It’s not you, it’s me: The psychology of breaking up with a vendor

Event Management News

February 14, 2023

Breaking up is never easy, no matter if we are talking about a romantic relationship or a business one. While we don’t have the credentials to help you end a romantic relationship, we have heard many broken heart stories of event professionals who tied the knot with the wrong tech provider and went through hardships to put an end to the relationship and look for something better.

Similarly to a romantic relationship, we tend to invest a lot of time into finding the perfect tech match of our dreams: from numerous dating demos to email exchanges and phone calls. When we decide to commit and to make the move, it can be hard to realize that the expectations weren’t quite met. It’s difficult to see it from the outside, but once the relationship gets serious is when we see the ugly and the bad.

All the effort to dress up and look good during that dating phase are out of the window once you commit and you are left with the sad reality of a dysfunctional tool. Once we get into a routine and spend more time using the technology we realize the gaps and discover that we may have made the wrong decision.

Some of us may even stick to it for a while, maybe years, because we just accept that perfection is not reachable. After having invested time and money into learning a new system and onboarding an entire team, it can be hard to break up and start the dating process again, but not doing it may cost you even more. Despite the fear of change and the new, we need to take action.

Think of all the efficiencies that could be gained by using a tool that is just right for you. All the headaches that could be avoided if only that tool worked better. There is a perfect match for you out there, and sometimes you just need to take that leap of faith to go find it. We’ve seen it happening, and the relief of leaving and finding something better is one of the most rewarding ones. Looking back, it will all make sense.

Learning from a break up

Once you realize the relationship is not working, you need to spend some time to evaluate why – so the problem doesn’t repeat on your next commitment. Make a list and add all the issues you’ve had with that vendor: whether it is the lack of support, usability issues, or lack of must-have features, you need to identify what went wrong so you can make a better decision next time.

If you started this relationship in the first place, probably not everything is that bad. You should also acknowledge what they did right so you know what features and services are important to you in a future relationship.

Back to dating

In a romantic relationship, you may need time to mourn, but when talking business, you have no time to lose. Before you break up, you should already vet what other technologies may be a good candidate for you. From the list of must-have features you identified, you will be able to learn more about each candidate and choose which one is “the one” for you.

Also, make sure to check online reviews and see how happy other users are with the software you are interested in. After all, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Sites like G2Crowd and Capterra are great options to compare software and evaluate customer reviews.

The break-up

Getting a divorce is definitely more complicated than breaking up with a more casual relationship. If you are bonded by a contract you may need to research your options. Some vendors may be open to ending a contract sooner, given they haven’t fulfilled their part of the contract, while others may be more strict. Be strong! This is the hardest part, but it will end soon.

New beginnings

We hope the dating phase doesn’t last too long, but take as much time as needed to make sure you are confident about your new decision. We know how hard it is to be in a bad relationship, but brighter days will come! Focus on the wins that the new relationship will provide you: soon enough you will be in a better place, with better customer support, a stronger set of features that work for you, and a happy team around you.

5 Strategies to Improve Your Virtual Corporate Events

Event Management

January 6, 2023

As online events continue to grow, most companies have added more virtual corporate events to their portfolio. By now, we are all mostly well-versed in the online space, but there are ways to take your next virtual event a step further in order to provide an even better event experience.

Brand Consistency

Most organizations use third-party technology, such as web-conferencing systems or registration tools, to host their virtual events or collect RSVPs. However, relying on third-party software is not a justification for neglecting your branding. It is important to make sure you keep your brand consistent across all touchpoints with your audience, including the email invitation, the event website and registration process, the slideshow, and the web-conference itself.

Virtual corporate event platforms like EventUp Planner will allow you to keep your brand colors, fonts, images, and more, so you can keep control of your brand on a fully white-labeled experience.

You can go an extra-mile and build a branded background for your speakers as well. Whether you build a real studio for your online events or a virtual background, this will surely make you stand out from the crowd!

Sponsorship Opportunities

When running virtual events, you will need to adapt the sponsorship packages to a new reality. While you are no longer able to share physical banners or sponsor a dinner, online events can offer different types of opportunities with far less cost for the event producer – which can result in more ROI for you!

In addition to showcasing the sponsors on the event website (bring the physical banner to the online space!), you can also have organizations sponsor unique sessions of your multi-session event, include their logos in PDF catalogues and supporting materials, as well as showcase them during your virtual event.

To go the extra mile, you can produce a short video clip to promote your sponsors before or in-between your sessions. Just like a recorded commercial for TV or YouTube, this pre-recorded video will make your event look even more professional, while also giving your sponsors a reason to love you!

Interactivity

Although fostering interaction online may pose some challenges, there are still ways to engage your audience and make them an integral part of your event.

You can ask questions during the presentation, encourage attendees to participate through chat, create live polls and surveys, and more. Additionally, incentivizing participation by offering prizes for the most engaged can help motivate people to involve.

Use Music to Help Set the Mood

Keeping the energy up for the duration of your online event can be challenging, particularly if it extends beyond a few hours. To help maintain the energy, consider utilizing music to your advantage.

You can use music during breaks between sessions or before introducing new speakers and sessions. You may prepare live music, or pre-record video introductions and break slides in advance.

Networking/ Messaging Capabilities

We can’t deny that one big reason people love events is due to the networking opportunities it provides. Although it can be challenging, it is not impossible to translate these opportunities to the online space.

Whether you provide a directory hall where attendees can browse the profile or fellow event-goers, or connect directly with sponsors and exhibitors to book one-on-one meetings can go a long way. Give power to the people and let them select those they’d like to connect with and book their meetings using online event technology.

Finding the Right Virtual Corporate Events Platform

It can be as simple or as complex as the technology you use allows it to be to run an online event. With EventUp Planner Virtual Studio, you can manage all your events, whether in-person or online, from one unique platform.

The Virtual Studio is a truly integrated virtual corporate events platform that supports planners in providing a seamless experience to attendees, from start to finish. Now, your virtual events journey doesn’t have to feel like a second class citizen to your in-person events portfolio.

EventUp Planner (formerly Attendease) covers all you need to plan and manage your event including event registration, agenda management, website builder, event marketing, reporting, and more. While the Virtual Studio add-on covers all your virtual events needs. With minimal training and setup, it is easy to get started and launch your first virtual event with EventUp Planner.

If you are ready to see how this can work for you, contact our team to book a discovery call and see if this could be a fit for your event planning needs.

How to Convince Your Boss That it’s Time to Upgrade Your Event Management System

Event Management News

August 29, 2022

We know how hard it is to get budget approved for new software, but it’s equally difficult to get buy in to switch into a completely different platform. Whether you have outgrown your current system, or feel like your current software is too clunky, considering a new solution may be the best path for you. But how do you get buy in from your team and/ or from your boss? Here are a few answers to prove that changing software is not really a choice, but a normal evolution of business processes — and that it can actually mean increase in ROI too (let’s be honest, it all comes down to $$$).

