Most event organisers are of the impression that a mobile event app should be used only for external events that generate business, like trade shows, seminars and conferences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether it is large company-wide events to communicate the goals of the organisation, or offsite retreats and trainings to boost employee engagement, mobile event apps play an equally important role in your internal events programme.
According to a study by Microsoft, the average attention span of a human is 8 seconds – shorter than that of a goldfish! While the lack of peer reviews means this claim isn’t exactly set in stone, it highlights a problematic fact of living in an increasingly digitised world – frequent distractions.
For internal events, this poses a major challenge. Employees might lose interest in your event pretty quickly or dismiss it as yet another formal briefing with the same old facts and figures being peddled.
To keep your employees engaged with the event, a mobile event app can be a big help. With instant push notifications, ease of use, and immediate access to a variety of information, it ensures that the interest of your attendees never wanes.
Here are the various ways you can use mobile event apps successfully in different internal events:
1. All-Hands Meetings
An all-hands meeting is conducted across the company, across the department, or within a team. For every such gathering, it is key to set a concise agenda so that the hours spent with your team or employees are utilised in the most efficient way possible.
A mobile event app can be used to:
- Highlight agenda, communicate important details and set the pre-meeting talking points.
- Maintain a schedule of upcoming events so that the conversation is focused, and not repetitive.
2. Company Offsites
Organising a company-wide offsite can be tricky business. As an event organiser, you get bombarded with endless questions that your phone keeps ringing incessantly. To address the expectations of all participants and ensure the offsite runs smoothly, an event app can be used to:
- Communicate key details about travel, accommodations, special programmes and activities
- Share polls and surveys to find out about food and beverage, medical emergency plans etc
- Highlight key company messages, goals and action items
- Play different team-building games
3. Team or Department Meetings
A commonly held belief is that an event app is required only for large meetings. That’s not the case though, and you can spur engagement and be more productive at internal events as well. That’s because you need a clear agenda for every attendee, no matter how many participants are there and who all are presenting.
With a mobile event app, you can utilise the live Q&A functionality to address the most relevant questions for all team members and address one-off questions from individuals. This is especially helpful when you have remote teams working with you, and those who get disconnected because of technical issues can stay in the conversation.
Using the peer-to-peer Q&A capabilities, you can even encourage your employees brainstorm and self-solve together, as well as provide alternative views and perspectives long after your team meeting has ended.
4. Sales Kick-Offs
The sales kick-off demonstrates a perfect example of the integrated functionality offered by an event app. It allows the organiser to develop tailorised experiences for each employee and act as an essential tool for knowledge retention and networking. Here is all what you can do:
- Post details of travel & accommodation, and different things to do within the app.
- Create information sections that provide in-depth details of new products or topics that will be covered at the sales kick-off
- Manage speakers and sessions within your organisation.
- Customise content for different attendee types, so that you can create a unique, enriching experience for the top sales executives and the C-Suite.
- Use lead scanning and lead suggestion in the app as an internal networking tool to connect with members most relevant to their roles.
5. Learning & Development
A mobile event app can also act as an effective tool for learning and development. Through training modules and other features, the app can be used to improve knowledge retention. For example,
- Use polling and quizzing to get real-time insights into different sessions and how well are employees grasping different topics.
- Live Q&A sessions where employees can ask questions anonymously that they might feel uncomfortable asking aloud.
- Optimise the content within sessions through post-training surveys
6. Year-Round Use
Mobile event apps have moved beyond traditional internal use cases by acting as a forum where employees can network with each other, all year-round. Your app doesn’t need to stop being useful when there are no meetings or events being held!
Here is how you can maximise its use year-round:
- Use the activity feed to connect with employees and stay updated at what’s happening at other offices, share great news and project insights.
- Encourage participation and engagement by using leaderboard and gamification features.
- Highlight your core company values, HR policies, and org charts for quick view.
- Take polls and surveys to gather information for upcoming activities or events.
Whether you are hosting an internal event or an external one, you need to partner with an event marketing technology partner to execute it efficiently. Here are the 8 questions you should ask potential event tech solution providers before selecting the best one.
