The bar keeps rising for the quality and the requirements that congresses, incentives, meetings and trade fairs have to meet, yet their organisers are rarely given unlimited resources in terms of tools, people or budget. As a result, professionals in the sector have to get better and better at optimising resources to keep everything in balance, and at identifying the tools that deliver the most efficiency and the best results. Among these, in our view, one tool is taking on ever greater importance, even though it is often wrongly dismissed as a mere gadget: the event app.
But why, and how? In our view, for at least three good reasons.
1. Smooth, efficient event management
First of all, event apps are a practical, efficient tool for the people who organise events. With their ability to simplify processes, and with the portability that keeps them accessible on the move, apps can be a genuinely strategic resource for making the management of many activities smoother, faster and more secure: from handling check-in and attendance (particularly important for events that require attendance to be certified) to keeping the performance data that matter most to the event constantly in view. From the ability to send real-time notifications so that everyone is always informed about updates and changes to the programme, to the creation of a marketing and promotion tool that is fully customisable in both features and design, and therefore unique and distinctive.
2. The value of personal schedules in handling complexity
Events are becoming richer and more layered, because that is what the market demands, what investors require and what attendees expect. This makes it ever more important to give all the different stakeholders (attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and funders) tools to handle that complexity quickly and practically. It is essential that people can make the most of everything on offer, finding exactly what they are looking for within it without getting lost, distracted or worn out. Apps can be an important resource because one of their distinctive characteristics — and we are talking, of course, about apps designed and built specifically for the events world — is the ability to build individual schedules and journeys based on the tastes, preferences and interests of each single person, who in effect puts together their own personal, made-to-measure event. This achieves two results at once: on one side people are more satisfied and take part more actively because they are in charge of their own choices and can manage them clearly, quickly and practically; on the other, it allows the event organisation to gather a great deal of data on the tastes, the interests and the preferences of its audiences, on the basis of which it can build events that are increasingly well targeted and of higher quality.
3. Managing and booking appointments
Last, but certainly not least, there is the question of managing appointments and booking them. Without repeating what you all know perfectly well — that people and companies attend events partly, if not mainly, to build their network of relationships and worthwhile contacts — the advantage of giving every attendee a tool that lets them set, change and manage a schedule of appointments and meetings clearly, quickly and precisely is more than obvious. It raises engagement, attendance and satisfaction, it cuts dead time and it optimises performance, and all of this translates immediately into gains of various kinds, material and intangible alike.
And these are only three of the things a good event app can do to improve the management and the performance of a MICE event. In many cases, customisation of these tools makes it possible to go much deeper into the specific needs of each event, to the point of creating products that are entirely bespoke and made to measure.
Would you like to see it in action? Request a live demo and we can start building the perfect app for your next event right away.