If you manage multiple events, you’re well aware of how demanding and time challenging the process can get. Fortunately, with the right tools and strategies even the busiest event managers can handle competing priorities, save time, and get more done. One of the best strategies is using email cloning. Here’s a quick guide to why and how you should use email cloning.

Email cloning is what it sounds like: with one click, you create an exact copy of an email, whether it’s a newsletter, flyer, or something else. The copy goes into a folder of your choice and you can quickly reuse the same content, edit it, and send it out to another segment in your email database.

So if you don’t already use email cloning in your event promotions, you’ll probably want to as it saves you considerable time and effort. You can quickly personalize multiple emails sent to different people, groups, or lists, without having to start from scratch.

In managing multiple events, you and your team likely need to touch base with leads and attendees multiple times over the life cycle of your events. Email is a critical channel as it allows you to provide detailed information to large groups of people.

These three key emails are essential for each event you manage. However, you might need to send additional emails throughout the process, especially if you’re selling tickets well ahead of time.

You can also use this email to highlight event hashtags to encourage attendees to promote the event on their social media. Send this email around two days ahead if no travel is required, or 10 – 14 days in advance if attendees are travelling.

With email cloning, you can quickly target different segments, different event attendee groups, or include event-specific information for different groups of people to make your emails resonate more with the readers. If you have no-shows, you can also use email cloning to quickly touch base and get feedback on why they didn’t attend.

Email cloning could also gear up your marketing and promotion, whether you’re selling tickets well ahead of the date or need to boost your ticket sales close to the date. You can send out invitation emails to leads designed to appeal to things like fear of missing out, perceived value (through discounts), or pain points (like improving skills).

For each segment, create a specific call-to-action to make email templates. Use email cloning to send out customized, by-segment messages so they’re more effective at compelling your readers to take action and buy a ticket. Note the layout and other visual elements can enhance the appeal of your emails.

As you define your segments, consider re-targeting opportunities – what you already know about the recipient. For example, they might have expressed interest in certain event types, or given feedback about event costs in the past. They might have been regular attendees at certain events and suddenly stopped. You can use this type of information to further focus your targeting efforts by creating exclusive offers (like discounts) for each group. Using email cloning to create templates for each group and streamline the process.

Update emails can vary in their content. You can sort them by theme and decide on the best time to send them out. For example, you might send out save-the-date emails to people who’ve expressed interest in certain event types.

You can send out email blasts on early bird specials and high-profile speakers at the event. Information emails covering accommodation, transport, and local attractions can be useful if attendees need to travel.

Sneak-peak emails about event content can remind attendees close to the date about the event and ensure they remain interested. Again, email cloning can support these, and the more emails you’re sending out, the more time and effort email cloning could save you.

Email is one of the most important marketing and communication channels for event managers. By leveraging email cloning, you have a powerful tool for personalizing your messages, checking in regularly with multiple segments across multiple events, and boosting awareness and ticket sales.

Attendease is an all-in-one corporate event management software and automation platform for corporate event teams, and it features a powerful email cloning tool to support your attendee communication strategy. Find out more about Attendease here.

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Metadata is used widely by businesses today, but how can professionals in charge of multiple events leverage this tool? We start by understanding what metadata is, and then list some of the ways you can use metadata to optimise your event management processes.

Metadata is data that describes other data. Because it summarises basic information about data, metadata can be helpful for finding data, using data, preserving and storing data, and re-using data. Basic examples of metadata include author, date created, date modified, and file size.

With this type of metadata, you can locate and use specific data sets quickly. In your event management platform, an example of metadata could be the member attendance field. You can create metadata manually or through automated processes, though manual ways tend to be more accurate.

Metadata can be used in a wide range of ways when you’re managing multiple events. It can help you discover, categorise, and re-use data.

For people and companies managing multiple events, tracking individual events typically isn’t a challenge. Instead, the challenging aspect might be tracking the totality of your events, which might be dozens or hundreds of events at any time. An event management platform with the right metadata tools can allow you to track multiple events more easily.

For example, you could have fields like event date, event category and available places for each event logged in your platform. You can then conduct searches by data, category, and available places and see at a glance how many events of this type you’ll need to manage and market more effectively (to fill the event) in a certain period.

