Prospective Partner Profile - Event Management

We would anticipate that prospective partners for this pack would either be professional event management companies or organisations that regularly run events or conferences. You may have mature systems and processes for event management. However you are looking for ways to build “stickiness” into your client base so that they will keep coming back to your events as well as refer their friends and colleagues as well.

The opportunity that the pack offers is to address the issue of how do you facilitate better networking amongst attendees. By building a stronger networking experience you will also build a stronger community around your events and therefore a stronger likelihood for repeat business. Our experience has been that the maps become a real focus and conversation piece for the attendees. If integrated well into the overall conference management the experience can be a memorable one not just for the attendees, but for you and your events.

Case Study

Context
The International Technical Conference of a global IT service provider with some 800+ attendees

The Problem
How to get attendees to connect with their counterparts from around the world if they have never met before.

The Solution
Through the use of a short interest profiling survey and subsequent network mapping, each attendee was identified with their 10 closest 'common interest buddies'. At the conference a competition was run to see who could actually connect with all 10 during the 3 day event.

The Benefits
The competition winner tracked down all 10 of her connections, none of whom were previously known to her. The knowledge shared was way beyond what could normally be expected.

Case studies like the above have been repeated many times now. Explore some of the examples using the links to the right.

Deliverables

The Event Management service is centred on a web based facility which provides a network map of how attendees (or prospective attendees) may be connected to other attendees. This map can be built before the event so that attendees can plan their networking activities ahead of time. The site will also provide a Pareto Chart of which topics are attracting the most interest.

Additional to the site is a networking practice guide. On this site are some hints and tips as to how you can best use the maps to facilitate networking at the event. This site will capture other hints and tips from other partners using this pack.

Examples of recent events:

• Green Drinks
• KM Australia Conference

The sites enables the attendees to search for their own name to identify those attendees that are closes to them based on interest profiles.

The deliverable to you is:

• A hosted site for up to 3 months around the event
• A downloadable report of data collected from the site
• Access to the hints and tips wiki for 3 months, around the event.

As the event organiser, you identify 10 to 15 interest topics relevant to the event itself. You enter these areas into the system and then launch the page to your attendees. They will be asked to select the 5 topics that they are most interested in exploring at the event, in ranked order. Their positioning on the map will be based on their affinity with other attendees at the event.

Social Networking at the Event?

For some events it is common to have attendees use social media tools like Twitter or Facebook to update their contacts or followers of happenings at the event. We have been able to map these conversations using our networking platform, which can add some more interest and spice to your event.

This is not part of the standard pack, and would require a custom engagement with Optimice.