Objective

The first line of an event concept. An objective names what changes because the event happened, in terms specific enough that someone who was not you could look at the room afterwards and say whether you hit it. The distinction that matters is between attendance and behavior. “A full room” is a count, and counts are outcomes of marketing. “Most of the room leaves having had a real conversation with someone they had never met” is an objective, because it describes something people do, and behavior is the only thing you can actually design a room around. One objective per event, not five. Everything downstream, the format, the venue, the program, the money, is checked against it, and when the feasibility test fails, the objective is the one line that does not bend.

Source: Richard Millington, CMX Summit (talk), who separates the goal (how you benefit) from the objective (what you need people to do to produce that benefit) and warns specifically against the non-objective “get as much engagement as possible.” The course translates his community vocabulary to events: members become the room, engagement becomes the behavior you designed the room to produce.

First used in: 1.1 · Strategy before logistics.