What Happens to Retention 30 Days After Your Event? A New Study Has an Answer.

Most agendas are built for coverage. Sessions get packed back to back, the recording goes up, and everyone moves on to the next thing. But a new pilot study by event strategist Lisa Schulteis of ElectraLime Marketing, conducted in partnership with EventMobi, took a closer look at what actually sticks weeks after an event ends, and whether a small design change could change the outcome.

Schulteis and her team randomly split attendees into two groups watching identical event content. One group received a brief, structured reflection prompt after each session, delivered right in the event chat and taking under five minutes in total. The other group received no prompt at all. Thirty days later, the reflection group retained 77.1% of foundational session content, compared to 66.7% for the group without the prompt.

The entire intervention added just 4 minutes and 45 seconds across the full program. No agenda redesign, no new technology, just a short, deliberate pause built into the schedule. The study is a pilot, and the sample sizes were small, with one of the two sessions producing inconclusive results. But the signal from the foundational session is worth paying attention to: a few minutes of reflection may be one of the most cost effective retention levers available to event planners today.

Download the full white paper to see the complete methodology, session by session data, and Schulteis’s recommendations for how a larger follow up study could build on these early findings.