Posted by John
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:15:00 GMT
"The Congress for the New Urbanism is very excited to be using Zerista this year! Attendees have been impressed to find an event networking site that looks great and connects them with the colleagues they'll see at our conference. They're also using it to select and find sessions. It definitely surpassed our expectations." -CNU Communications Director
We recently completed a fun project working with a leading urban design conference in Denver. The Conference for the New Urbanism (CNU) is the nation's leading forum dedicated to advancing urbanism and promoting alternatives to sprawl.
We were excited to work on this project - not only because we support the general new urbanist principles, but also because we live and work in the types of communities that new urbanism seeks to encourage.
As background, New Urbanism is an urban design and development movement dedicated to implementing community-oriented principles of traditional town and city planning in contrast to the prevailing system of formless sprawl. New Urbanist developments are walkable, provide a diverse range of housing options, encourage a rich mix of uses, and provide welcoming public spaces as detailed in the Charter of the New Urbanism.
The conference attracts more than 1,000 attendees from around the world who particiapte in several hundred planned activities throughout the week.
Some of the key challgenges faced by the conference organizer:
• Strengthen relationships between core stakeholders - attendees, speakers and exhibitors
• Increase networking between attendees, speakers and exhibitors
• Increase productivity at the conference
The solution included the following key components:
• Attendee, speaker and exhibitor directories with detailed info on all key stakeholders
• Online conversations for attendees, speakers and exhibitors
• Personalized scheduling tools with ability to export MS Outlook, iCal and other calendar aps
The solution generated a significant ROI:
• 27% average increase in event networking due to Zerista (based on survey data)
• 10% average increase in overall event productivity due to Zerista (based on survey data)
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free comment below.
Posted in Conferences | Tags case, event, media, networking, new, social, study, urbanism | no comments
Posted by John
Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:48:00 GMT
We recently worked with an academic association on their annual conference. One of the unique aspects of this conference was its international audience: more than 50% of the attendees were from outside of the United States. The conference attracted more than 1,000 attendees from over 30 countries, with significant representation from Europe, India, and China.
Given this global audience and the fact that our software is currently English-only, we were curious to see how well our software tools would be adopted. We shouldn't have been. In fact, we saw that international adoption was the key driver of activity within the community. Many of the most active users were from around the world. Within less than 48 hours, close to 20% of international attendees were already activety using the system.
There's a more general observiation here. For conferences with geographically dispersed audiences, web-based social event tools like Zerista's add a significant amount of value to attendees.
Posted in Conferences, Events, Politics | Tags case, conference, conferences, event, international, networking, on, pattern, recognition, social, software, studies | no comments
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