You can use this type of metadata to do other things like generating reports and tracking which events have been the most successful by doing a search based on survey metadata.

So you don’t want the detailed data of each event; you only want a summary of data sets. A metadata-based search lets you bring up a full list of events satisfying specific metadata criteria.

For example, you can look for events that are filled, events that need to be filled, ticket price, location, and any other metadata criteria.

Metadata can help you better understand relationships among events. For instance, you can bring up a list of related events and their topic summaries. These summaries can help you decide what you need to do to promote multiple events.

Additionally, this can help you share vital data sets across team members, like newly added events each day. Furthermore, metadata insights can support integration with leading tools by allowing the different platforms to understand what data they need to share.

Metadata can be a critical tool for supercharging your marketing campaigns for multiple events. First, metadata allows technology to “understand” your data. For example, search engines, CMSs, and social media rely on metadata to sort, retrieve, and deliver data. So you can ensure your websites and social media platforms are visible and draw on the traffic data (which is not metadata but made accessible by metadata) to track interest in your events.

Metadata insights also allow for smarter decisions about aggregating content and re-using content to optimise your marketing efforts across multiple events. You can use metadata to make marketing decisions about personalisation and localisation, for example. With metadata, you (and your marketing software) can easily sort through content to offer specific upcoming event recommendations (based on past attendance and things like interest areas) for your past attendees.

Finally, metadata is also a great way to boost content intelligence by helping you track how would-be attendees are interacting with your content. You can then use this information to provide better content if necessary, for example.

Metadata can also help you develop a better strategy for managing data for your events and in turn manage different events. Since you’re dealing with high volumes of events, ensuring you have detailed, accurate, and comprehensive data can be a challenge.

Generating reports from metadata-based searches, for example, can allow you to identify where there might be poor quality data, inaccurate data, or missing data because, for example, you might be able to see at a glance where events have missing metadata fields.

With the right metadata insights, you can more effectively sort through archived event data for multiple events. By searching and sorting with metadata-based searches, you could get granular details about specific types of events during a given period.

For example, you can work out how well your conferences versus webinars did last year (by doing a metadata search based on attendance levels plus event type) and explore the possible reasons.

Metadata can help you better track your events, access summaries to support multiple-event-management processes, and drive stronger marketing outcomes. It could also help with data quality and obtaining insights from archived data. Using a powerful event management platform could make leveraging metadata for valuable insights a simple process. See below some metadata you can track with Attendease.

Attendease is an all-in-one event management software and automation platform for corporate event teams. Our robust data analytics tools make it easier for you to draw on metadata for granular insights. Find out more about our event measurement capabilities today.

Managing one corporate event can be demanding enough, so when it comes to managing multiple events, the time, resources, and details involved can make it a challenging endeavour.

Errors can lead to wasted money, time, and resources. Luckily, having a great event management tool on hand along with understanding the potential pitfalls can help you avoid these 13 costly mistakes.

There can be a temptation to go over budget without accountability. Ensure every member of your event planning team negotiates with vendors and makes an effort to get better pricing. Everyone should be aware of the budget and be accountable for the costs they incur.

Too many decision-making layers can compromise the quality of your events. Having small details to go through multiple tiers of decision-makers can be an inefficient way to organize multiple events. Choose one or two leaders who have the final say and remove unnecessary decision-making layers.

All your events should have defined goals, so start every new event planning process by setting out the goals and objectives. Goals guide your corporate event planning team and allow them to stay focussed on what’s to be achieved. The goals can then be translated into measurable objectives like number of registrations or attendees for events.

Plan your overall communication strategy so it’s consistent for all your events. The most successful corporate events – whether they’re internal or external – communicate a consistent value, personality, or message from start to finish. They also address practical needs, like letting attendees know all the essential details (like venue and time) before the event.

Don’t assume your event agendas will always appeal to attendees. Plan all your event agendas with your attendees’ perspectives in mind. Look for ways to keep attendees engaged and interested with fresh, relevant content and speakers, presenters, professionals or trainers.

