Technology must not be confused with content, but it can supply some wondrous tools for saving time, adding value and opening new exciting formats for meetings and events. That was the message from last month’s CN/Active Network ‘Harnessing events technology’ Round table of 20 event industry professionals at 195 Piccadilly, the BAFTA HQ.
Active Network’s Senior Account Director for EMEA, Peter Donnelly, presented a brief company overview and looked at how ‘The Holy Trinity’ of event planners, event marketers and corporate executives, were being brought together through the harnessing of events technology.
He presented Active’s own suite of solutions, including integrated new-generation registration and booking systems designed to work in a holistic way and at a variety of levels. “RegOnline is our online registration attendee management tool; Conference Solution offers a full suite of integrated technologies which support tier one events such as Cisco and HP; and StarCite, acquired earlier this year, bringing the strategic meetings management programmes and the supplier marketplace to the table.”
“The smart use of the right technologies to help organisers run their events more efficiently helps drive engagement with audiences and delivers real business benefits,” said Donnelly.
The CEO of the EventWorld agency, Michael Packford, said clients passed on their own attendee management system: “A media congress for 700 journalists in Thailand we ran recently involved using their supplied online registration.”
The International Federation of Automotive Engineering’s Helen Lycett said in her experience there was often one system for smaller events, while for larger international congresses, “partners seem to invent the wheel each time”, sometimes “with inefficient registration systems”.
Ex-Imagination guru and ISES UK President Richard Foulkes, now running The Paradise Experience agency, believed that for some events, “a spreadsheet is absolutely fine. If you’ve got 50 people attending your event that you know, then a spreadsheet can do better than anything else”. Active Network’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, Izania Downie challenged: “no matter how small the event is by using the right system to automate administrative processes frees up the organisers time to work on more valuable aspects of the event than updating spreadsheets constantly and risking human error.”
Foulkes cautioned against “event expectations”. “You have to be careful that technology does not lead the way,” he added. “Make sure that from the moment you first intece with a customer they see you in the right format. That will determine what technology you need. This could be from registration down to how you display your presentations.”
Event technology is a tool, an enabler, said Donnelly designed to make your event easier to organise, help you engage more with your audience in different ways and help provide information useful to you and your client’s organisation”.
CN Editor Paul Colston asked whether technological advances were speeding up to such an extent that content was getting lost. “Are those that are the most dextrous at using the new technology the ones with the loudest voices?” he asked.
Donnelly urged organisers to tie in technology with their event strategy and their business strategy. “You can then define what is going to help your organisation and choose the right type of event technology to help you deliver that,” he said, adding that technology for technology’s sake “could lead you to spend a lot of money yet it may not necessarily work for your event”.
Engagement
Downie said recent experience had highlighted that organisations without a member or audience engagement strategy could not really have an understanding of why they were doing events. “Deploy the right strategy and deliver the right content; it may not need to through an event but could be through some other way, like a White Paper or a podcast.” she said.
Regardless of what technology tools we choose, Eventia Chairman Simon Hughes recommended packing a ‘phrasebook’ in any event tool box, to allow people at different levels to talk to each other. “Getting the conversation going between the website developer and my team who are event specialists, and then the research team who are thinking about the questions that we might ask visitors is hard, so a phrasebook is a very useful thing to have. We are in a fast world and sometimes we have conversations where nobody knows what others are talking about.”
CN’s Online Editor Sarah O’Donnell asked whether organisers found event technology daunting and, as a result, not using it to its full potential?
Reftech’s Ken Clayton thought few organisers have a handle on how to make the best use of their data. Partly because the terminology confuses people. “Forget the technology; think about what you are trying to do in the first place and then start thinking about what do you need to use in order to do it.”
Future Facilities’ Erin Richards said what is missing is people don’t always think about what the audience does in regards to online tools, apps and social media. “I’ve noticed in the UK that the take up on online is very slow. If I compare that to events in the US, there it is really fast; everyone is tweeting, where in the UK most of the Twitter feeds come from people who tend to write for industry publications and PRs rather than the attendees,” she added.
Donnelly pointed out some of the differences in techonology usage for events between sectors and geographies. “At one event with government heads in attendance in Saudi Arabia, we saw delegates very much into their social media, yet at another event we did with part of the United Nations, we never saw any such action.”
Ex-MPI UK President and hybrid events guru Paul Cook said some kind of industry technology helpdesk would be useful, “to guide people on what there is out there and what they need. Such advice is needed for the event planner but also to be passed on to their delegates”.
