Introduction

Most event teams can tell you how many people attended.

Fewer can tell you where those people came from.

Not just "they found us on LinkedIn" — but specifically:

Which channel touched them before they registered?
Is that channel growing or shrinking over time?
Are you talking to the same people everywhere, or totally different audiences?

These questions matter more than most teams realize.

Because if your event is mostly discovery-driven — if most of your attendees are first-timers — then understanding how people discover you isn't a marketing question.

It's a survival question.

This workshop is about making that visible.

Without a data engineer.
Without complex dashboards.
Without constant manual work.

The Insight That Started This

In our last session, we showed that most event growth comes from net new attendees — not returning ones.

Once you accept that, a much more uncomfortable question follows:

Where are those new people actually coming from?

Is it Slack?
LinkedIn?
Your newsletter?
Word of mouth?

Most teams have a strong opinion about this.

Very few have looked at the data.

That gap is exactly what EventPath was built to close.

What Is EventPath?

EventPath is a lightweight tool built to map the channel path a warm lead takes before they register.

Not who bought.
Not a bot.
But who actually knew about the event — and through which channel — before they decided to register.

The goal is to make channel contribution visible in a way that doesn't require:

• A data engineer

• Advanced spreadsheet work

• Constant manual exports

It works with CSVs.

Export your contact lists — newsletter, Slack, LinkedIn, attendee history — upload them into EventPath, and within minutes you get a structured view of:

• Channel overlap

• Channel contribution per event

• How those patterns shift over time

The Workflow

Step 1 — Export your channel lists

Gather CSV exports from your key marketing channels:

• Slack — community member list

• Newsletter (HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc.) — subscriber list

• LinkedIn — follower or connection export

• Attendee history — multi-year registration data from Whova, Eventbrite, or any event platform

Multi-year attendee history is ideal, but even one year works.

Privacy note: EventPath uses email as the unique identifier to reconcile overlap across lists. If you're concerned about sharing real emails, replace them with internal customer IDs or anonymized identifiers before uploading.

Step 2 — Import into EventPath

Upload each file and map the channel:

• Slack Members

• Newsletter Subscribers

• LinkedIn Followers

• Attendee History

EventPath detects row count and column structure automatically.
Email is the only required field for reconciliation.
No cleaning required before import.

Set merge sensitivity to Medium (recommended) — this means ~85%+ similarity match on email identifiers, which handles minor formatting differences between exports.

Step 3 — Read three views

Once imported, EventPath surfaces three core views.

View 1: Channel Overlap

▎ How distinct are your audiences, really?

Are you talking to the same people across Slack, LinkedIn, and your newsletter — or completely different people?

If audiences are mostly distinct, your content and campaign strategy should reflect that immediately.

Example: Out of 3,000 Slack members, only 1,000 were also newsletter subscribers. That's a meaningful gap — and a meaningful opportunity.

View 2: Channel Contribution by Event

▎ For each event, what percentage of attendees came from each channel?

This answers: which channels are actually producing attendees — not just followers.

You can see, for a given event year:

• What % of attendees were Slack members

• What % were newsletter subscribers

• What % were LinkedIn followers

View 3: Channel Contribution Over Time

▎ Flip the lens. For each channel, how has its contribution changed year over year?

This is the most strategically valuable view.

In our client's data, the pattern was clear:

• Slack contribution: decreasing year over year

• LinkedIn contribution: small but increasing

• Newsletter contribution: decreasing, but slower than Slack — and highest conversion rate

The channel the team believed was their community engine was quietly losing ground.
The channel they treated as a broadcast tool was quietly becoming their most reliable conversion path.

What the Data Said

Two findings from the client's EventPath data that changed their strategy immediately.

Finding 1: Newsletter is the real community — not Slack.

Newsletter subscribers were consistently the highest-intent buyers.
In recent events, the majority of attendees came from the newsletter — not Slack.

The team had been treating Slack as the primary community hub and newsletter as a secondary broadcast channel.

The data said the opposite.

Strategic move: Stop trying to convert directly inside Slack. Instead, treat Slack as the engagement layer — and move the most relevant Slack members into the newsletter. Because newsletter is where conversion momentum actually happens.

Finding 2: Retention still matters, even in a discovery-driven event.

Even if most growth comes from new attendees, returning attendees are cheaper to acquire than new ones.

Using historical attendee data, the team built:

• Win-back sequences for dormant attendees

• Dormancy segmentation: 1-year non-attendee / 2-year / 3+ years

• Hyper-personalized outreach based on last attended year

Example message: "You attended in 2023. Here's what's new in 2026."

The Channel Role Framework

Once you've run EventPath, the next step is simple: assign each channel a clear role.

Once roles are clear:

• Your content becomes clearer

• Your metrics become clearer

• Your team stops fighting over vague goals

Key Takeaways

If you don't understand how people enter your event, you're optimizing blind.

1. Most event growth is discovery-driven — which makes channel attribution critical, not optional.

2. The channel your team believes is most important may not be what the data shows.

3. Channel overlap reveals whether you're reaching distinct audiences or repeatedly targeting the same people.

4. Assign each channel a role. Without a role, every channel competes for the same metric.

5. Retention is cheaper than acquisition — even in discovery-driven events.

Next Steps — Try This This Week

1. Export your Slack member list, newsletter subscriber list, and multi-year attendee history as CSVs

2. Upload into EventPath

3. Look at channel overlap first — are your audiences distinct or overlapping?

4. Look at contribution over time — which channels are growing, which are shrinking?

5. Assign one primary role to each channel based on what you find

About This Workshop

This workshop was presented live by TalkValue as part of our Lessons Series.
Practical education for event professionals navigating the AI era.

Next in the series: Coming soon.