Data & Research Methodology
We publish what we can see across the event industry, built from aggregated activity on Check Cherry: bookings, proposals, contracts, payments, and leads. Here is exactly what that means, what we never publish, and the standards every number has to meet.
Aggregate Only
Never a single business
No Names
Yours or your clients'
No Client Data
Never part of our research
Reproducible
Every figure has a query
What We Publish
Most decisions in this industry get made on instinct, because there has never been anywhere to look up what normal is. We can see it across thousands of businesses, so we publish it.
What Normal Looks Like
Typical event lengths, lead times, booking volumes, and prices, by service, season, and market. Always as a range, never as a single number.
What Is Changing
How demand moves through the year, which services are growing, and what is shifting in the way clients find and book event pros.
How the Work Gets Done
Deposits, travel, staffing, follow-up timing, and the operating conventions nobody writes down but everybody has to figure out.
What Clients Actually Choose
Which backdrops, templates, packages, and add-ons get picked most often, and which ones sit untouched.
What We Never Publish
These are hard rules, not guidelines. If a finding cannot be reported without breaking one of them, we do not report it. They apply anywhere we put a number in front of you, in our published research and inside Check Cherry.
We never publish one company's pricing, revenue, booking volume, or performance. Not named, not described, not implied.
Customer names, contact details, addresses, event details, and photos are never part of our research. Where we use AI tools to help analyze a question or write up a finding, they work from aggregated figures, never from your records.
We do not show cuts sliced thin enough to fingerprint one business, such as a single format in a single small market. Every figure has to have enough independent businesses behind it. Where a local cut is too thin, we widen the area or show no number at all.
We do not sell, license, or broker your records or your clients' information. Not to data brokers, not to advertisers, not to anyone, and that will not change. The market research on this site is our own aggregate work, published free, and nothing in it traces back to a single business or customer.
How We Build the Numbers
Five standards every published figure has to meet.
Ranges, not just averages
A single number describes the middle of a market. It is not a recommendation and it is not a target. We publish the spread alongside it so you can find where you actually sit, because the distance between the middle and the top is usually the most useful part of a finding.
Stated population
Every report says which bookings it covers, over what period, and what was excluded. If a segment is thin or a field is only recorded sometimes, we say so in the report rather than burying it.
One documented query set
Every figure traces to a saved query we can re-run. If we cannot reproduce a number, we do not publish it, and if we later cannot reproduce one we already published, we recompute it in public.
Corrections in the open
When we get something wrong we fix it in the article and note what changed and why. We do not quietly edit numbers.
Written to be useful
Our research is written for whoever has to make the call, whether that is someone running an event business or someone hiring one. Where the data can show what separates a strong result from an average one, we lead with that, because it is the part that changes a decision. Check Cherry earns more when our customers earn more, so publishing what actually works is the whole point.
Why We Have This Data
Every booking taken on Check Cherry adds to a view of the market that no single operator can have, and no survey can match.
We think the right thing to do with that view is publish it, aggregated and anonymized, so that a first-year operator in a small market has the same benchmarks as an established company in a major one. Some of what we publish is written for the people hiring an event pro rather than running the business, and it is held to the same standards. Our use of aggregated, de-identified data is described in our Privacy Policy.
If you have a question about how a specific number was calculated, or you think we got one wrong, tell us. Our research gets better when readers push back on it, and more than one figure on this site has been corrected because someone did.
We add to these standards as we learn. When a rule here changes, the change is dated and stated on this page, the same way we handle corrections to the research itself.
Last updated August 10, 2026.
Read the research
Benchmarks, trends, and operating data from across the event industry, published free.