There are many moving parts involved in event management—whether that’s securing a venue, acquiring sponsors, sending invitations, developing a ticket pricing strategy, or planning the event’s schedule. However, these to-do’s shouldn’t make you lose sight of your event’s main goal: providing an exceptional attendee experience. 

What better way to do so than to leverage data to connect with attendees and cater to their preferences? Data can fill in the gaps and solidify your existing relationships so that attendees can have a smooth event experience and receive engaging information after the event has ended. 

Keep in mind that data must be clean to be actionable. Here are our best tips and tricks for how to incorporate proper data hygiene into your existing event management plan.

The first step in maintaining proper data hygiene is standardizing your data. Once your attendee list is finalized, comb through your attendee data to ensure it’s uniform and standardize any data entered in different formats.

This practice will ensure it’s easy to find any data you need to reference in the future and streamline the check-in process. Additionally, standardizing your attendee data helps your staff understand how you’d like them to manually input data during the event to ensure uniformity.

For example, there are two different ways to enter phone numbers. During registration, some attendees may have used parentheses: (123) 456-7890. Others may have used dashes between numbers: 123-456-7890. Deciding which method you’d like to use will help clean your data for future use.

Events present a unique opportunity to meet with people face-to-face and share your organization with them. Take advantage of these in-person interactions to improve your data hygiene by asking attendees to quickly verify their information before they become immersed in the event atmosphere.

That way, you can ensure you have the correct contact information, enabling you to follow up on sales leads or present attendees with relevant future engagement opportunities after your event concludes without disrupting their experience.

If you’re hosting a virtual or hybrid event, consider sending an email right before the event starts that asks attendees to verify their information online. You may link to a quick form that allows attendees to check their demographic information, phone number, email address, and mailing address for accuracy.

You’ll likely collect additional data from attendees during your event—whether through a lead capture form, survey, or some other method. Simplify and standardize these data collection points as much as possible to provide a good user experience and avoid data clutter.

When you’re collecting attendee data, incorporate the following elements in your forms to maintain data hygiene:

You may also add validation rules to your forms that standardize responses and flag input errors to ensure attendees enter data correctly. These rules may include mandatory fields, data types for each field—such as numbers or text—and length of input.

Facilitate the flow of data between your different systems by integrating your event management platform with your constituent relationship management platform (CRM). For associations, Protech recommends using an association-specific CRM that allows you to centralize member data and leverage those insights to provide an enhanced member experience.

When data flows seamlessly between the two platforms, you can avoid duplicate entries or errors. Automating this process also reduces manual entry, which can save your team time and prevent future errors from occurring. 

You may also integrate your event management platform with secondary platforms, such as digital invitation software, email marketing software, or your website, so attendee data can inform your efforts in other areas of your event or organization’s activities.

Let’s say you want to follow up with an attendee to thank them for coming and eventually engage them in additional opportunities. However, when you look at your records, you seem to be missing their email address. Upon closer inspection, you soon realize that there is a group of attendees who didn’t pre-register for your event and never gave their contact information at check-in.

To reach these attendees, conduct a data append. AccuData defines a data append as the process of supplementing your database with information from external sources.

In this case, you would conduct an email address or direct mail append, depending on how you would like to thank attendees. You may also append the following types of information:

Adding third-party data can help you gain a better understanding of your attendees beyond the information they’ve supplied. As a result, you can segment them into relevant groups and personalize your communications with them.

Beyond the demographic and contact information you collect from your supporters, make sure to fully leverage all of the data generated from your event. Dive into event analytics provided by your event platform to determine your event’s success. Attach insights about attendee behavior to your records and leverage this information to improve the attendee experience for your next event.