Five steps in designing for emotion
Every organization investing in events eventually arrives at the same question: How do we prove this worked?
For decades, the answer has been ROI: return on investment. More recently, the smartest teams have added ROO: return on objective—to capture whether an experience actually achieved the behavioral, cultural or brand outcomes it was designed to drive.
Both matter. Neither is enough.
There’s a third dimension our industry rarely names, let alone measures: return on feeling (ROF). It’s arguably the one that quietly determines whether the other two ever materialize.
What Return on Feeling Actually Means
The way an experience makes someone feel is what determines whether they renew, refer, re-engage or quietly disengage. It’s what turns an attendee into an advocate, a prospect into a buyer, an employee into a believer.
Yet feeling is almost never on the measurement framework. We track attendance. We track satisfaction scores. We track pipeline influenced. We rarely track the emotional resonance that made any of those numbers possible in the first place.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Audiences today are more selective with their time and attention than at any point in modern history. In a world that’s faster, more automated and more virtual, the opportunity to bring people together in person has never been more valuable.
Read More: Unleashing Imagination: 5 Essential Steps to Transform Creative Event Design
When someone leaves an experience feeling seen, energized, challenged or genuinely connected, the business outcomes tend to follow. When they leave feeling like another body in another ballroom, no amount of post-event nurture will close the gap.
Designing for Emotion
There’s a misconception that designing for emotion means sacrificing strategy. The opposite is true. Here are five steps planners can take to incorporate Return on Feeling in their next event:
- Start with strategic questions: Great experience design starts with asking questions like: What business outcome are we driving? What audience shift needs to happen? What should people walk away believing, understanding, or doing differently, and how should they feel when they get there?
- Ensure every element reinforces that objective: The best experiences feel seamless to attendees, but in reality, they’re deeply deliberate. Your event’s content, storytelling, agenda pacing, environment, technology, networking and participation can all be designed for emotion. Nothing is accidental, including the feeling.
- Align teams early: Measuring return on feeling demands closer integration than most organizations currently have. Experience teams need relationships with finance, analytics, strategy and executive leadership. These are all functions that have historically operated separately from event teams. Additionally, there’s value in bringing the experience teams into the business conversation earlier. The most successful programs happen when strategists, creatives, producers, operations and executive stakeholders align around purpose before timelines and budgets are locked.
- Be intentional rather than add more: Our industry tends to default to volume. We add more content, more activations, more technology and more stimulation. Great experience design is rarely about more. It’s about clarity, pacing and understanding how people actually absorb information, emotion and memory.
Read More: Blueprints for Belonging: Designing Events with Purpose, Emotion and Impact
Why Now?
In uncertain markets, events are often the first place organizations look to cut. The most effective companies take a different approach.
Planners have the opportunity to lead in this next chapter by recognizing that emotional resonance and business outcomes go hand in hand. They’ll measure ROI. They’ll measure ROO. And they’ll start measuring the thing that quietly drives both.
Return on feeling isn’t a soft metric. It’s the one we can’t afford to keep ignoring.
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Joelle Morgan is chief experience officer at Bishop-McCann, where she leads the evolution of the company’s experience design strategy and strengthens the connection between creative vision, strategic thinking and flawless execution.
This article appears in the July/August 2026 issue. You can subscribe to the magazine here.
