Making a personal connection is really the goal of your event. A connection between your attendees, a connection between your organization and your members, a connection between your speakers and your attendees. There’s a whole web of connections that need to be nurtured.
So, what’s the best way to make those connections? Here are Four Tips to make the event experience more personal.
1. Engage With Your Audience at ALL Your Events, Even the Smallest Ones
You have thousands of people who come to your main conference, but you also want to maintain touchpoints at all the events that happen beyond your main event, like your webinars and trainings throughout the year? You want to build a community that covers all those “mini” events as well. You don’t need an elaborate, full-blown event app but you do need “proportional engagement”. Our Events Calendar allows attendees to register for each mini event, get schedule information, ask a private question, follow a discussion and give feedback. You want people to be able to talk with each other, even if there are only 4o people attending! The Events Calendar covers what most event apps totally ignore but are, in sum, a major reason why people are members of your organization.
2. Target Your Messaging
Your audience always has different groups. They may have different job functions, come from different regions, have different interests and more. For example you may have “staff members”, “committee members”, “exhibitors” etc. You want to send different content to those different groups. How? Personalization Tools within your event app allow attendees to select their interests and group (or you can assign). Grouping and Segmenting your audience lets you deliver different notifications, and different content. Attendees can add themselves to different interest groups so that they will get the notifications and discussions related to only those interests. Or the organizer can integrate the “type” field from their CRM. So they can send notifications to, for example, just the “Board of Directors.” It’s easy. And it’s personal.
3. Encourage Discussion
Everyone has different interests. And recognizing those subgroups within your event audience and enabling them to engage with each other boosts a more personalized experience. So if an attendee who is interested in GDPR issues wants to connect with other attendees who know about GDPR, you can use the event app to leverage that connection. Our Personalization Tools allow for that, enabling attendees of similar interests to find each other, and engage via blind email to meet up or ask questions. And our Hot Topics gives your members a forum for conversations that are important to your organization.
4. Your Event Destination Counts and What Your Attendees Do in That City Matters.
Over 80% of attendees state that location of the event matters in their choice to attend an event.* Your attendees want to love your event city. And you spend a lot of time on that choice. So why not show it off. Enhance the overall event experience for your attendees by giving them city info like great places to eat and great places to visit so that they can explore the event city like a local.
Make it personal, and you’ll make the engagement last longer!