It was a point backed up by Hughes who remembered a medical exhibition where organisers had invested heavily in putting a big screen up for doctors to do a kind of test but no one touched it due to the fact they were terrified of looking stupid in front of their peers. And the content had cost a fortune.
“One needs to address the behaviour part of an event and enhance that. That is the bit that everyone misses,” said Foulkes.
A response Hughes noted when deploying online registration for the first time was that “it transformed the working practice. Suddenly we could work a lot faster and our clients were amazed we could turn things around more quickly”.
Lycett returned to the first principle of technology as a tool for delivering effective content. “No matter how slick the technology, if the content isn’t there that delegates can just perceive it as data gathering exercise on behalf of the planner and will not turn their device on,” she added.
Holistic approach
“With so much new technology in different separate areas perhaps, for the first time, we are starting to see some joined up options, where you can have one solution and that once you make an investment you no longer have this worry that something better will come along to outflanked you?” asked Colston.
Donnelly pointed out that businesses were mindful of future-proofing and acquiring different solutions because technology is quickly changing and the needs and requirements of the events industry are changing as well. “There’s always this fear that you’ve gone for a technology and invested in it, then it’s ‘my head on the block’ if it doesn’t work.”
He recommended using experts to track the changes in new technology. “We are not suggesting that you might need every new piece of technology kit, but in three years time there will be new technologies are things that your delegates might want.”
Clayton said a thought that had bugged him for over 30 years in the events staging business was the fact that the content you are delivering might not seem interesting to you and you might want to deliver it in a different way. “But that content might be interesting to your audience and if so, then why think up gimmicks to make them listen. If you have to do that, then maybe you have the content wrong.”
Foulkes begged to differ: “How many big conferences do you see with very serious people having very serious discussions and yet half the auditorium is empty? They actually want the information but they are bored by it because they have had five hours of it. So sometimes you need to have something to wake audiences up. Maybe that’s the opportunity for technology, to manage the story rather than manage the logistics.”
Downie spoke about a conference where the idea was to change the usual face-to-face event to a virtual one as the company thought it was the right thing to do being a technology specialist brand. “Having seen a huge drop off in attendance, they realised they needed to do the two together and now run the event as an annual hybrid and have found that the online element helped increase not only the audience online, but also physical delegate.”
Universal WorldEvents’ Husbands said: “The feedback we had from international doctors at one large medical conference was not about the flights or food, but that they loved meeting with other doctors in their field and exchanging best practice.”
Adding a venue perspective, the Royal Society of Medicene’s Nigel Collett said: “We’ve been doing hybrid streaming for some medical conference and we’ve had a full auditorium of 300 or so delegates. We hit 40 countries and an extra 2,500 people live. The client was amazed as it was the first time they’d done it.”
Colston wondered how reliant our events technologies were on the internet?
Etherlive’s Tom McInnery took up the point and advised that when working with customers you really need to evaluate how critical what you are doing is to their event. “Having one socket out of the wall with every extension cord plugged into it, may mean you need to consider some redundancies.”
McInnery also warned of the bandwagon rolling out the ‘free Wi-Fi’ at venues campaign. “Free Wi-Fi for certain things is brilliant, but for other events it is probably not the best to offer because simply the expectations on the service should be different. If you want to use something that will deliver 100 per cent, then you should expect to pay for it. That’s the bottom line. If you just want to check your emails from time to time then a standard connection is fine.”
A consensus view seemed to be that organisers must identify where they need expert advice and acknowledging that if they don’t know, they must find the right person.
“Planners can go into a venue with certain expectations but the venue need to probe and proactively ask the right questions,” added Foulkes.
McInery summed up a common thought running through the discussion: “The education gap is the biggest issue for the events industry today”.
“What I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis with Wi-Fi today is probably how we felt about AV a decade ago and people would have not known what rear projection was but we just learnt and we have that lingo now and we are just early on that IT life cycle.”
Downie finishes the session by emphasising the need for one technology suite that will provide a total solution encompassing every type of event from Strategic Meetings Management programme through to client events and delegate management. “What is most important is the ability to measure and track the data across all of the events to truly understand the ROI of a full events programme, improve the attendee experience, save costs and most importantly increase the value of the programme, only technology can do that for you.”
Click here to see Conference News’ gallery from the forum.
For more information on Active Network and its event technology offering see: www.activenetwork.co.uk/conferencenews