When you have outgrown your current technology

Many organizations start managing their events using multiple tools that fulfill very specific needs. For example, using a platform just to manage email marketing communications, another tool to manage ticket sales and registrations, and so on. This piecemeal approach may work when you manage few events, but once you start growing your event portfolio, it becomes a daunting process. In addition to giving you the scalability, here are a few more reasons why it makes sense to switch to a more robust event management platform.

Save time

Simple tasks that could be performed with the click of a button may take hours or even days, because of the additional steps that it takes to get things done when using multiple systems.

Here’s an example: you need to send email communications to different segments of people (e.g. people who attended your events before, people who are registered to your current event, people who are on your list but have never been in one of your events before). Using multiple tools that are not integrated means you may need to export new lists every time you need to send an email. Multiply that by the number of emails you send and the number of events you run. How much time are you spending doing something that could be done with the click of a button?

Emails are just one example, but there are many other tasks that may take up a lot of your time today and that could be cut into a few minutes per week, when using the right solution for you.

Improve your brand experience

Companies relying on a simple registration tool are usually unable to provide a branded experience to their audience. That means using third-party sites to collect payment and registrations, which doesn’t include your brand’s logo, URL, color scheme, fonts, and more. Once you upgrade to an all-in-one event management platform, like EventUp Planner (formerly Attendease), you regain control over your brand, which allows you to build fully branded registration websites, emails, and more, all in line with your brand guidelines.

Empower your workforce

Some systems are so complex, that only a handful of people in the company hold the keys. This,makes the entire team dependant on them, adding a lot of pressure on those who have the knowledge.

A modern software interface that is easy to learn makes training and staff adoption less cumbersome. Plus, a solution that accommodates collaboration, different levels of security and permission allows event profs to delegate some of the workload to other departments, contractors, freelancers, virtual assistants or interns, only giving them access to the parts of the platform that are relevant to them. Choosing an easy-to-use platform that all can understand and use will not only empower the entire team, but will also foster collaboration and add to employees’ satisfaction.

Make data-driven decisions

How are you tracking performance? Managing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) from a spreadsheet may not paint a full picture on how your events are doing and it can drain a lot of precious time out of your week. Event management platforms like EventUp Planner can provide you with data visualization dashboards that can pull in information based on the event settings and give you a clear idea of your event’s performance — with no need to search and input numbers into an Exel file. From the number of registrations to revenue generated, capacity limits per session, or attendee satisfaction, an event management platform will provide you with important data to help you make better decisions.

Integration with other platforms, like Google Analytics, social media tracking pixels, and CRM systems, can help to paint the entire picture and give you all the data you need to successfully manage the performance of your events.

Scalability at your fingertips

As more events are added to the marketing mix, it becomes unrealistic to execute them using human resources alone or using the piecemeal approach we mentioned earlier. Eventually, it will be time to “graduate” to more sophisticated event-specific software in order to achieve scale.

When managing a large portfolio of events, is important to adopt processes that can help your team work more efficiently, saving time and money. That can include a variety of inputs, such as the ability to clone past events’ settings and websites to create new events. That will save a significant amount of time and will relieve the team from depending on web developers and designers to create new websites from scratch every time there is a new event. Having the data from all events in one unique platform can also assist with the process of scaling, as you can visualize and compare the performance of your events as well as analyze attendee data across multiple-events.

Minimize errors

When you manage your event details from one unique platform, you minimize the occurrence of errors. That’s because all your event data is interconnected, so you don’t need to update the same information in multiple platforms. For example, any change to your event settings using the EventUp Planner platform will automatically push the changes to your event website and event app. That includes change in schedule, speaker, date and time, and more.

Vetting technologies for your business

In the same way that marketing and sales processes matured with the introduction of marketing automation and robust CRM platforms, it’s easy to imagine that Event Management Software will provide the same lift to event planning. Such newfound visibility will draw even more event tech solutions into the market. To avoid the analysis paralysis that often comes with a flood of offerings, it’s important for companies to expand the criteria for evaluating solutions to include ways that they can be used to empower the company and not just manage events. Here are some things to consider when considering event tech providers:

Ability to provide fully-branded experiences (white-labeled event websites, emails, registration, etc.)
Integration with other tools you currently use, or are considering using, including CRM system, marketing automation platforms, day-of-event solutions, and more.
Option to clone past events to create new ones using the same settings and website templates, so you don’t need to start from scratch every time
Data collection capabilities, including custom forms and surveys
Ability to create a variety of passes, add-ons, promo codes
Ability to manage speakers, sponsors and exhibitors profiles
Option to carry event in multiple languages and accept multiple currencies

These are just a few things to consider when selecting vendors for your event management needs. We recommend that you list all features that are required and which ones would be good to have, and then start vetting the options available in the market.

Conclusion

Getting buy in to adopt new technology can be difficult, but don’t be discouraged. With data to back you up, you can build a strong case and prove all the many benefits that are behind the adoption of new systems. From time savings to improved brand experience, empowered workforce, data gathering, scalability capabilities, and error reduction, there are so many reasons to make the switch.

If you would like to learn more about what EventUp Planner can offer, book a demo with our team.

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Manage your entire event portfolio and drive down the cost per event with each additional event you execute. EventUp Planner has flat-fee pricing, with no surprises.

For all meeting and event types
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Book a call with our team to learn how EventUp Planner fits your needs.

How to Use Your Website to Promote Higher Education Events

Event Management

August 16, 2022

Higher education events bring your university together to engage students, faculty, alumni, and community members in enriching, fun experiences. To generate excitement and interest, you’ll need to create a dedicated strategy for promoting your events.

The first marketing resource you should consider in this process is your university’s event portal/ website. As your online information hub, this platform is one of your most valuable digital assets for publicizing your events and boosting registrations.

In this guide, we’ll explore these five tips for using your website to spread the word about your event and grow engagement:

Review other top college websites for inspiration.
Optimize your event landing pages.
Offer an accessible registration process.
Livestream your event.
Emphasize fundraising opportunities.

When you optimize your higher education website for promoting events, you offer attendees an easy way to learn more about your engagement opportunities and register. This helps grow event satisfaction, providing your university community with valuable experiences that improve their overall relationship with your college.

1. Review other top college websites for inspiration.

You don’t have to overhaul your entire website just to boost the visibility of your events. However, it’s still important to approach the event portal strategically to ensure your events are well-represented.

That means it’s important to consider your audience and, specifically, the segment of your audience that’s most likely to attend events. When you design your event portal with a particular audience in mind, you can create an event registration process and online event experience catered to their preferences.

It’s worthwhile to look at a few examples set by other top college websites to help think of engaging ways to promote your events to your audience. Review these standout examples:

Cornell’s robust events page spotlights plenty of virtual opportunities. Keeping your university’s virtual opportunities front and center helps appeal to those who feel more comfortable attending online events and those who might live farther away from your campus, such as alumni.
The Rhode Island School of Design’s alumni events page allows users to apply multiple filter types, letting you search for events by class year, major, event location, and more. This allows any visitor to specify their search to their exact event preferences, finding opportunities that appeal to their interests.
Stanford’s events page highlights all types of events, including those that are free and open to the public. Spotlighting events that are open to all helps your university foster stronger connections with the surrounding community.

