Events as trust-witnessing infrastructure — HBA dinners / awards nights are public ratification venues; measure share-of-voice, not leads-attributed

Claim: HBA dinners, BILD Awards nights, OHBA Awards of Distinction, the Ontario Building and Renovation Forum, Construct Canada, supplier counter days, and certification training cohorts function as trust-witnessing infrastructure.

They are not where deals are closed; they are where reputations are publicly affirmed in front of the in-group. The mechanism is Goffmanian rather than transactional — being seen with the right people, being acknowledged from the stage, accepting an award — these are public ratifications that downstream referrers can point to.

Confidence: Industry-consensus.

For Candid: Event presence is not a lead-generation activity; it is a reputation-witnessing activity. Measuring its ROI by leads-attributed-to-event will underestimate its value because the value accrues in the form of incoming referrals from peers who saw Candid at the event and remembered the brand as an in-group member when a referral opportunity arose months later.

The correct measurement is share-of-voice within a defined in-group population — e.g., "Of the 40 GCs we identified as our peer-coached target persona in the WRHBA region, how many know Candid by name, and what associations do they make?" Slower, more diffuse measurement, but it matches the actual reputation accrual mechanism.

Operationalized as: [[rule-treat-events-as-reputation-witnessing-not-lead-generation]].