Pay attention to the on-site experience attendees have for each event. Things like long queues, limited food and beverage options, understaffing, and poor accessibility can make your events frustrating experiences. Plan the on-site experience to optimise attendees’ experience.

Review your technology tools to see if you could benefit from updating them. For example, if your team is struggling with tasks for multiple events on an outdated event planning platform, you might be wasting a lot of time by not upgrading. Switching to a corporate event planning platform could reduce manual and repetitive tasks, streamline your processes, and save you and your team a lot of time (and money!).

If you plan and execute multiple events, you’re likely always racing against the clock. However, allowing your team, the speakers, the exhibitors, and the caterers plenty of time to set up can make the difference between failure and success. It could also help you avoid unnecessary delays like presentation or conference equipment not working when the event starts.

You might be working with a range of different vendors – from caterers to training associations – when you’re managing multiple events. Always get verbal or email confirmation from each vendor a day or two before set-up time. By confirming, you’ll make sure they turn up at the right place and right time.

If some of your events are off-site, you should create and use packing lists to ensure the required supplies are available on the day. These lists are great for sharing with your corporate event planning team so everyone can check each event is adequately stocked.

Contingency plans help you and your team recover quickly when something unexpected happens. Bad weather, emergency closure of venues, or presenters calling in sick can affect your events. Whether it’s a way to contact attendees quickly to let them know not to attend or having a back-up venue, make sure you set out a contingency plan for all your events.

Noisy events in the same venue can seriously compromise the quality of your attendees’ experience. Similarly, competing events can increase demand for facilities like bathrooms, which can also affect attendee experience. Check for competing events, and make sure you don’t schedule noisy events next to each other on the same time.

Think of your events as part of a bigger strategy, whether it’s marketing, training, or something else. Rather than considering each event finished on the last day, take the opportunity to follow-up with thank you messages, survey requests, or social media posts. Get feedback so you can measure ROI and find out where you can improve next time.

As a manager of multiple corporate events, you’re responsible for ensuring each event runs smoothly and without unexpected disruptions that can cost you time and money. By having a strategy to address these common pitfalls and using the right event management platform, you can minimize the risk of these unwanted disruptions.

Attendease is a powerful event management software and automation platform designed specifically for corporate event teams. By helping you address the entire event lifecycle, using Attendease can reduce event costs and remove custom development expenses. Find out how Attendease can help manage your multiple events today.

Watching an event unfold successfully is a bit like taking in the performance of a world-class ballet or an elite-level gymnast. They make it look so easy that all you see is the polished final product – not the hours upon hours of practice that went into pulling off the illusion of effortlessness.

Managers in charge of national and regional events know that it takes blood, sweat and tears to get an event to go off without a hitch. And while there’s no way to fully eliminate the work required to produce a successful event, you can make things easier on yourself by choosing technology tools that allow you to automate repetitive or manual event management tasks.

An added bonus? You won’t just minimize frustration. You’ll also reduce costs – and improve overall event ROI – by simplifying your efforts and driving greater overall event efficiency. Here are 18 Attendease features that’ll make it possible to do just that:

Event success isn’t built off of final attendance numbers or total revenue generated alone. It’s generated at every step of the process along the way – including the actions you take days, weeks and months before your event opens its doors.

Take your event’s website. According to research by Event Manager Blog, event planners listed event websites and event registration sites as the third and fourth most effective tools, respectively, for event marketing (behind social media and email marketing). Anyone who’s ever struggled through a frustrating online event registration process intuitively understands how important these tools really are.

That said, building a great event website doesn’t have to mean learning code or handing over five figures to a web developer. Using Attendease’s Website Builder tool gives event managers access to these four features:  

What you put on your website is just as critical as how you publish it, and that means bringing a level of thoughtfulness and sophistication to the way you organize your sessions. As Enterprise UX conference organizer Louis Rosenfield explains, “A conference program isn’t just a bunch of talks. It must also connect them, and sequence them so they build upon each other and create the momentum that drives the event forward.”

Attendease simplifies this process with the following features:

Finally, there’s attendance. According to Geoff Beers, writing for The Balance’s Small Business blog, “Attendance is the single most important factor to the success of your event. Good attendance numbers bring revenue and sponsorship opportunities. And the more people you have registered will create more demand for advertising and participation openings.”

