Friday, 3 February 2017

The One Thing Event Planners Want Most - Lei, Xochitl & Milo



The One Thing Event Planners Want Most

The event management industry has undeniably drastically changed with the onset of the technological revolution. Seems like every month we have a new software or tool that we can leverage to make our client’s experiences even more memorable. Sounds great, right?! Unfortunately, the reality of technology in the event management industry is translating to more work, more unstructured data, more expenditures and less sleep!


We have witnessed the same revolution within other industries, such as banking and capital markets. As new corporate technology solutions were released financial institutions would purchase them in hopes of helping their bottom line, from Goverance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) systems to cloud storage. However, after a few years organizations realized that their data was siloed within each respective system because of software incompatibility or lack of integration solutions.

Today the event management industry is going through the same cycle. Event Managers are having to manage client, registration and event data across various systems, many times leading to higher operational costs, incorrect client data, or delayed customer service[1]. So what is the solution to this madness? – Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)!
An API is software in the form of an application that helps access information from one system and transfer it into another[2]. These integration components have been around for years, but were not as readily adopted because of their high costs1.  However, today API costs are significantly lower with the increased use of open source coding. So how exactly can APIs help event managers? Here are a few key areas and examples:
1.     Managing registration details in real-time on any device3.

a.     Eventgrid is an up and coming event registration and ticketing platform offering an API solution to clients. This enables the event management company to have access to their sales and client information at any point in the process. Allowing for same-day registration without the stress of making sure the door manager has the most up-to-date print out of names.

2.     Access local event data to better plan event dates or to also conduct competitive analysis4  
     a. Ever wish you could have a visual representation of the pricing of other local events or what dates have the least competing events? Well that is all possible with numerous APIs that search open source data and present it to you in a visually applying manner4.
2.     It is a common saying in event management that you always need a Plan A, B, C and even D because nothing is set in stone when it comes to events. Well what if you could seamlessly project all your various plan’s financial statistics.
a.     Adaptive Insights, helps you run more sophisticated “what-if” scenarios, aside from excel, by accessing your historical data and helping you adapt forecasting budgets, revenue gains and workforce management5.
So where to go from here? As the event management industry further integrates corporate managing systems, organizations will become more aware of their need for information sharing which will lead to an increased use of APIs. So the question to ask is how can you become an early adopter of this technology – where can your organization benefit from faster information sharing?





2 http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/API.html

3 https://www.zkipster.com/3-event-management-software-trends-for-2017/
4https://www.programmableweb.com/news/93-events-apis-eventful-upcoming-google-calendar/2012/05/01
5 http://www.adaptiveinsights.com/

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