text: typically you would want your result to be greater than the investment.  You can make an investment and have no results or negative results. You would calculate each separately.  The investment is whatever amount of money/time/labor you put into the project.  The result would be revenues or sales, number of people in attendance, increased awareness of a product, reduced costs, etc.  There can be lots of different results.  If you want to calculate ROI, then the investment and return have to be the same measure.  For example, the investment is $10,000 for an event sponsorship and you had 20 people attend the event.  Those 20 people each represent $1,000 worth of sales, so the return is $20,000 in sales.  The ROI is 20,000 divided by 10,000 or 200%.