Vine Blog: Tapahtumahallinta

This text is only available in Finnish at the moment. 

This text is only available in Finnish...

Digitalisation has made me miss genuine encounters with people. Looking from the view of Marketeer, events offer a unique opportunity for the encounters. Instead of spending time in the manual event management, we want to sacrifice our precious time in organizing the event. When we talk about automated event management, what do we really mean? Lets first separate the words event management and automation.

 
WHAT DO WE MEAN WITH EVENT MANAGEMENT

  — collecting sign-up information
  — event communication

The automation part in the event management means that these two processes mentioned above, happen automatically, without any manual work. By our personal and our companys filosofy, it’s clever to make as many things as possible automatic. That means there is more time left for the creative work.
The lifecycle of event always starts with the planning of the event and continues to the after sales and marketing. Event marketing is definitely it’s own world and  the ways to work with an event can be very different depending on the nature of the event – we don’t focus on that in this blog post.
Event management on the other hand is very similar in every event: Sign-up information needs to be collected, confirmation message needs to be sent for the enrollees and there needs to be reminders, feed back requests and thank you messages sent to the enrollees. So the event management pattern is very much the same regardless on the nature of the event. As usual with patterns, they can also be copied. This pattern can also be made automatic – And the best part is that the algorithm isn’t very complex.

 
EVENT COMMUNICATION IS A WHOLENESS

  —  upfront marketing
  —  invites
  —  sign-up confirmation messages
  —  reminders
  —  thank you notes
  —  feed back

Take good care of the enrollee all the way from the confirmation message to the thank you message.The communication should make the enrollee feel like he is taken cared of and this way the amount of no shows gets smaller. The not knowing is very unpleasant for the enrollee and that’s why the information is good to be served piece by piece via email. Professional and timely event communication is a part of customer experience and creates the customer an image of being taken cared of.
At least for now event communication is most efficient by the email, which acctually takes up a lot of time from peoples workdays. With the help of automation technology you can schedule all the event communication a lot before the actual event – That allows you to concentrate on the most relevant thing, which is hosting a successfull event.

 
HOW AND WHERE DO YOU MANAGE THE SIGN-UPS

Signing up needs to be easy for the participant as well as the event organizer. From the enrollees point of view, the more different information the form of enrolment requiers, the less likely it is going to be filled up. So ask the enrollee to fill up only the very necessary things you don’t yet know. If you for example send targeted invites for the event via email, you probably already know a lot about the participant – don’t bother the participant by asking this information again.
With the help of automation technology already known person just has to click the sign-up button. Other information that we already know can be hidden. You get more participants on your event when the signing up is as easy as possible.
From the event hosts point of view take care that you don’t have to do any manual work with the collecting of sign-up information. Let technology take care of this and the maintenance of up-to-date participant list. If the enrollee information is all around emails, excels and desktops get rid of this messy way to do it as soon as possible. In addition to the fact that excels takes a lot of your precious time, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) will make the rules of handling personal data more strict in the spring of 2018.