Attendance isn’t something you can afford to leave up to chance by assuming an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Ensuring people show up for your event begins by providing them with easy registration options – such as those enabled by Attendease’s registration form features:

Event marketing factors heavily into attendance as well -– and it’s something that can be simplified with the following three Attendease features:

“What session am I supposed to be in right now?”

“Which room is this panel being held in?”

Sound familiar? Anyone who managed events in the pre-digital era remembers the seemingly-never-ending series of questions posed by attendees – despite the number of print-outs or the amount of carefully-worded instructions issued by event managers.

Modern event technology has changed all of this. Although no app can completely cure attendee confusion, the features offered by Attendease – including the three described below – can take a significant chunk out of the effort required for event execution.

Having these types of tools at your disposal doesn’t just minimize the headaches associated with answering the same questions over and over again. It can actually save you money if fewer people are needed to staff the event in order to field attendee queries.

The potential impact of event management technology doesn’t stop once your doors are closed. The analytics data these tools provide plays an important role in your post-event post-mortem analysis process.

Christy Lamagna, founder and Master Strategist at Strategic Meetings & Events, explains, “A post-mortem is a formal meeting that walks through and assesses all major aspects of the program. It evaluates what worked, what didn’t and what should be improved or remembered or done differently the next time. My team conducts an internal post-mortem to measure our processes and performance and to critique every event.”

To execute something similar at your organization, you’ll need the numbers provided by the following Attendease features:

Thanks to event management technology tools like Attendease, there’s no reason to suffer through the manual tasks associated with running a national or regional event ever again. That said, it’s important to ask yourself a number of different questions when evaluating possible event management solutions:

For Attendease’s answers to these questions – or to learn more about other features offered by our comprehensive event management and automation platform – download our free Platform Overview guide or reach out to our team to book a free demo. We can’t wait to show you how easy it can be to manage national and regional events with Attendease.

Back in 2015, I introduced five trends I expected would have a major impact on making events stand out. But since four years is practically a generation in the world of technology, I wanted to revisit the initial predictions I made, as well as introduce the new trends I’m looking forward to as event management technology has continued to evolve. Did mobile event apps, iBeacons, event analytics, interactivity, or gamification have the impact I’d predicted they would? What new trends have eclipsed them in the event space? Let’s dive in together.

Back when I first wrote this article, I predicted that “it’s a good bet event apps will be the tool with the largest impact on the conference industry in 2015.” Not only do I believe this trend fully materialized, I believe it continues to grow in importance today, in 2019.

On the floor of a major conference or event, apps make it possible to quickly preview schedules, uncover networking opportunities, identify priority exhibitors to visit, and find needed amenities around the venue. It should come as no surprise that the 2018 Event App Bible produced by Event Manager Blog reported that 91% of 1,000 survey respondents believe that event apps are still relevant, or that a study from Global Experience Specialists found that “91% of event planners who have incorporated an event app have experienced positive event ROI.”

Mobile event apps have their challenges. As the Event App Bible notes, GDPR compliance and Apple App Store updates relating to templated apps released in 2017 are both concerns for mobile app producers. But given that the same report predicts 26% potential growth for event apps over the next year, it seems safe to say that the impact of these considerations will be manageable.

The potential impact of beacons on event personalization remains indisputable. But have they taken off the way I predicted they would? The answer appears to be both yes and no.

Since I first published this article, a number of notable events have gone on to use beacon technology, including Mobile World Congress, the Detroit Auto Show, the Bonnaroo music festival and more. Additional types of beacons have been developed that are carried by attendees, such as in the form of lanyard beacons on event badges. This adoption shouldn’t be surprising, given that “proximity-aware event apps are found to be 235% more engaging than standard mobile apps at events,” according to Beaconstac’s Devika Girish.

However, there are worrying signs as well. Though Apple launched the first beacon technology – iBeacon – in 2013, it was quickly followed by Google’s hardware-agnostic Eddystone platform (part of its Physical Web initiative) and the Nearby app for Android and iOS in 2015. However, in October 2017, Google removed Physical Web support from its Android and iOS Chrome applications, and discontinued Nearby notifications entirely in December 2018, citing an increase in “locally irrelevant notifications.”

