We first kicked off our Solution Evolution blog post series with The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with Cvent Upgrades, followed by The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with Cvent Flex, The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with New Reports and Access Portals, The Solution Evolution: New Meeting Request Form, The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with the Cvent Salesforce App, and The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with Surveys and next up we’ll be diving into The Solution Evolution: What to Expect with the Attendee Hub Event App.
The Attendee Hub is replacing CrowdCompass, which is currently planned to sunset on December 31, 2022. The Attendee Hub works seamlessly for any event type you are planning, whether it be virtual, in-person, or hybrid, as you have the ability to build out both the Attendee Website and the Event App, giving your attendees access to all of your necessary event information and content in one place. Not only can Attendee Hub power any event type, but it can also be used for any event size, enabling you to utilize the platform for your total events program. Think of Attendee Hub as a one-stop shop, where leading up to your event, during your event, and post-event, attendees can interact, engage, and consume. For example, attendees can peruse the agenda and add on sessions that interest them, watch content live or on-demand and interact during sessions by taking advantage of features like session chat, live Q&A, and live polling, make appointments with other attendees and exhibitors, complete challenges to earn points in the game, answer general event and session feedback surveys, interact with exhibitors and sponsors, network with other attendees via Instant Networking or 1:1 messaging, join video or text based discussions, and so much more.
What’s New & Different
For those who have used CrowdCompass in the past to build out your mobile apps, a big advantage with Attendee Hub is that you will no longer need to log into Cvent to build out your event and then log into the CrowdCompass Event Center separately to build out your app. You will simply log into Cvent, create your event once, enable Attendee Hub as a feature you’d like to use within your event, and then work on building out your Attendee Hub app and website using the new website and app builder, all within your same event that you may be using for registration, OnArrival, and other solutions. (You can also create a standalone Attendee Hub event as well that doesn’t have registration enabled, if you plan to import a list of registrants into the event from another system, for example.) Another benefit is that you no longer have to integrate Cvent with CrowdCompass and duplicate efforts to build out certain components of your event and app. The event, session, speaker, exhibitor, and attendee information you add into your event will automatically pull into your Attendee Website and Event App.
Should you choose to use the website component of Attendee Hub for your event, it is modern, user-friendly, customizable and has a variety of new features to take advantage of in comparison to the Online Event Guide available within CrowdCompass. From the Attendee Website, attendees can watch a variety of session types, whether they be live streams, pre-recorded content, simulive, on-demand, or collaborative sessions, making it an incredibly powerful tool for any event type. Your exhibitors and sponsors will find value in the Expo section of Attendee Hub, which features their profiles, information, and available engagement features. For example, exhibitors can have robust profiles built out with collateral like videos and documents for attendees to view and download, virtual booths to meet with virtual attendees, exhibitor booth chat, inbound leads, and sponsored sessions capabilities for sponsors, to name a few. You can also allow exhibitors to manage their own profiles and upload their own content, so they can take true ownership of making their profile on the website and app as detailed as they’d like (and hopefully take some of the manual work off of your event team in the process)!
One of my favorite features with the event app is the live preview capability, which allows you to see a live, real-time preview of how the event app looks on different devices, right from directly within the website and app builder in Cvent. For the event app, you can also create a different home page experience for attendees before, during, and after the event to highlight the content they need to see the most during each stage of your event. Additionally, you can take advantage of more app design options with features like custom cards, custom pages, and more. Overall, you have more customization options for how your Attendee Hub website and app look and feel and new features to employ to entice your attendees (with even more new features being released regularly!) Lastly, you can report on all of your event and attendee data and insights all within one place in the platform and there are a plethora of detailed Attendee Hub reports available to showcase the data and metrics that are the most important to you and your stakeholders.
Resources
If you’ve never used a mobile app ever before, have yet to start your migration from CrowdCompass to Attendee Hub, your migration is currently in progress, or your migration is complete, there are a wide variety of helpful resources available for you throughout each step of your journey to ensure you are trained, comfortable, and taking advantage of all the Attendee Hub has to offer. The Solution Evolution Hub: Attendee Hub portion of our overall Solution Evolution Customer Resources page has a handful of resources including trainings, webinars, guides, step-by-step articles, and more. If you do need to migrate from CrowdCompass to Attendee Hub, I highly recommend signing up for the Solution Evolution: CrowdCompass to Attendee Hub Transition Webinar, available both live and on-demand, which talks through the benefits of features available in Attendee Hub and helps you get started with your transition process and next steps. Additionally, one of my favorite articles to bookmark for easy access is What's New in Attendee Hub. You can reference this article to stay up to date on all of the new features that are released for Attendee Hub, inclusive of both the website and event app. You’ll be able to see the date the new features were released and helpful step-by-step articles on how to set up and utilize the features for your events. Lastly, I also recommend learning from and chatting with other Cvent users in the Open Forum page within the Cvent Community to see how they are using Attendee Hub for their events, their experience with migrating from CrowdCompass to Attendee Hub, best practices and creative use cases they’ve exercised, overall recommendations and more. There’s a lot of beneficial knowledge sharing going on between users, so definitely get in there and check it out if you haven’t already and pose a question or comment on other posts to get started! As always, keep calm and Solution Evolution on!
This post was written by Julia Plymack, a Client Success Manager at Cvent. Julia enjoys traveling, the outdoors, true crime podcasts, and binge-watching reality TV shows.
