For those of you who may not know, ROI stands for return on investment. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot in the corporate/investment world. The simple definition is “what am I going to get back if I make this investment”.
Basically, when an individual or company is looking to make an investment in a new business, product, initiative, etc., return on investment is a key question they have to answer. The reasoning is they want to try and make sure this is the most productive use of their time, resources and dollars. Otherwise they will look at investing elsewhere.
Now you may be asking, what does ROI have to do with me and my planning of Christian meetings and retreats? I believe it has a lot to do with it, but not in the traditional business sense. Whether they realize it or not, most of your potential attendees will run an ROI calculation in their head before deciding whether or not to sign up to attend.
I’m pretty sure they’re not thinking in quite those technical of terms, but rest assured they are trying to figure out if going to your retreat is a good use of their limited time, resources and/or money.
“Will I be encouraged? Will this event stretch/grow me spiritually? Will I make some new Christian friends? Will I have fun?”
These are just a few of the questions going through their minds before they decide to attend or not. Put yourself in their shoes and think about how the retreat you’re planning is going to address these types of questions. If you can’t answer yes to most, if not all of these personal return on investment questions, chances are pretty good folks will look to make that personal investment somewhere else.
What can you do to improve the return on your attendees investment of their time, resources and dollars? The success of your next event could depend on your answer.
