Mobile application: the indispensable tool for your event!

Currently, the event attendees are expecting to live a real experience and being involved personally in the event. They are looking for something unique, memorable and are willing to a total immersion. The major advances in mobile technology have entirely transformed our way of life. Today, most of attendees carry smartphones and other devices which allow organizers to develop mobile applications in order to learn more about the attendee’s profile: session attended, favourite topic session, professional relations met and many more. Consequently, the event marketing departments have changed their practices from traditional to more digital ones.

Mobile applications invaded our daily lives, and using it for your event can be a real competitive advantage. Here you will understand what are the benefits of this tool and why adopt a mobile application to boost your event?



Before the event: it facilitates the organisation and the planning of the event

Source: freedigitalphoto.net

Months and weeks before an event can be very stressful. It’s a very busy period and until the end of the event you hope that you have not forgotten anything. In order to be well organized, several applications can give you tips and help you along the preparation. Those apps have different goals, and are more or less appropriate depending the size of the event.

You can manage your “to-do list” with “Wunderlist” or “Coolendar”, and in the case of bigger project management “Tom’s Planner” is a more appropriate tool which allow you to create Gantt diagram. Another great app “Super Planner” provides an estimation of the resources needed and available. The budget is also a “hot” spot to watch carefully. With “Check” you have the history of your payments and you keep an eyes on the state of your finances.

During the event, it increases the transmission of information and encourages networking

Source: freedigitalphoto.net

People attending to the events are forgetting the vast majority of the information provided. Indeed, a study made by Evenium shows that “after three weeks after the event, the participants will recall only 5% of the content”. In order to involve the attendees, you need to make them participate, think and reflect! 
In this case smartphone‘s applications are perfect to face this challenge. Indeed, we used to be connected all the time to our network. Actually, 27% of our time spent on the internet is devoted to social networks” in accordance with Evenium study. 
In addition, a mobile app allows your attendees to take advantages of integrated networking and social media tools in order to build professional relationships with other attendees. With an effective app, the event organizers can identify potential customers and identify their key interests by responding to specific needs, anticipate potential questions which increase the impact.

In a first place, an app like Evenium ConnexMe, allows to manage online registration, attract more participants, and especially to make guests interact by promoting networking. By giving their opinion, guests retain much more the messages and recall lasting content. In the same style, a new app appeared on the market a few months ago: Beekast. This app also allows organizers to create live polls and get result instantaneous, messaging with questions or comments and project them on a screen but it also solves microphone technical problems. Organizers don’t need to move the mic around the convention room, because microphone are replaced by attendees’ smartphones. The sound is transmitted in a real time and a speaking time management is also integrated. Those two apps increase significantly the interactivity in all your event!

Then we can highlight another fact: the difficulty of storing all the new contacts. Indeed, at the end of the day your pocket is full of business card and a week later you are lost searching through the piles. In this case, several apps as Presto BizCard or Camcard for example can help you. It works on an easy principle; these apps take a photograph of the card and perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to translate the contents to editable text. Then, you save them into the app's own database or into your smartphone's contacts listing.   

After the event, it improves the collection of feedback

Collecting and gathering all the feedback on speaker, event and sessions are easier with mobile apps. The apps are better for collecting feedback because they are asked when the users are at the end of the session after a short period of time. Thus, it is easy to express their opinions and improves the response rate as well as reduces the staff necessary to collect the paper responses. The use of a mobile apps such as Boast, IML, Crystal Interactive help event organizers to gauge customer expectations and understand participants reaction during the event.

Source: freedigitalphotos.net

To conclude, in our current society where people are more and more virtually interconnected, applications are a necessary step. It may sound paradoxical but they bring more interactivity and connectivity between attendees. Participants fell involve before, during and after the event. It’s also a powerful tool to simplify organizer’s life and provide better experience. We can also assign them ecological property, less paper or plan have to be print. However, the virtual still have some limitations! The Wifi has to be powerful enough to support big manifestation and we all know that even if smartphones become increasingly efficient, the autonomy remains limited. The risk to finish the day without battery, and therefore be depriving of interactions has to be taken in account!

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Cap Gemini. (2013, 12 04). 7 applications mobile pour organiser son événement. 
Retrieved from Les Fontaines: http://www.les-fontaines.com/7-applications-mobile-pour-organiser-son-evenement.html

Leblogdelevenementiel. (2014, 11 05). Un microphone ? Pour quoi faire ! 
Retrieved from Le blog de l'évènementiel et du hors média: https://leblogdelevenementiel.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/un-microphone-pour-quoi-faire/

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Retrieved from Concep Empowerment Marketing: http://www.concep.com/the-top-10-benefits-of-mobile-event-app/#.VLkiMy6AqjY

 Eve Dellinger & Elsa Yenigotchian