As you browse through these examples, look at how each website structures, its event calendar, event listings, and registration forms. Consider the format and flow you think will work best for your higher education website and unique audience. For example, what types of search filters will you include? What information will you ask for on your registration page?

Answering these questions allows you to create an event calendar that stands the test of time and best serves your audience.

2. Optimize your event landing pages.

Event landing pages and calendar entries are the web pages that most visitors click through to view event details, including what your event will entail and how to get involved. Your event landing pages should clearly lay out your event’s basic information so it’s easy for audience members to sign up.

Ensure your event landing pages or calendar entries includes:

The event’s logistics. Ensure your landing pages include essential information such as the event’s purpose, date, time, location, and other must-know information. If you’re hosting a virtual event, clearly explain how attendees can access the event’s livestream.
Professional photos and videos of past events. Including images with your event entries helps draw attention to your events. Plus, if you use a photo from a similar past event, you can let attendees know what to expect from your upcoming opportunity.
Social media sharing buttons. Including social media sharing buttons on your event entries allows attendees to promote the events among their friends and family members, growing awareness of the opportunities.
A registration link. Include each event’s registration link in a clear location on your event pages. This might be a link to an embedded form on your website or another website if you’re spotlighting a different organization’s event.

Prospective attendees don’t need you to drone on about the history of each event and why they should consider attending. Stick to the basic details and keep your event entries as simple as possible, so audience members can quickly assess whether they want to attend.

3. Offer an accessible registration process.

According to Kanopi’s guide to higher education web design, it’s essential that higher ed websites are accessible and inclusive for all audience members. Accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have feature for higher ed websites—it’s a requirement. Universities that receive federal financial support are required by law to provide reasonable accommodations that make their web content accessible.

Accessibility should also extend to your online event pages to ensure your event information is available to everyone. Plan to design your event registration process with accessibility guidelines in mind. Your main resource in this process will be the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a universally agreed-upon standard for web content accessibility.

Here are a few WCAG components that directly apply to your website’s event content:

Ensure your event registration forms can be filled out using assistive technology. This might include a screen magnifier, screen reader, or a head pointer.
Simplify your navigation and form fields. Consider using a breadcrumb navigation component that shows visitors the chronological order of internal website links that led them to the current page. Also, keep form fields as simple as possible by only asking for necessary information, such as attendees’ names and contact information.
Use descriptive alternative text for images. Alternative text is a written description of an image that users with visual impairments can use to understand what the image portrays. Alt text can also come in handy when a web page fails to fully load images for any reason. The images you use in your event web pages should include descriptive alternative text that fully conveys the purpose of each image.
Ensure sufficient color contrast. Color contrast is the difference in luminance or brightness between foreground text and background colors. If your web pages have low color contrast, potential event attendees may struggle to read the text, possibly leading to a lower event registration rate. The WCAG recommend using text with a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 or 3:1 for large text.

Your website should be a reliable, accessible resource for all of your university’s audience members. Incorporating these accessibility best practices into your event page design helps widen the audience for your events and create a better event experience right from the start.

4. Livestream your event.

Even if most events you’re hosting are in person, consider adding a livestream component. This can help you expand your event audience to include individuals who may not live within driving distance or those who prefer remote event participation.

For example, let’s say one of your university’s professors is hosting a free in-person seminar on native plant identification. You can host a simultaneous webinar livestream on your university’s website or social media pages to allow for virtual audience participation. The lecturer can field questions from both audiences to engage with each group equally.

If you decide to livestream some of your events, consider hiring a professional videographer. These individuals can ensure that your event’s in-person components, such as the lighting and sound, are optimized to create a clear, professional-looking livestream.

Also, include a link to access your event’s livestream on your website landing page. Allow attendees to note during the registration process whether they’ll be participating online or in-person so you can track engagement levels for each format.

5. Emphasize fundraising opportunities.

Fundraising helps your university grow and allows you to offer new opportunities to students and other community members. If your event has a fundraising component, you’ll want to keep your donation opportunities front and center.

Use your event landing page to highlight multiple donation types, including:

Alumni giving opportunities. According to AlumniFinder, alumni giving helps fund scholarships, operational costs, research projects, and other necessary expenses that your university incurs. If your event is designed for engaging alumni, emphasize how donating can allow alumni to leave a powerful legacy and positively impact your university for years to come.
Matching gifts. Matching gift programs are a corporate philanthropy initiative where businesses match donations their employees make to nonprofits or schools. You can embed a matching gift database into your online donation page to allow visitors to research their eligibility. Then, donors can quickly access all the information and forms they need to complete to apply for a match.
Volunteer grants. If you’re hosting a university-sponsored volunteering event, make sure volunteers are aware of corporate volunteer grant opportunities. Volunteer grants are another form of corporate giving where businesses make a donation after their employees volunteer with a charitable organization for a specified amount of time.

It can be helpful to review top nonprofit websites to understand how these websites centralize their donation processes. They use features such as large call-to-action buttons, pop-up messages, and clear language to direct attention to their fundraising opportunities. These same elements will come in handy when increasing engagement with your fundraising event and online giving opportunities.

As a higher education institution, your university has a reputation to uphold. Disorganized or underdeveloped event landing pages can make your university appear unprofessional and lead to lower event engagement.

Therefore, optimizing your event registration processes starts with streamlining your website’s landing pages and registration processes. These tips can help turn your university’s website into a more valuable resource for your students, faculty, alumni, and community.

Author: Allison Manley, Director of Marketing & Communications

Allison is a recovering (and award-winning) designer who applies her creative and organizational skills to marketing strategy for Kanopi. Her diverse, multi-disciplinary background — which in addition to design includes glassblowing, publishing, podcasting, and figure skating — contributes to strong relationships to which she offers a broad perspective.

Her job is to tell the story of Kanopi by sharing information, writing, working with staff and partners, and keeping the brand cohesive across all channels. And since she maintains this site and wrote this, she can say she considers it a privilege to be able to work every day with fun, smart people who make her job easier; her colleagues keep clients so happy with solid work and processes that the clients, in turn, are obliging in helping Allison with case studies and positive feedback.

When not keeping the Kanopi brand on point, Allison is working on double jumps on an ice rink, chasing small children, or organizing something somewhere.

How Event Registration Tool Can Help You Avoid Pitfalls That May Ruin the Attendee Experience

Event Management News

April 14, 2022

We all recognize the importance of first impressions. Event registration is usually the first touchpoint for attendees, so it’s important to create a positive experience from the start. Offering a seamless experience with the right event registration tool will help ensure that registrants are focused on the excitement of the event, not the friction of poor registration processes.

However, creating a stress-free, optimized registration process isn’t as simple as throwing up a generic registration form on your website. As an event planner, it’s important to pay attention to your attendees’—and your own—pain points to help optimize the experience. Addressing these challenges head-on with a high-performance and user-friendly event registration tool will ensure you put your best foot forward.

When seeking an event registration tool, look for these four things to help you overcome common registration pitfalls.

