Rob Curtis, managing director of technology consultancy Event Footprints, advocates a needs-based approach when building an effective tech stack for events.
The event tech stack has developed and evolved out of the data systems you’re already familiar with – email marketing, registration, badging, event apps, onsite engagement tools, spatial analysis platforms and so on.
Taken individually, systems and platforms like these generate data that can be collated and analysed to reveal insights and knowledge about particular aspects of your events, helping to enhance performance and success, reduce unnecessary costs and increase engagement.
So, whether you have chosen a ‘best-in-class’ approach for each component, or opted for an all-in-one solution, your event tech stack is probably largely in place, and you’re poised to take the next step: bringing all this data together into a single picture, allowing you to identify patterns in attendee behaviour across the whole life cycle of your event. You may have gaps here, but they should be straightforward to bridge given the availability of live survey and Q&A platforms, event apps, smart badges and lead capture tools.
At the Event Tech Forum in May in London, I used Vevox’s polling feature to sample opinions from event professionals. When asked to rate the importance of measuring ‘event impact’ on a scale from 1 to 5, the average rating was 4.33, indicating its high significance. However, the average rating for their organisation’s level of maturity in event measurement was only 2.23. This discrepancy suggests that while there is an understanding of the importance of measuring events, the implementation and reporting needs improvement.
The key to successfully deploying your event tech stack to support a robust measurement approach relies on having clearly defined data needs and goals – finding the right data job and avoiding the trap of it remaining siloed within the various platforms.
Define your data needs by engaging with your key stakeholders to identify essential metrics.
Sponsors might seek exposure, engagement and leads; event managers may want to focus on effective execution; Sales may prioritise lead generation; and Marketing could aim for brand exposure. Understanding and defining these needs is foundational to selecting the right tech stack, and ensuring the right metrics can be captured.
