Our planner, Jenny, is about to experience perhaps the most chilling moment a person in her profession will ever face. So, it’s time to gather up your courage and watch the blood-curdling video below (peek through your fingers if you are faint of heart), and then read about solutions to this horrific situation. https://youtu.be/AIKNI7xDpic Well, there you have it. The terrifying tale of an empty venue, all of Jenny’s efforts, vanishing in a ghostly mist before her eyes. How could she avoid such a gloomy fate?
By Going Mobile: Planners know full well, event planning involves last-minute changes, evolving timelines, impossible deadlines, and the need to act quickly and decisively to make sure meetings, conferences, and trade shows come off without a hitch. Jenny’s program brochures all had the wrong date on them, likely a missed detail by an overly stressed planner with too much on her plate.
Mobile event apps can exorcize event-planning demons in many ways. Apps are a planner’s trusted partner when it comes to dealing with fire drills, and last-minute schedule changes, and eliminate the need to print out thousands of programs and brochures that may become obsolete by the time the event arrives. Here’s how an app can help you:
- Get your changes out instantly: Send meaningful reminders, updates and quick links to all attendees, or specific groups with push notifications. If Jenny wanted to contact everyone registered for her session, she could have sent out an immediate push notification to alert them about the wrong date, and/or instantly re-schedule the session for another time or date.
- Keep your content available anytime: Offer all your content in the mobile event app, or provide quick links. You can edit content and make important changes on the fly. This puts you in control of the content at all times. Any content changes you make will sync to all users right away. Room change, time change, date change for a session? No problem. Plus, the best native mobile apps include event checklists to help you stay on track so you don't miss important details…like the wrong date on a session!
- Put your attendees at ease: Apps let your attendees build their own personalized schedules so they can create personalized schedules during registration—don’t make them do it again when they download the event app. Keep your attendees happy by making it easy for them to pull their individual schedules into the app. Personalized schedules can also be exported from the app to the native calendar on any mobile device.
- Provide needed flexibility, something brochures do not: This flexibility gives attendees the ability to find exactly what they need when they need it. Interactive session pages make it easy for attendees to download presentations, take and share notes, cast votes, post social updates, and rank speakers. Jenny’s crowd that missed the presentation, could download the presentation if they couldn’t make the rescheduled session, find another session to attend and not waste time, or re-build their personalized schedule to fit it into their day.
We all make mistakes, and there’s never been a perfect event. Mobile event apps make it simple for you to quickly communicate with your attendees to communicate instantly. If Jenny had an app she could have addressed the problem immediately and made plans to rectify this error in an instant, thereby preventing this gruesome fate. That and paying for Frank the security guard’s dry cleaning bill.