Flexibility

Flexible online registration is key to a positive registration experience. This can be a challenge to achieve because one size does not fit all. For example, registering for a webinar or an in-house educational seminar differs greatly from the registration process for a multi-day conference. Accordingly, event registration tools must have the flexibility to accommodate various requirements—whether attendees are requesting a special meal, registering multiple attendees at once, or indicating accommodation preferences. Furthermore, the ability to tie registration to different tracks is pivotal so that you can easily identify regular attendees, VIPs, or speakers, and tailor their experiences accordingly.

Automated Data Collection and Integration

The registration process can yield valuable attendee data, but tracking, storing, analyzing, and effectively utilizing the volume of data for all your events is no small feat. Thankfully, sophisticated event registration tools like Attendease provide event reporting capabilities that can simplify the task.

In addition to providing one source of truth for your event data, Attendease also offers integration with other software, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, among others.

You can also garner value from post-registration survey data, and export reports that track performance through the entire event lifecycle—from registration through post-event follow-up.

User-friendly Registration Process

Long gone are the days of waiting in line for tickets! In today’s increasingly ecommerce-driven world, attendees expect to be able to pay for tickets online and without hassle. If your event registration software supports customizable forms, use them to make the online payment process as simple and as flexible as possible for attendees. Providing a variety of ticketing options (ie. a single-day ticket vs. a weekend pass), accommodating discounts and refunds, and offering promotional codes are great opportunities to help make the payment process more flexible. These options can also help make your event more accessible, or more exclusive, depending on the context. For event managers, there’s plenty of reasons to seek user-friendliness too! For example, an integrated payment solutions not only begin to create a positive attendee experience, but they also save you time and administrative headaches!

Optimized Registration Forms

Creating mobile-friendly registration forms that provide attendees with all the information, choices, and flexibility they require can be a challenge. In order to tackle this, it is important that your event registration software is sufficiently adaptable. It should be flexible enough to create forms that work in each of the major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) both on mobile and off. Every browser is unique, and what looks good or works in one browser may sometimes not work in another. If registrants can’t complete their enrolment, it reflects poorly on the event and increases the likelihood of losing the registration. Customizable forms for different event groups, custom ‘help’ text, and conditional fields for more sophisticated registration scenarios help streamline the attendee registration experience, too. Lastly, from an event management perspective, event planners should seek out event registration software that supports last-minute changes and the ability to edit forms on-the-fly.

Attendease is a powerful event registration platform whose features provide the foundation for all your meetings and events. With Attendease, you can provide a seamless experience by allowing attendees to register for the event without ever leaving your event website!

Here are some more great features:

Manage pricing categories, promo codes, and group passes
Use advanced form features, including global fields, conditional logic, custom fields
Manage secure payments with Stripe, Microsoft, Apple and/or Google Pay
Measure real-time registration, sales, and refunds

Want to learn more? Request a demo of Attendease today!

Key Pillars to Boost Your Event Registration Strategies

Event Management News

March 10, 2022

When organizing an event, prioritizing a frictionless, successful registration experience will have a positive ripple effect that can be felt through the entire event and beyond. Registering for an event is often the first touchpoint for attendees, and having flexible online registration is paramount to a positive registration experience. However, when it comes to event registration, one size does not fit all. For example, registering for a webinar or an in-house educational seminar differs greatly from the registration process for a multi-day user conference.

Accordingly, your event registration software needs to have the flexibility to accommodate various requirements, whether attendees are requesting a special meal, registering multiple people at once, or indicating accommodation preferences. Your event registration platform of choice may also need to provide the flexibility to create separate, optional add-on sessions such as gala dinners or pre-conference education sessions. Finally, the ability to tie registration to different tracks may be pivotal, so you can easily identify regular attendees, VIPs, or speakers and tailor their experiences accordingly.

Communicating Your Event Registration

The first step in any registration campaign is deciding how you’re going to announce—and then communicate—your upcoming event registration with your audience. It’s important to keep the tone and positioning consistent with other brand communications, so the process often begins by examining the same marketing channels that are already familiar to your audience.

Track Your Marketing Efforts

Take advantage of trackable URLs—also known as UTM parameters—or promo codes to define the success of each of your marketing campaigns. Both trackable URLs and promo codes can be shared with industry influencers, speakers, sponsors, and other collaborators, and will make it easier for you to define the success of your marketing efforts and measure ROI.

Consider The Entire Experience

Poor registration experience is a major contributor to registration drop-offs: when visitors who started the registration process don’t complete it. Consider technical aspects that are more “behind the scenes” but help reduce friction.

For instance, if your audience primarily interacts with your brand on mobile devices rather than on desktop browsers, make sure your registration software allows for mobile-friendly registrations.

Make sure you only ask what is absolutely necessary for your registration process, and use functionalities like conditioning fields and global fields to make it easier for your attendees to complete their registration. Conditional fields will help to ask questions that are only relevant to a certain group of people, and global fields will allow you to pre-fill data about the attendee that you may already have in your event platform, saving your attendee time and making it easier for them to complete the registration.

Make Your Event Website Stand Out

Event websites continue to be an extremely powerful marketing tool for promoting your upcoming events. They provide potential attendees with detailed information about the event while educating them on why they must not miss it.

Ensure that your event registration platform allows you to utilize your branding and messaging so you can keep your brand consistent across all platforms. It’s entirely possible that your potential attendees are visiting your website after they’ve seen the event advertised elsewhere, simply because they want to know more about your event, or because they need one final push before committing to the registration.

Want another great website tip? Don’t forget to complete the look and feel of your website by using professional images from past events. Great photos help to induce FOMO; if you effectively showcase a can’t-miss event, your audience will respond to the additional social proof with increased registrations.

How to Optimize Your Event Registration Strategies and Process

Regardless of its format and content, there’s no event without your attendees! It’s, therefore, crucial to design your event’s onboarding process to be as easy and smooth as possible to encourage registrations. Below are a few pointers on how to optimize your event registration process to encourage a large turnout and make your event as successful as possible.

Encourage Group Registration

For many events, it makes sense to offer streamlined registration for groups, such as companies and organizations. In order for this to work, your event registration app must be flexible enough to handle group categorizations, and an optimized event registration process for groups should match the ease and simplicity of the standard individual registration process. As an extra incentive, it’s a great idea to provide discounts in the form of coupons to encourage group registrations.

Keep Event Registration Forms Concise

Whittle your form down to its essentials and only ask for information that’s pertinent to the event registration. Research has consistently shown that the more pages someone must fill out in a form, the likelier they are to abandon it.

Avoid Repetitive Event Registration Forms

If a common event registration pain point is having to fill out lengthy forms, it’s best practice to avoid making return attendees fill out the same forms more than once. Because if an individual has already attended a previous event from the organizer, why should they have to fill out the same lengthy form again? Your event registration system should be intelligent enough to pre-populate personal information from its database to reduce the frustration that comes with filling out forms.

