How to measure the impact of your event?

About

An event organizer can count heads at the door and smiles on the way out, but neither tells you whether a room full of strangers actually became an ecosystem. 

That's the question Impact Hub Vienna brought to voices of impact (voi), ahead of Impact Days 2026, Austria's flagship gathering for impact entrepreneurship and investing. Since 2009, Impact Hub Vienna has built ecosystems that connect entrepreneurs, corporates, public institutions, non-profits, and investors around shared societal challenges, and Impact Days has grown into Austria's largest gathering of the impact economy. For the 2026 edition, the team wanted to know more than whether attendees enjoyed the day, they wanted to know whether the event was doing its real job: strengthening the connective tissue of the ecosystem it exists to serve.

voi's job was to allow attendees to communicate with the Impact Hub Vienna team, a new way to voice their experience of the event in their own words. Using voi, the AI impact researcher, the team replaced a long evaluation process with a rigorous assessment delivered in the same week as the event. 

voi ran the interview, captured participant voice using quantitative and qualitative indicators, followed by an AI-powered analysis to show not only what attendees experienced, but what changed as a result.

The Challenge

Networking events are easy to run and hard to evaluate. The number of attendees alone cannot tell whether an event actually built community, contributed to generating ideas or moved participants closer to action. Working with voi, Impact Hub Vienna made reality what they needed to measure: 

• Quantifying community, not just satisfaction: enjoyment and ecosystem trust are two different things, and needed to be measured separately.
• Capturing cross-sector reach: with every kind of player in the room, it mattered whether people crossed sector lines or just stuck to familiar faces.
• Surfacing operational friction alongside impact data: logistics and acoustics needed the same rigor as the impact indicators themselves.
• Balancing quantitative indices with participants' own words: composite scores needed to be paired with open-ended reflection, not left as a single summary number.

The Approach

voi made it easy to design and deploy a structured post-event assessment. Impact Hub Vienna captured 47 responses across the Impact Days 2026 community, a mix of social ventures, investors, Impact Hub Vienna partners and experts, and other ecosystem players:

1. Choosing proven indicators: voi guided Impact Hub Vienna to seven distinct indicators, from Net Impact Score to Cross-Sector Interaction Rate, instead of a single satisfaction score. 
2. Structured plus open-ended data collection: voi's AI enumerator ran interviews at survey scale, coding open answers into themes in real time alongside the closed-ended metrics.
3. Segmentation by ecosystem role: responses were tracked by group, from ventures to investors to partners, so findings could be read across the ecosystem's different vantage points.

Findings

The assessment delivered a clear, two-sided, picture of Impact Days 2026:

• A strong sense of community: 94% of participants said they felt a sense of community during the event, driven by shared values and a supportive, low-barrier networking atmosphere.
• Net Impact Score: 57 (Good)
  leonardo's Net Impact Score is a scale from -100 to +100 that evaluates the share of people who had a positive experience, minus the share who had a negative one. Impact Days 2026 scored 57 “Good” (100% reported a positive experience, 43% reported also a negative one.
• High-volume, cross-sector networking: Participants had on average 11 meaningful interactions with other guests
• Net Promoter Score: The event scored a Net Promoter Score of 36, with an average recommendation likelihood of 8.3 out of 10 (median 9), against a global benchmark for events of 53 (Eventbrite, 2019). 
• Motivation outpaced idea generation: 72% agreed that the event increased motivation toward social or environmental action, while 47% agreed they had developed or refined a new idea and 51% reported increased venture confidence, suggesting the event's strongest effect was relational and motivational rather than ideation-driven.
• Areas of improvement potential: participant’s feedback was able to capture areas of improvement, people mainly mentioned venue acoustics as the main barrier.

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Our Suggestion for The Way Forward

The Impact Days' approach offers two things worth stealing for your own events. Personal interviews turned out to be the strongest channel for getting volume: people gave fuller, more honest answers face-to-face than they would have on a form left on a table.

Second, they didn't shy away from negative feedback. Asking people what didn't work, not just what they liked, gave the team a real basis for planning the next edition instead of assuming everything landed.

Because the ecosystem's own data now shows where Impact Days already works: a high-trust, high-connection atmosphere that participants are eager to recommend, the next edition can focus its energy on removing friction rather than rebuilding what already resonates.

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Get to know Impact Hub Vienna — and support their amazing work.

Visit https://www.leonardo-impact.com/voices-of-impact to learn more about voices of impact. 

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