What to measure, beyond attendance

The headline number says almost nothing.

Attendance and revenue are reported because they are available. The figures that inform the next event are different: how long entry took at peak, where congestion occurred, how many medical presentations and of what kind, complaint volumes and their subjects, and how long egress actually took.

Most of these can be captured with modest effort during the event by somebody assigned to it, and none of them can be reconstructed afterwards. Assigning that role is a planning decision.

Complaints in particular are worth reading in aggregate rather than responding to individually. They cluster around real problems, and the cluster is frequently something the organisers had not noticed at all.

It is also worth capturing what went well specifically, since successful arrangements are repeated less reliably than failures are avoided, and an organisation that only records problems gradually loses its own good practice.

It is worth measuring one thing during the event that nobody usually does, which is how long it took to resolve issues rather than how many there were. Ten small problems resolved in minutes is a well-run event; three resolved in an hour each is not, and the count alone reverses the picture.