Place Registration Forms On The Event Website

Many registration platforms take the user from the event website to a third party registration site, which disrupts the user experience and, many times, doesn’t carry the branding forward from the website to the registration. To provide a better user experience and keep control of your brand, consider event registration platforms that can provide a seamless registration experience to your attendees, which can also increase trust.

Ensure Brand Consistency Across Registration Forms and Website

A professional, consistent look between your conference’s website and the online registration form helps potential attendees feel comfortable. If registrants land on a page that looks nothing like the site they came from, they might feel like they are in the wrong place and feel hesitant to complete the form. Keeping a consistent representation of your brand gives your registrant confidence in your organization and your event.

Ensure Registration Forms Work Across Browsers

Whether you are developing your own registration form, using a plug-in, or using online event registration software, you will want to test your form in each of the major browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are a great start. Every browser is unique, and what looks good or works in one browser may sometimes not work in another. Although most issues are minor, such as alignment or spacing inconsistencies, in some cases your form may not work at all. If registrants can’t complete their enrollment, it reflects poorly on the event and increases the likelihood of losing the registration.

Design a Mobile-Friendly Event Registration Process

With mobile devices taking a 55% market share over desktop devices between January 2021 and January 2022 according to Statcounter, it is more important than ever to ensure that the online registration process is mobile-friendly. This means that your conference’s registration should be accessible not only from a desktop computer, but also from any tablet or phone. By taking this step, you offer your registrants the convenience of registering immediately from wherever they happen to be.

Prioritize User-Friendly Payments

With e-commerce becoming increasingly common, attendees expect to be able to pay for tickets digitally without hassle. If your event management software supports customizable registration forms, you can make the online payment process as simple as possible for attendees. Plus, integrated payment solutions not only begin to create a positive attendee experience, but they also save you time and administrative headaches.

Offer a choice of secure payment processing methods and the ability to choose different event pass types at various price points, i.e. single-day tickets versus 3-day passes. Providing a variety of ticketing options, accommodating discounts and refunds, and offering promotional codes take the guesswork out of the process for attendees and can also allow more people to attend your event.

If you host international events, consider a platform that can accept payments in multiple currencies.

4 Easy Tips to Drive Your Registration Further

1. Remarketing Can Boost Registration By 20%

Incomplete registrants—the people who have stalled midway through your event registration process—are an often-overlooked source of additional event attendees. A study conducted by the Baymard Institute found that e-commerce transaction abandonment rates averaged almost 70%, with some studies reporting rates up to 84%. That’s a lot of lost registrations!

Event registration case studies (including this one by the RFID Journal) have shown that, with a solid remarketing campaign, you can gain back 20% or more of your event registrations that have stalled somewhere along the way. That’s 6% of your overall registration total. With some thoughtful target marketing and a series of strategic email campaigns, you can boost attendance to your event and increase your revenues significantly.

Using the registration module of your event technology platform, you should be able to compile a comprehensive report that will identify all of the partially completed or incomplete registration forms. Then, set up a series of automated yet personalized emails to go out to these people who have abandoned their registration process, regardless of where in the funnel they dropped out.

If you think it might apply, you can also include some reassuring language to your event’s legal policy or terms and conditions. The tone should be friendly and lighthearted. Here are some great examples of effective emails to inspire you.

Registration abandonment emails typically have much higher click-to-open and open rates than usual. This is because the prospective attendees are already familiar with the event and just need a little reminder or encouragement to complete their registration form. By creating an email campaign filled with engaging event content, keynote speaker highlights, or even a discount for prospective attendees, you can increase your event registration revenues considerably.

2. Be Proactive and Catch Problems Early

Sometimes people drop out of the registration process due to design flaws in your event registration forms. Most people will not take the time to tell you that they experienced a problem, so be proactive: take the time to double-check and test all scenarios before launching your forms to the public.

3. Schedule and Send Event Registration Reminders

If your event invitation contains an early bird discount, you can use the upcoming deadline as a reason to send another email reminder to your incomplete or abandoned registrants. Make sure you send it at least a few days, if not a week, before the deadline to give them adequate time to take advantage of the opportunity. Sending another one the day before the deadline is not taboo either. Remember, these are people who have already shown interest in your event. They just need a little nudge!

4. Utilize Valuable Post-Event Data

The registration process can yield some valuable attendee data. But tracking, storing, analyzing, and effectively utilizing the volume of event data for all your events is no small feat. Thankfully, sophisticated event planning software like EventUp Planner can simplify the task by integrating with marketing automation tools (HubSpot), marketing analytics software (Marketo), CRM solutions (Salesforce), and email marketing tools (MailChimp, Infusionsoft). By integrating your event registration software with your marketing tech stack, you can send automated follow-up emails after registration to ensure attendees are consistently engaged, garner value from post-registration survey data, and export reports that track performance through the entire event lifecycle, from registration through post-event follow-up.

Technology to Support Your Event Registration Strategies

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing how flexible event registration software needs to be to accomplish a successful event in today’s market, and just how many pain points there can be if you haven’t yet discovered a solution.

EventUp Planner is a powerful event registration platform that simplifies the management of the meetings and events that your organization relies on. From digital marketing and registration to speakers, attendees, rooms and sponsors, EventUp Planner simplifies the complexity of event registration.

Our built-in templates and drag-and-drop interface enable your teams to quickly build and launch event websites, registration, and communication flows that are on-brand and look amazing.

Here are a few features of EventUp Planner (formerly Attendease) that will support you with your event registration strategies:

Design white-labeled, fully branded event websites
Create branded email templates for every event
Design a custom event app
Easily handle different registration types and waitlists
Manage pricing categories, promo codes, and group passes
Manage secure payments with Stripe, Microsoft, Apple and/or Google Pay
Create unique registration forms for specific pass types
Save registration forms to use again in future meetings and events
Keep attendees up-to-date through our mobile event app
Track and measure your event performance

Want to learn more about EventUp Planner and how it can help you streamline your event registration strategies? Book a demo today!

5 Things to Consider When Planning Your Next Product Launch Event

Event Management News

February 28, 2022

The importance of a great product launch event cannot be overstated. Momentum is everything! Curating a fantastic first impression to both your customers and the market-at-large can have a drastic, long-lasting impact on your product’s success.

On the other hand, an underwhelming launch can have negative effects, increasing the likelihood that your product fizzles out and fades away faster than you can say “Microsoft Zune” or “Google Glass”.

Consider these five tips when preparing for your next release and ensure you launch your new product with a bang, not a whisper.

1. Create Hype for Your Launch Event

The hype machine is, in fact, real. A truly great launch will have people everywhere wondering what all the fuss is about. Once they’ve discovered your product for themselves, they’ll be sure to leave their own enthusiastic reviews, increasing momentum even further.

In today’s e-commerce driven environment, reviews are valuable social currency. According to Bazaarvoice, just 50 reviews have the potential to increase sales by 30%!

With social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok being viewed as conversion drivers and trend spotters, generating online awareness has never been more important. In addition, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the adoption of e-commerce to the masses: According to McKinsey & Company, 10 years’ development happened in Q1 2020 alone. A strong online presence should no longer be seen as optional in your product launch, but rather a requisite piece of its success.