Of course, beacon usage at events is quite different than retail usage. But reading through event blogs, I’m still seeing a number of articles continuing to introduce the benefits of beacon usage – such as Event’s April 2018 article, “Is Proximity Beacon Technology the Missing Piece to Your Event?” This suggests to me that beacons aren’t yet fully understood and haven’t reached potential peak adoption in the event space in particular (perhaps due to privacy concerns on the part of users).

I’ll keep watching this one as we move into 2019, though I’m not as optimistic as I was in 2015.

No one would argue that analytics have diminished in importance since 2015, which is why I’m comfortable predicting this trend to continue through 2019 and beyond.

One interesting change from this article’s initial publication, however, is the way different apps have diverged in their approaches to analytics. The proliferation in the number of event apps out there means that each has a slightly different take on the data that’s gathered and how it’s interpreted.

If you’re shopping for an event app solution these days, it isn’t important to just ask whether or not it has analytics available. Now, you have to drill down to the core features that are most relevant to your company. Do you need real-time analytics? Do you need the ability to heat map your venue? Are you more concerned about measuring event ROI or sponsor engagement? Ask these and other questions of yourself before choosing a solution.

It’s also worth noting that analytics generation depends on app adoption. If you want to make event app analytics a higher priority in 2019, it’s just as important that you focus on ensuring as many attendees as possible are using your solution.

As with analytics adoption, the use of interactivity in conferences and events continues to expand as event app development grows. Google’s Demo Day program, for example, now uses its event app to facilitate voting for its Audience Choice awards. Audience keypad voting, polling and quizzing features are now commonplace at events.

One other area where I’ve noticed increased interactivity recently is through the use of real-time speaker feedback gathering. Rather than handing attendees paper forms after each session (and trusting that they’ll find their way to you, not the garbage can), event apps make it possible for session participants to quickly share feedback while it’s fresh in their minds.

Like beacons, gamification appears to have enjoyed more success outside of the events space than within it to this point. For instance, according to a MarketsandMarkets report, “the global gamification industry will be valued at $11.1 billion by 2020, up from $1.65 billion in 2015.” Yet, despite this potential growth, the team at MCI Experience notes that, “although gamification is a concept which has been around for a number of years now, it’s still an idea that is relatively unfamiliar to many people in the events industry.”

In part, I believe some of this disconnect lies in challenges differentiating gamification from interactivity. Interactive polling and quizzing, for example, can share elements of gamification, depending on how they’re deployed. But as Himani Sheth writes on Medium, gamification can be so much more, potentially encompassing activities such as scavenger hunts to orient participants to the layout of the venue, reward-driven networking games and more.

I’ll continue to watch this one as technology and adoption grow.

Since 2015, the use of chatbots – through Facebook Messenger and apps like Drift – has exploded in popularity. I can see tremendous potential for their usage within conferences and events, such as the ability to answer quick questions regarding ticket level access, session room assignments and the location of amenities within the venue.

Morgan Howard, a freelance customer experience manager, shares her experience working on a Facebook Messenger bot that answered fan queries at the Sound on Sound Fest music festival. “It was automated, and able to answer a lot of customer questions with a great success rate,” she says. “Fans got the instant gratification of receiving a response.”

However, I can also see them running into many of the same challenges faced by traditional event apps – namely, adoption. If no one knows the feature is there, it won’t get used. That chatbots can only answer simple questions that don’t require human intelligence may also limit their usefulness in the context of the events, but I can also see them providing conference organizers with valuable event data. If a significant volume of questions are asked at a certain time or on a particular topic, that could indicate that better education or additional human support is needed.

One emerging trend identified by the Event App Bible is the use of voice search features or “Siri-like responses” in event apps. This is understandable, given that “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, according to comScore.”

People have grown accustomed to asking questions of Siri, Alexa and other voice search-enabled technologies, rather than typing them into search engines. It’s reasonable to assume they’d expect to be able to translate this same behavior to their conference and event apps, which is why I expect we’ll see more event technology adopt this approach in 2019 and beyond.

