Sunday, 26 April 2015

Organizing an event? Use the crowd to your advantage!

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Nowadays, everything is customer-focused. It is not enough to offer a good product or service anymore, we need to involve the customers in the process to create the most successful experience possible for them. And of course, event planning is not an exception. On the contrary, events are particularly impacted by this trend as an event is by definition an experience where emotions and feelings take a prominent position. That is why, it can be interesting for each event planner to wonder if they use their crowd effectively; because who knows better than themselves what attendees or customers want?


Three crowd management tools benefited from the technologic progress to establish themselves as not-to-be-missed trends: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and crowd shaping. They offer great opportunities to improve events while attracting the millennials, as they are mainly implemented on social media. 


During the preparation phase of events, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are amazing tools. First, crowdfunding enables the event organizers to show their project, especially when the event is new, and to know if the event has enough potential to be economically sustainable or not. For already existing events, it is a good way to fund new features of the event or to prevent some of its aspects from disappearing such as free entrance days that are not profitable for the organizers and that can be made sustainable through crowdfunding. A good use of crowdfunding can be to establish some level of funding; for instance if 5,000€ are raised, there will be this many more speakers, and if 10,000€ are raised the event will last one more day. In this way, attendees feel involved in the event’s creation process and this increases their loyalty. There is more than 1,000 crowdfunding platforms online, keep looking and you will find the one that fits your needs.

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On another hand, crowdsourcing can be used to empower attendees not only to improve the event design but also to improve the content. That is what A.M.P Events Ltd, the organizer of Event Tech Live, did by launching an online vote last year that enrolled delegates to vote for the topics and the speakers during the conferences. This is a great innovative and interactive way to make sure your content corresponds to your attendees’ requirements and needs. By using this kind of solutions, each of your participants will feel unique and totally involved in the event as they have a certain control on it. This personalization of events perfectly fits with the growing demand of the new generations Y and Z to create bespoke events.

Using the crowd effectively can also help event planners to improve attendees’ experience in real time during the event with crowd shaping. By using data generated by your attendees thanks to RFID technologies for instance, event organizers can analyze live the behavior of their attendees and they can deduce from it their preferences and tastes to finally adapt the event. Knowing your target is essential, even though we know that there can be a difference between what people say and what people do. That is why crowd shaping, when properly used, is a golden source of information that can lead your event to a greater success.

Belonging to the generation Y, we truly believe these new ways of interacting and communicating with your target audience is the future of events. Our advice: don’t wait to use them, tomorrow is today. 


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