Posted by John
Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT
Many event organizers that we work with are very concerned about their event's attendance. What's worked in the past is often no longer working. As a result, event organizers are working harder than ever at finding relevant content and expanding their audiences.
We hear many questions about content - What topics are compelling this year? Should we stick to the tried-and-true or branch out to new topics? Which speakers will be a draw this year? Should we change our format?
Equally common are questions about building out the audience: How can we increase repeat attendance? How can we appeal to the younger members of our audience? What can we do to retain current exhibitors and attract new ones?
We've worked with a number of events that are growing - some of them significantly. When you step back and look at what they are doing differently than their peers, you see that the event organizers are addressing these questions creatively and early on in the planning cycle.
A great example of this kind of approach is outlined in Chris Brogan's excellent post The Art of Butts in Chairs.
Posted in Conferences, Features, Events | Tags attendance, audience, conference, content, exhibitors, networking | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by John
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:07:00 GMT
We recently completed a project for a leading clean alternative conference. The event organizer's key goals were increasing attendee loyalty and repeat attendance. We helped the organizer achieve these goals by enabling each attendee to get more value - both networking and informational value - from attending the conference. The Zerista software tools extended the event online, enabling each attendee to be more productive onsite.
The results were highly positive:
“Zerista was an excellent resource for our conference attendees. They could find out where things were happening, connect with each other before they'd even met, and start discussions about the conference proceedings in real time. It was an online destination that boosted the value of our conference far more than our static website ever did before.” -Event Organizer
“I really liked being able to see who else is attending the conference. I set up 3 meetings via the system – these were meetings that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have happened.” -Attendee
The Zerista software tools were broadly adopted and received overwhelmingly positive reviews. To read more about this case study, click here.
Posted in Social Mapping, Conferences, Events | Tags attendance, attendee, case, conferences, loyalty, rates, repeat, study | no comments
Posted by John
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT
One of the more entertaining projects that we've worked on recently is the Great American Beer Festival. The Beer Festival is an annual classic each fall in Denver and is rated as one of the 1,000 places to see before you die. Each year upwards of 40,000 attendees and 400 exhibiting brewers get together to sample the best beers in the country. We worked with the event orgnizer to provide online tools to make it easier for attendees to find brewers before and during the event.
One of the more challenging aspects of the project was to provide a user-friendly venue map interface that enabled attendees to quickly search and find exhibitors from within one browser window. 10,000s of attendees used the site and the project was viewed as highly successful. In the words of the event organizer:
"With Zerista, we were able to offer our 40,000+ attendees an easier way to plan and map out their event experience at the Great American Beer Festival. Our requirements included an interactive convention hall map that showed the location of more than 400 exhibitors and 50 events. Zerista rapidly delivered an intuitive, easy-to-use solution to a rather challenging mapping project. The Zerista team was great to work ith, and we're looking forward to working together again in the future.
Here's a screenshot of what we provided:
Posted in Social Mapping, Conferences, Events | Tags american, and, attendance, attendee, beer, driving, event, festival, gabf, great, loyalty, mapping, repeat, social, venue | no comments | no trackbacks