One final trend I’m watching are the many potential applications of different virtual reality (VR) technologies at conferences and major events, growing out of the recent release of affordable, self-contained VR devices like the Oculus Go.

Not only could exhibitors and vendors use these technologies to give attendees the full experience of their products and services, speakers, and presenters could use them in an educational context to make session materials more engaging than standard lecture-style delivery.

Given that the Oculus Go currently retails for $199 per unit, providing a headset for every conference or session attendee may not yet be practical. However, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and prices come down, I expect we’ll see it used more and more at conferences and events.

What technologies have you used to make your events stand out? Any you’d add to this list? Share your thoughts below.

You’ve decided on the type of event you’re going to hold.  You’re ready to start spreading the word on your organization’s social media accounts. You’re crafting a registration landing page that any attendee will find easy to use.The only thing missing is memorable merchandise that will commemorate your event and spread the word about your organization.

Event merchandise can supplement your fundraising efforts, strengthen relationships with your supporters, and attract more attention for your cause. When your attendees wear, carry, or display the merchandise they’ve picked up at your event, others are likely to ask them where they got the items and what they represent.

Your goal is to create merchandise that will make your attendees happy and generate conversation surrounding your organization and the good work it does long after the event is over. While designing merchandise is a creative process that gives you lots of room to have fun, following a few guidelines will ensure that your organization benefits from your merchandise.

In addition to these guidelines, we’ve noted a few common mistakes you should avoid as you start designing. Let’s begin with the most important aspect to consider when designing merchandise: giving your event attendees what they want.

Knowing your audience is the first and most essential step in designing custom merchandise for distribution at your event. Your attendees want merchandise that fits within their personal styles, relates to the cause they care about, and reminds them of how much fun they had at your event.

This may sound like a tall order, but don’t worry! You can create merchandise that addresses all three of these preferences if you do some research on your supporters ahead of time. First on your list is knowing some basic demographic information about your attendees.

How old are your attendees? If most of them are around the same age, they’re more likely to share design preferences. If you’re worried about following a trend that will quickly become outdated, remember that attendees of all ages will appreciate a simple, stylish design that places your organization’s mission at its center.

In-person events take place in specific communities, so why not incorporate your attendees’ shared geographic location into your merchandise design? Consider incorporating town and city names and landmarks in your design or modifying your organization’s logo to reference the location of an event.

If you’re designing wearable merchandise like t-shirts as an event fundraiser, try to create a design that guests of any gender would be comfortable wearing, or provide multiple options from which they can choose.

Need to do more research before creating something that you know everyone will love? In addition to broad demographic research, focus on your organization’s past experiences with community engagement. You may have useful information on hand from previous community events, social media interactions, or earlier merchandise sales.

After you take your attendees’ demographic information into consideration, it’s time to think about their relationship to your organization. Think back to what you know about your supporters: what draws them to your cause? If you can summarize that in a memorable phrase or a striking visual, you’ve uncovered the starting place for your design.

Depending on the focus of your organization, you may be already associated with certain images (animals, children, or nature, for example). But this isn’t the case for all nonprofits! If your cause doesn’t easily translate to an image, a good typographic design is just as effective.

Mistake to avoid: Not doing enough research on your attendees! Choose and design items and styles that your particular group of supporters is most likely to love.

Your attendees want merchandise that shows their pride in the good work your organization does and serves as a memento of the event they attended. Commemorate the occasion with a design that will remind them of how much fun they had every time they wear it.

You have multiple options when it comes to deciding when your attendees will receive their merchandise. Will you use merchandise as a way to promote your event, including the items with registration and distributing them before the event so that attendees can wear, carry, or use them there? Or will you sell merchandise at the event so that everyone can take home a memento from the big day?

Whichever you choose, you know that your goal is to create merchandise that your attendees will wear or use to show their support for your organization wherever they go. They’re more likely to do so if the item reminds them of how much fun your event was!

Wearable merchandise, like customizable shirts from Bonfire, is a perennial favorite among both nonprofits and supporters. If you’re opting for t-shirts or sweatshirts, don’t forget to take the season of your event into consideration! Choose a sleeve length that’s appropriate for the time of year and climate of your event. You may even consider a seasonal color scheme, especially if it fits well with your organization’s branding.

