Head of Events at Guild
Now that you can prove the business value of events, this stage is where you take a seat at the strategic table. Events shift from being reactive support tools to proactive revenue levers across the customer lifecycle—from pre-sales (new business) to post-sales (customer upgrades, renewals, and retention).
You’re building events directly into your integrated revenue campaigns, where they’re accelerating revenue across product launches, territory expansion, and other key initiatives. Events are a core pillar for your GTM strategy, and are recognized as such by C-suite leadership.
Early on, you’re incorporating events into your GTM motion. When you’re launching a new product or your marketing team is pushing out a new campaign, events are seen as a way to amplify the messaging.
In other words, you’ve got a seat at the revenue table, but you may still be reacting to GTM needs—helping sales, marketing, and CS—rather than shaping revenue campaigns.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Annual and quarterly planning sessions with cross-functional business leaders to discuss major marketing themes and how events will support
Strategize event timing and content to map to larger revenue initiatives, such as:
At this level, you’re now becoming a strategic contributor. You’re co-designing GTM campaigns with events as a core component, designed intentionally to drive pipeline, renewals, and expansion. Events are a must-have (not a nice-to-have) to hit quarterly revenue goals.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Measure event success against goals for annual recurring revenue (ARR), net revenue retention (NRR), and gross revenue retention (GRR)
Score success on quality meetings, pipeline velocity, and expansion revenue
Design field marketing events around target account lists (key ABM strategy)
Schedule churn-reduction workshops proactively based on product adoption gaps
Events become a key component of sales’ quarterly paths to hitting their numbers
If you’re mastering this stage, your events are indispensable to revenue efforts. Event calendars shape launch timelines, product roadmaps, and GTM strategies—not the other way around. Business outcomes, like deal acceleration and account growth, are planned through events. Insights from events also influence roadmaps or corporate strategy.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Plan product roadmap and launches around annual user conference
Lower CAC (customer acquisition cost) and widen reach by blending event formats (e.g., webinars, roundtables, regional pop‑ups)
Revenue teams use the event schedule to map out deal acceleration plays (e.g., enterprise sellers know key accounts will attend a specific leadership summit, so they build custom experiences to engage executives pre- and post-event)
After identifying stalled deals in the pipeline, revenue team invites decisionmakers from those accounts to an exclusive VIP track at a regional showcase event
A post-event dashboard shows which existing customers visited specific product booths, asked in-depth questions, or scheduled time with product managers. This data is routed directly into CS and account growth teams’ workflows, who then launch expansion plays with highly personalized outreach
Sample KPIs to Measure
Influenced ARR (annual recurring revenue)
NRR (net revenue retention) for event-engaged accounts
GRR (gross revenue retention)
CAC (customer acquisition cost) and payback
Deal velocity improvement (time from lead → closed-won)
Event-driven account expansion rates (upsells, cross-sells)
Stakeholders by the End of This Stage
GTM leaders
Executive leadership
Having a great event platform is crucial here, because collecting data isn’t usually the problem—consolidating that data into a clear story is where it’s easy to get stuck. For a quick pulse on event program health, Swoogo’s highly customizable dashboard gives you a session summary that includes KPIs like the number of registrants, registration by session, revenue, and more.
Plus, did you know Swoogo has a calendar widget where you can aggregate all of your events on one calendar to promote to your prospective attendees? Swoogo’s open API also allows you to plug your data from Swoogo into a business intelligence tool like Looker or Domo to make that data more actionable.
We've successfully been able to get executive buy-in on the value of our events strategy by showing the pipeline data attributed to events, and getting executives to show up and engage at the event. This year, leadership tasked marketing with building a proposal for what we want to launch on stage at our annual conference, Collaborative. This plan then drove the product roadmap. Product was asked to deliver based on our event timeline. Our messaging and content will also ladder up to this major market launch.Laura Kaiden, Senior Manager of Events at Classy
At the pinnacle of this model, your events become industry pillars and must-attend experiences. You’ve moved beyond just leads and pipeline—you’re creating eagerly anticipated, deeply respected events that foster lasting community, brand loyalty, and market leadership. All of this fuels organic demand and long-term growth.
Think of Atlassian’s Team event, HubSpot’s INBOUND, Adobe Summit, or Dreamforce. These events transcend product to actually shape the market, positioning their companies as true industry thought leaders.
The beginning of Stage 5 marks the shift from events as purely transactional experiences to powerful brand-building platforms. You’re aiming to build emotional connections and loyalty at your events, transforming attendees into advocates. Your guiding mindset is clear: attendees should want to come back for the community, not just the content.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Curate VIP networking lounges or affinity group gatherings (e.g., Women in Tech breakfasts)
Launch a branded event hashtag and drive user-generated content (UGC)
Conduct post-event NPS survey
At this level, your events become the launchpad for ongoing engagement. You create community programs around your events, pointing attendees to initiatives like user groups, executive councils, loyalty programs, regional events, certification programs, and other experiences that reinforce connection and influence. Essentially, you’re extending the event experience well beyond the event itself—turning fleeting moments into long-term community and advocacy.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Invite VIPs to annual executive councils or advisory boards
Create a private Slack group for alumni
Launch smaller regional events laddering up to your larger annual event
Start loyalty programs with exclusive perks for repeat attendees
At this level, your event brand transcends your product; it becomes an industry-wide platform for innovation, thought leadership, and community. People attend not just to learn about your offerings, but to be part of something transformative—they come for inspiration, bold ideas, and meaningful connections. After all, your events define trends and set the tone for your industry.
You've gone from building community to being the community. It’s not just customers anymore—the whole industry is orbiting your brand, wanting to take part in the conversation you’re hosting.
Goal Inspo and Examples
Thought leaders, partners, and media actively seek to participate in your events
Waitlists not just from customers, but the broader industry trying to attend
Your event inspires sub-communities to form on their own around your brand and event (local chapters, industry think tanks)
Sample KPIs to Measure
Net Promoter Score (NPS) for event/community programs
Community participation and growth rates
Share of voice (mentions in media, social)
Word-of-mouth registration rates (referrals, organic lift)
Advocacy rates (testimonials, case study participation from event attendees)
Community-driven deal attribution (new logos from community referrals)
Stakeholders by the End of This Stage
Executive leadership
GTM leaders
Brand and community leads
Customers and advocates
Industry leaders and influencers
Media
Consider a multi-format approach to extend the value of your events and continuously engage your community. For instance, you can layer in webinars, on-demand experiences, local micro-events as offshoots of your major conference, and more to fuel engagement and conversation year-round.
You never leave a stage behind. You continue to build on the foundation you've established. The jump to stage 5 involves making a shift away from solely product/sales focus, and more into industry and thought leadership. It’s creating lifelong relationships at the highest decision-making levels that establish us as a trusted partner. We also see our events as a way to establish and nurture community. We use our events to push to the next step that continues to add value for the customer: webinars, group forums, engaging in Atlassian Community, and Atlassian University.Josh Shepherd, Head of Event Technology at Atlassian
No matter where you’re starting, the Event Maturity Model is here to give you clarity, direction, and momentum as you evolve your event strategy. Use this framework to turn your events into true growth engines for your company. Every stage you unlock builds not just better events, but a stronger brand and a bigger voice at the leadership table.
When you’re ready to put it all into action, we’re here to help. Learn how Swoogo’s event management platform can help you personalize attendee experiences, integrate seamlessly with your tech stack, and measure your events’ impact. Let’s build something big.
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