2. Anticipate Uncertainty

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us all anything, it is to continue to expect the unexpected.

Manufacturing and supply chain delays remain a challenge for many industries, including automotive, fashion, and electronics. Throughout 2021, shipping container prices increased tenfold, the pandemic adversely affected manufacturers in developing countries, and consumer spending increased significantly in North America, further exacerbating existing issues.

Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 5 video game console, which was released in November 2020, was met with immediate supply challenges, citing a worldwide semiconductor shortage. Coupled with the increased desire for video game consoles during the pandemic, Sony nonetheless still managed to break its previous generation’s launch records despite the shortage.

This would appear to be a success at first glance. However, with unauthorized resellers driving up resale prices of the new console and online communities forming around predicting product “drops” at retailers, the hype had become so large that Sony still had room to grow their sales significantly. So, they pivoted to extend the life cycle of the previous PlayStation 4 console past its original expected discontinuation in 2021 to try and meet consumer demands, and continued to produce both PS4 and PS5 in tandem into 2022.

The challenges that COVID-19 brought will affect both product availability and consumer trust well into the future. Your product launch needs to be robust enough to forecast how to overcome these challenges and more.

3. Plan Early

How do you create hype and anticipate the unexpected? The best way to do so is to start planning early. Here are our recommendations for elements to consider:

Begin brainstorming your launch 6-12 months in advance. This often involves communicating with retail partners, event planning, and scheduling product availability dates long before the launch.
Ensure your creative team readies a concept 5-6 months prior to launch. This way, you can align everyone executing your marketing in correctly promoting the product’s branding, unique selling propositions, and key features.
Distribute the product to brand ambassadors at least 90 days before launch and begin to give product samples to consumers to start generating ratings, reviews, and images. This early feedback is pivotal and allows you to course-correct or adjust materials if needed prior to the official launch.
In the weeks prior to your product launch, run countdown campaigns across your brand’s social media channels. This can include CTAs for consumers to sign up for email alerts, teaser videos, and social media-specific presales. Don’t forget product-specific or event hashtags to help you go viral!

4. Curate an Exclusive Launch Event

Ideally, you should build your product launch event around two groups of people:

Your existing customer base and social media followers; and

Those that can help grow your following to help your product reach new heights. Examples of this would be influencers, media, and industry experts.

Your existing customers already know and love your brand, so be sure to find ways to give them an experience that is both on-brand yet unlike anything they’ve experienced from you prior. Encourage exclusivity throughout. This can be as simple as a product-related goody bag or discount code, or as elaborate as a one-on-one VIP session at your event. These experiences are proven to improve sales: 91% of consumers “have more positive feelings about brands after attending events and experiences” and 85% are “likely to purchase after participating in events and experiences,” according to EventTrack.

For influencers, sample campaigns and other branded goodies are a great way to get buy-in prior to the event alongside an invite to the event itself. It’s a small price to pay to gain access to a loyal following that may not otherwise have exposure to your products.

Attendease, the leading event registration platform, can help you organize and leverage your product launch audience. Our built-in templates and easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface enable your teams to quickly build and launch event websites, registration, and communication flows that are on brand and look amazing. The Attendease platform provides the foundation that ensures all event details are addressed, changes are simple, and repetitive tasks are automated—allowing planners to focus on amazing event design.

If you’re still not sure where to begin, we recommend reading our guide on How to Plan a Successful Product Launch Event.

5. Have a Follow-Up Plan

The hours, days, and weeks after your launch event present an opportunity to squeeze every last drop of hype out of your release, so don’t miss out!

This is a crucial time to capitalize from customers new and old who could not make your event but wanted to, or those who have heard the hype but were hesitant to commit at first. Use the same strategies you employed pre-event (i.e. exclusive hashtags, email campaigns, and social media activity) and combine them with newfound footage generated by attendees over the course of your launch for added social capital.

Conclusion

A successful launch is not a flash in the pan, but rather a well-thought-out process that helps build momentum and drive your product forward before, during, and after the launch. The stronger the launch, the bigger the hype…The bigger the hype, the stronger the reviews…And the stronger the reviews, the more success your product will have.

Book a free consultation to learn how Attendease can help you configure your event registration process and provide a smooth registration and post-event experience to your attendees.

Spotlight: The truth about event engagement with Samuel J. Smith

Spotlight Interviews

November 29, 2021

In today’s spotlight series, you will learn more about event engagement from Samuel J. Smith, founder of the event gamification software, Social Point. Sam produced hybrid events in a prior life and led the MPI research team that developed the baseline research for virtual and hybrid events. And today, he helps exhibitors and marketers make virtual and in-person events fun through event gamification.

Attendee Types and Event Engagement Expectations

Pre-pandemic, Sam wrote an article about the myth of 100% attendee engagement. The concept he shared is more relevant than ever. In this article, he mentioned the existence of six attendee types: creators, critiquers, collectors, shares, joiners and inactives. Each attendee type will have different needs from technology and therefore, they’re going to require different engagement experiences.

Whether it’s an in-person, hybrid, or virtual event, you will have some version of these attendee types in your event. For example, a creator is someone who enjoys creating things, they take a white piece of paper and they can draw or come up with lots of ideas. Creators represent about 10% of one’s audience.

Critiquers can’t really come up with anything. But if they see what you did, they can write 40 pages of why that’s terrible and need to change. And you want to embrace that behavior, because that’s actually about 30 to 40% of your audience.

Can you create an event experience where creators are engaged, but also critiquers? Instead of letting them fight against each other, how can they enjoy working together to create something better? If a creator makes a post on Facebook, you get critiques to comment on it. So how can you do that inside your event? Those are the types of questions you need to ask.

There’s another behavior called the collector: they’re the ones who run around a tradeshow and collect all the things, whether pens, buttons, or notepads. We’ve designed events that had buttons all around the venue. When they realized there were different buttons, they were trying to collect the full set. Another way to think about this is using gamification to collect badges for example.

The other three attendee types are shares, joiners, and inactive. There are people out there that will join everything. They don’t really do much when they join, but they just like to sign up for things. And there’s a group where people like to share, they just like to tell people about other things. And then of course, there’s always people who will do nothing. No matter what, no matter how hard you try, they will do nothing.

Once we understand this concept it’s easier to think about what types of experiences we can create in our events to drive the event engagement from these different attendee profiles. In a chat, one of the tools that we like to use is to have a topic-based conversation. This can motivate creators and critiquers to participate. Having a moderator is important to get that conversation going, even before the session starts. We noticed that having these easy, fun questions, in the beginning, can help to continue driving engagement later.

To fulfill the needs of collectors, we have done scavenger hunts or multi-day event gamification, offering different badges for them to collect. For the collector, it is not about being on the top of the leaderboard. The reward is in collecting those badges.

In order to build opportunities for most people to engage, we have what I call a layered engagement approach. You will not please everyone all the time. So rather than putting all the energy in one session, try to think across the entire event and give opportunities for different attendee types to engage when it makes sense for them too. In the past, we’ve built a chart to find what engagement opportunities existed. That can make sure we tried to appeal to all people at some point during the event.