The type of event you’re hosting can also help you decide on a design. For instance, athletic activities like runs and walks are common fundraising events. If you’re holding one, go for a sporty design. If your merchandise is a take-home gift after an evening event, try something classic and elegant, or something bolder for a louder party setting!

Mistake to avoid: Your merchandise references your organization but not your event or–more dangerously–references your event but not your organization! The perfect design strikes a balance between identifying your organization and cause and commemorating your event.

Take the time to create a design that your attendees will associate with both your event and your organization. The key to the latter is to brand your merchandise in a way that’s creative, but still consistent with your organization’s imagery.

You know and love your organization’s familiar branding: the color scheme on your website and other materials, the characteristic font you use for your name, and of course your logo. While you may not be able to include all of these elements in your event merchandise, incorporating your organization’s branding within your design in some way is essential.

Consistent branding builds familiarity, trust, and recognition among your supporters and in the wider world of individuals who may become your supporters in the future! One main purpose of event merchandise is to build awareness for your cause when your attendees wear or use the items in public.

If you want to use your organization’s branding but need to tailor it to your event, create a design that combines these two elements. If your organization’s name can’t be displayed prominently within the design you choose, consider keeping your color scheme to boost recognition in this way.

Your organization’s logo is likely to be a part of any design you create, but consider updating it to reflect an aspect of your event or a shared interest of your attendees. A modification or partial redesign may make your logo fit in with the activity around which the event is centered, the location where it’s taking place, or the season when it’s being held!

Mistake to avoid: You design stylish merchandise that your attendees love to wear or use, but it contains few or no clear references to your organization or indications of your cause. Remember that part of the purpose of event merchandise is to spread the word about your organization and all of the good work it does!

Don’t neglect the power of branding in your design. If you create merchandise that your attendees love, they may even wear or use it in efforts to promote your next event in-person and on social media!

If you’ve decided on a color scheme and know how you want to incorporate your organization’s branding, it’s time for you to choose the design’s central image or text. Leaning toward a catchy phrase? Typographic designs are powerful, memorable, and suited to a wide variety of organizations and causes.

You’ll likely be able to decide quickly whether your organization’s work is better expressed in images or words. You can, of course, always combine them in your design, or use your logo as the image component of your design.

If you’ve decided on a typographic design or are making text a large component of your design, you’ll need to choose a phrase that expresses the mission of your organization within the context of your event. This phrase should be short, memorable, and easy to understand. Merchandise that displays the phrase may end up introducing others to your organization!

Keep in mind that your goal for your typographic design is that onlookers are able to read it! This means that you need to put thought into your font selection, font combinations, and especially your choice of background and text colors.

Choose easily readable fonts and large type to ensure that your phrase comes across well on your merchandise. Need a little extra artistic value in your text-only design? Use multiple fonts, making sure that they complement one another. Above all, don’t choose two light or two dark colors for your background and text! Color contrast is essential to readability.

Mistake to avoid: Your phrase doesn’t strike the right balance between catchy and informative, or your have a great phrase that your design renders unreadable. If your phrase requires too much reading, is too dry, or contains too much “insider information” for onlookers to identify your organization’s purpose, revise it before you create your merchandise. Once you’ve formulated the perfect phrase, use a design tool to test out available fonts and color schemes to ensure readability.

You’ve researched your audience, created a design unique to your event, incorporated your organization’s branding, and selected just the right image or phrase. Before you order your merchandise, go over this final checklist to make sure that the design will look as good on the items as it does in your plans.

Have you:

If you have ideas for designs but need some help with the process or don’t have the time to address every event planning challenge yourself, consider enlisting the help of someone with graphic design experience. You’ll get the design you want and save yourself time when you need it most.

We don’t need to tell you that events are a big deal in the event world, but we can tell you that you want your supporters going home with a professional-quality item that they’ll want to show off again and again. Provide them with the right merchandise and watch as awareness of your organization grows!

