Planning an event involves a lot of moving pieces, from co- ordinating venues to communi- cating with attendees. Bringing some new technology into the picture might not be the first task on your list, but leveraging the right tools can make your life easier and your occasion more exciting.
We’re not talking about incredibly complex or expensive technology. You don’t need drones flying overhead to wow your guests and you shouldn’t hold out for teleporters to make it easier for your guests to arrive. A few mobile apps and online platforms can be all it takes to raise your event to the next level.
According to Guidebook’s 2014 State of Mobile Event Technology report, event planners are harnessing the power of these mobile apps for meetings of all shapes and sizes with great success.
How are event planners using technology?
Almost all of the respondents to the report (91 per cent) said they had a positive return on investment with their mobile event apps. In particular, they noticed improvements in the all-important attendee satisfaction measure, along with an impact on the number of attendees and registrants, revenue and social sharing.
Having the right tools in place can also help event coordinators address some of their leading concerns, such as marketing, increasing attendance, transferring registration data and more.
Event technology can support these goals in a number of ways, particularly by helping to better engage participants before, during and after the meeting.
What types of tools are available? Here are four cool up-and-coming options:
- Crowd Mics: Tired of running microphones around the conference floor? Want to spark greater audience interaction? Crowd Mics is a mobile app that transforms your attendees’ iOS and Android devices into microphones. It integrates with your room’s sound system, allowing them to be heard throughout the room. Encouraging dialogue just got a little easier.
- Eversnap: A picture’s worth a thousand words, but sometimes you can’t capture the fullness of your remarkable event from just one lens. Eversnap solves that problem by providing a platform for gathering all of your guests’ videos and photos in one album. Not only can you see your event from their eyes, your attendees will enjoy reminiscing over memories and discovering photos their friends and colleagues took.
- Speecheo: Everyone wants to go viral with their most brilliant content. Speecheo helps you share your conference material online and analyse what parts of a speech were most interesting and intriguing to your audience. This web-based program has taken the attention of the event industry, winning the Imex America startup competition.
- sli.do: Not all audience members want to speak aloud to a large crowd, but many have insights and ideas. With sli.do, they can participate in live polls and ask questions. Another great way to boost engagement, this option is useful for panel discussions, company meetings and more.
Carly Lewis is general manager – Asia, for cievents. This article originally appeared on the company's event management blog