Measuring Event Engagement Success

Considering this layered engagement approach for unique attendee types you will find out that you will never have 100% engagement across all opportunities you provide. For chat and Q&A you may have 50% of your audience participating, while for gamification you may get 40% of the audience engaged, but people who engaged with the chat and Q&A are not necessarily the same as those who engaged with the game.

For games managed with SocialPoint, we have a dashboard that shows how many players you got, how many games were played, how many questions were answered, and so on.

But you need to go down another level because some of those numbers are just vanity metrics. If you want to know if you hit your event objectives, you need to dive deeper. For example, our clients designed a trivia game and they can evaluate the questions by learning objectives. So you can report out on how well players performed against those marketing objectives.

The players don’t know anything about all these marketing objectives and learning objectives, they’re playing the game. But on the back end, we have that data grouped. Therefore we can then report on it and it helps event planners in decision making.

We do a lot of sales, kickoffs and national sales meetings as well. So you can have the Northeast team versus the Southwest team and look at the data in that way too. That helps you to find out why one team is outperforming the other based on those learning objectives.

For marketers interested in lead capture, you can see where a person exists in the customer journey. So they look at engagement on these virtual events to determine if they’re a new customer, in the decision-making process, or in the research phase, for example. This can help to confirm if the event has helped to move leads down the funnel. This can support the sales team in prioritizing who to follow up with, too.

Building Your Tech Stack to Support Event Engagement

In the past, in a world pre-COVID, we would talk a lot about the concept of all-in-one event management software. But what we’re seeing now more and more, especially with the increasing needs for virtual and hybrid events, it became more clear that it’s nearly impossible to have one platform that can do everything and do everything well.

With this, we’re diving deeper into the concept of having one strong foundational tool for event management and plug in other tools to support in different areas. And Attendease and Social Point is a great example of that. You can surely build your event with Attendease, you can design a fully branded event website, the registration flow, manage the event agenda, but that gamification component would be best managed by another platform like Social Point. To learn more about how to incorporate gamification into your next event, contact Social Point.

Hybrid Event Agenda Design with Mahoganey Jones

Event Management

November 3, 2021

We have recently concluded our first 3X30 Live Talks Series with event expert guests. In our last conversation, we discussed hybrid event agenda design with guest Mahoganey Jones, CEO & Founder at Event Specialists. Mahoganey shared some insightful ideas around agenda design and debunked some myths around hybrid event budget and content delivery. Read the key takeaways below.

“Hybrid events have been around for a long time, they were here pre-pandemic. Since the pandemic has hit though, we have changed how we approach our event agendas. We were first in panic mode to pivot in-person events to virtual formats. And without thinking, or allowing us to rethink what the goal of that event really is, we didn’t question if the agenda needed to be matched ‘one for one“. Read below some considerations from Mahoganey pertaining to hybrid events.

Hybrid Event Technology

We’ve been using the pandemic as a crutch or as a limitation. We keep hearing “we can’t do” or “we can’t accomplish”, versus how we can still accomplish our goals within limitations. We can use the limitations as a positive VIP level experience in-person, ultra VIP online… and look through a different perspective.

Technology was never meant to limit how we design events. It was meant to enhance what we’re doing while allowing us to hit our goals and objectives. We’re looking at the technology first, and then designing our agendas to match the bells and whistles of a platform versus seeing what our agenda needs to accomplish, and then finding the technology that is best suited to deliver that message. We’re putting the cart before the horse.

In this process, I feel like we forgot about the goals and what we’re actually looking to accomplish. Not every platform is meant for every type of event. We’re literally just building based on what the platform can do.

Attendee Journey in a Hybrid Event

I truly believe that a hybrid event is one customer journey that you’re taking your attendees through, whether they’re attending in-person or online. I feel like the intersection is important, and we design elements to ensure each audience gets exactly what they need. But we also need to understand that they’re an audience as a whole.

There’s no one true experience. We don’t need to deliver every session for the in-person audience and for the virtual audience. When we talk about the intersectionality between the two audiences, let’s think of how we can ensure that both audiences are getting the experience you’re looking for them to have.

If you think of the analogy of a hockey game: the in-person audience is watching the game happen live, listening to the announcers, etc. The audience who’s watching from home is not going to catch everything being thrown in the in-person audience. Does it make them feel like they’re not part of the same experience though? Absolutely not.

It’s about being mindful of how you’re ensuring your audiences are getting what they need from the event so that you’re not leaving anyone out. You don’t need to 100% translate the entire agenda between in-person and virtual. Virtual audiences don’t necessarily have to ask questions for every session if that may not be the goal of each session. We also don’t have to broadcast every single session.

We can be selective on the content that’s best delivered to each group. For example, entertainment can be great for both audiences, but it’s not always great to share workshops with two audiences.

When you’re planning your event agenda, create a spreadsheet to see how the flow is going to happen. See where you can put those intersectionalities together. And that the in-person audience and the online audience is getting a feel for that experience that you’re looking to deliver.

In-Person X Virtual Event Content

One thing the pandemic has also been great and afforded us as event producers is the ability to shorten content. TEDx talks are short, concise, and 10-20 minutes long for a reason. I don’t know when all of a sudden, we decided that we needed 90-minute keynote sessions. But the pandemic has allowed us to shorten a lot of things. We can now shorten that five-day conference. Still deliver the same bang for your buck, but in two to three days versus five.

For medical conferences and other conferences where there are CEUs or credits associated with the content, the sessions would have to be a certain amount of time to meet those criteria. Though there is no hard and fast rule that says all of those sessions have to happen on one day, four or five days consecutively.

We should have a look at how to best deliver the content. Spreading your content out doesn’t mean you’re diluting your content. It means you’re also opening your mindset and your audience’s ability to attend different sessions at work for them. With cross time zones, there’s now a hidden virtual audience that we didn’t know existed. We’ve opened up these opportunities to reach larger audiences, we’re truly global in the content that we’re delivering. So how can we best maximize that for our organizations?

Hybrid Events Budget

Let’s debunk the myth that says you need two or three times more budget to produce a hybrid event. Pre-pandemic, we would normally have a pretty complete in-person agenda and then the virtual was always that afterthought. When you’re looking at your agenda, your event content should help determine what you can actually deliver online.

Hybrid Event Planning Considerations

I was always a firm believer in lighting and sound. Without lighting and sound in any conference, it falls flat. For a hybrid experience, we have to ensure that the sound and the lighting of the in-person audience can be translated to the virtual audience. So using that to your advantage means you can use it as a design element for the in-person audience, it also creates a beautiful feed for the virtual audience so that they’re able to see and hear the speakers with clarity.

For example: have your presenters and audience Q&A using a microphone, so that the audio can be captured for the virtual audience. Or, alternatively, train your speakers to make sure that they repeat the question that was asked from the in-person audience to allow the virtual audience to hear it as well. Lighting is one of those things that almost always becomes an afterthought.

Personally, I always work with the AV company, see what you already have in the room, see what you’ve already paid for, and see how you can allocate that to make sure that it’s meeting the needs of both the in-person and the virtual audience.