Social Media has infiltrated every area of modern life and exhibitions are no different. Every one attending or presenting uses social media in some way. One of the benefits of social media for business is its speed: you can test concepts and ideas quickly to see if they work. This ability to quickly speak to your audience gives you an opportunity when designing your stand to refine your concept for maximum impact. You can test how your audience responds to certain types of messaging and ideas, and then feed this data back to your exhibition stand designers so they can build the refinements into the design. 

When it comes to the design of the stand itself,  you can integrate social media into the design in numerous ways. Social media’s functionality is easily adapted to work with your stand’s technology or experiences. This means you can add social elements to individual areas of the stand depending on the experience you are trying to deliver. These elements can help you with everything from engagement to lead generation.

The use of social media on exhibition stands in recent years has become increasingly innovative and entertaining. As the tools and audiences grow so does the inventiveness of those using it. There are no rules on where you can use social media, that is down to your imagination and creativity. However, there are some natural fits for social media within the modern exhibition stand. Below are the most common uses we come across:

Live engagement is using social media in its purest form. You merely create someway in which people using their social media can engage with your stand. This can be as simple as a “live social media screen” where photos using your event hashtag will appear on a screen in your stand. Another idea is to encourage selfies through a backdrop wall. Some companies have used social media to run competitions and then build in screens on the stand that let them announce winners and display their winning entries.

Mattel devised a wonderfully clever way to get social media engagement at Brand Licensing Europe. Their Barbie photo booth let people become a packaged Barbie and share the image online. Creating a fun buzz around their flagship product.https://www.instagram.com/p/BaHTqkNHp-X/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=12&wp=540&rd=https%3A%2F%2Feventupplanner.com&rp=%2Fhow-social-media-is-impactingexhibition-stand-designs%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A4252.5%2C%22ls%22%3A1999%2C%22le%22%3A2173.900000035763%7D

Take social engagement to the next level with real time interactions. This involves interacting with those who take the time to engage with you. Unlike the above, which tends to be automated, the interactions will require human elements. How this impacts the design can vary depending on your approach. If you are simply keeping interaction limited to social media itself, it just means having someone dedicated to doing so. However, some brands have decided to be a little more creative. This has led to some stands where the interaction has become part of the experience. Letting those influence what is happening as they watch or engage with the stand. It is simply digital audience participation. The difference is this is participation that you can then use to promote your brand online as it’s shared on social media.

One company embracing the possibilities of social media interactions is Old Navy. Their #Selfiebration campaign toured various cities letting people interact with Old Navy in a truly fun and engaging way.

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Live stream offers you a vast opportunity to engage with people who aren’t even at the event. If you have a renowned keynote speaker or exciting product launch you can share this with the world, not just the room. The design consideration here is how to present this. For brands on a budget, you can just film it on your phone or you can go for a higher quality video format. The IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam is one of the leaders in live streaming in the industry. They have evolved their live streaming of the event into a highly engaged community that continue to engage long after the event. Whatever you decide, you have to consider how it looks and sounds online before the event. Do you need more lighting? Do you need a pa system? Would screens help? Try thinking about what would affect your experience if you were to watch it online.

Social media’s growth is tied to smartphones and as these have grown, so has the amount of technology that they can connect to. Now you can control everything from your smartphone, from the lighting to the toaster in your home. Exhibitions are no different. This connectivity gives you the opportunity to let your audience control elements of the stand itself. Meaning you can deliver highly personalized experiences across your stand. You can also use this technology to be more playful, letting people connect to and play games on your stand and then share the experience online, all from their own phone. An example of this is Candy Mechanics’ Edible Selfies. Candy Mechanics can use your selfies to create candy recreations of the images for you to feast on. It is a simple and fun way to bring your social media interactions to life.

Whatever you want to do with social media, the key thing to remember is planning. If you want social media to play a part in your exhibition stand, it has to be built into the design from the beginning. Social media needs to be a consideration at the concept stage. By knowing in advance what is required, your stand designers can make a feature of it in their design, which will only help drive engagement. This engagement will then give you the opportunity to build relations and generate leads.

Author Bio

Mark Gill has been with DMN Design Build since 1997 when he started his career with the firm as a joiner. He now heads up the production team, managing the process from prototype to handover, specializing in exhibition stands design and exhibition services.