Plus, reconsider the venues that you’re working with. The pandemic has allowed venues to redesign their own spaces so that it can work for you. Look at what is already built-in. Do they have the technology to support it? Do you need that massive room or can you go into a smaller room? We’re seeing the rise of these virtual studios that you can go to that have space and be able to accommodate what you’re looking to accommodate.

Event Planning Resources from Mahoganey Jones

One thing I like to start with is an exercise called the SSK Method: Start – Stop – Keep. It’s a tool that is valid when re-imagining what your event could look like. So you ask your team:

What would you like us to start doing?
What would you like us to stop doing?
And what would you like us to keep?

And within that exercise we can actually make decisions and that you are hitting the mark from an internal perspective. You can pick up on some of those cues to see what you can start doing, what you can keep and see what you can stop.

The one-page Event Business Plan (download free here) is how I like to drive what happens in the event overall. I also use it as a tool to drill down what is actually going to land on the agenda and what is going to happen. The one-page business plan takes all of the different elements that you are going to cover in the event, drill down to one page so that you understand the mission, the target audience, the goals, and the KPIs you’re looking to meet. With that being listed front and center, and very concise, it’s a lot easier to understand your goals and to support your agenda decisions.

Conclusion

The pandemic is allowing us the opportunity to redesign and rethink what the in-person X virtual experience can look like. It’s allowing us to redesign what the event experience can look like, and to drill down to the core of what our agenda should and could look like.

This is a good time to step back and think about your event goals first, and then find the best technology, the best attendee journey, the best content format, etc. to support those goals. We don’t need to provide the exact same experiences to both audiences, but the same outcomes. You can watch the full conversation with Mahoganey here.

Debunking the Myth of All-in-One Event Management Software with Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey

Event Management

October 19, 2021

We recently spoke to Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey, CEO at Nifty Method, about the concept of all-in-one event management platform. We talked about why this concept is flawed and what approach tech providers and event planners can take. Here are some key takeaways from the conversation with Lindsay where she debunks the myth of all-in-one event tech.

Technology has become more and more part of the event planning landscape, whether to manage registration, event agenda, abstract, AV team, food and beverage, and more… While event planners are eager to find a tech solution that can do everything under one roof, the reality is much different. There has never been a platform that could truly fit all of these moving pieces together.

As Lindsay shared, event tech platforms begin by creating one really great piece of software that solves one really big problem. If they can do that really well and without bugs, they can then help solve another problem.

So, building a solution that can navigate from procurement to abstract management, food and beverage, registration, and more is something hard to come by. Lindsay even questions if that’s ever going to happen.

What drives the need for all-in-one solutions?

In our recent LinkedIn Live, Lindsay shared three main influencers in the drive for all-in-one solutions:

Price

Planners are often solving for price. It’s easier to buy in volume with everything under one roof because then you can negotiate. You can check 15 things off your checklist, and that’s going to lead to money savings.

Procurement

When you look at it from the enterprise perspective, those brands are managing a lot of moving pieces: procurement wants it to be simple. They’ve already signed and had the security teams jump through a lot of hoops. So that price and procurement run hand in hand.

Simplicity

It is not uncommon for things to go completely wrong on the day of the event. If you only use one platform on a virtual or hybrid event and that platform breaks, that’s scary. But it’s also just one vendor to deal with.

How to build the perfect event tech stack

It always comes down to the event goals. What are you trying to do and solve for your attendees, exhibitors, sponsors? At Nifty Method, the event’s team uses what they call the Event Tech Maturity Sheet (you can download yours free here).

In this requirements gathering document, you are able to break down the different elements of actually managing the event so that you have the answers to what you need before talking to a vendor and so that the vendor can understand what your desired tech stack looks like.

Questions you may add to your requirements gathering phase:

What do you have?
What do you need?
What’s important to you?
What’s good to have?
What’s a must-have?

In this process, you need to think about all stakeholders (including attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, leadership, and others), the goals for each of them, and how you intend to achieve those goals.

Just as you would plan with an in-person event, going from one room into another and having space and time to interact with people in the hallway, you need to have that same approach in a virtual scenario. What specific things would you like to happen to achieve those goals? You can add that to your requirements gathering document also.

What a foundational platform looks like?

The event management platform is really just one of the things in the grand scheme of planning the actual event. The platform you choose will depend largely on the type of event you manage and its specific requirements, be it a large trade show, an incentive trip, a traditional annual conference or user conference, etc.

When shopping for that foundational solution, I think I would turn some of that question back around and challenge the sales teams at the event platforms to reverse engineer. As planners, we don’t know what we need, we know what our needs are, and those things don’t necessarily translate well.

So the baseline lies in the vendor’s sandbox to develop and build a one-sheet or a capability deck that those of us doing research can go and check. That’s why the Event Tech Bible is so great for event apps. Then we can go to the peer network to learn more about those vendors – Do we like these people? Are they good? Will they be kind to us? Are they affordable?

An event tech horror story

I think it would be a user conference we did last fall. We’ve chosen a platform that did probably 98% of everything we needed. And then the platform went dark for our livestream audience.

The issue was coming from the vendor’s servers. It’s like Marriot was open, but no one could get in the doors and you had everything inside. We have decided to almost build the entire first day in Vimeo, and to tell the 9,000 attendees online that we had to move from one platform to another.

This is a great example of putting all of our eggs in one basket, all of our networking was there, together with sponsorship, partnership agreements, the actual presentations with the exception of this small audience we had at the program site.

That is the single scariest example of how it’s been over the last year, not having a backup, because even when you test it, it can still go wrong. I wish many of the tech platforms could allow us to copy and paste the event into one of our instances and move it into a backup platform in case it goes awry.

As an agency response to that, when we work with a client to set an event up, we build a second backup on a second platform entirely, so we’re not dependent on somebody else’s servers.

I’m not the only one with this kind of story. There are lots of people who’ve had that on a number of different platforms. This is not platform-specific, sometimes the internet goes down. Sometimes it’s raining really hard. Sometimes there’s a hurricane. And just like you would have a backup plan when there’s the hurricane in Miami and you need to go north to Tampa, you should be able to do the same for a virtual experience.

Walk-though a requirements gathering process with Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey

To dive deeper into the discovery process Lindsay uses with her clients at Nifty Method, she showed us how she uses the event Tech Maturity Sheet and the requirements gathering. Watch the clip below to hear from Lindsay. Video player

Conclusion

Rather than seeking the mythical all-in-one event management platform, the way to go instead is to choose foundational tech platforms that can cover 60-70% of the needs of your event portfolio, and then seek out additional event management tools to complement it. You can use these dedicated tools to cover more specific aspects of your event like networking and audience response.

And to future-proof your events, it’s crucial that you take a few steps back. Evaluate your event goals and the experience you’re looking to deliver to your guests before committing to event management platform. In other words, you need to think from a design-first perspective. Here’s another article to dive deeper into this concept and to help you choose the best event management platform for your needs. You can watch the full conversation with Lindsay here.