Posted on Mon, Aug 29, 2011
Gobalisation has enhanced the scale and scope of meetings and events. By making your registrations, important web pages and daily agenda multi-lingual, you can instantly appeal to a wider, more diverse audience and offer a more scalable solution to your clients.
Over the years, we have had everything from organisers of a single international event to corporations with international events teams wanting to expand the reach of their events by having mulit-lingual websites and registrations.
Nearly all event managers, sooner or later, will need to run an event in different languages, either for an international congress with a majority foreign speaking audience, or multi-national conference with multiple language options. In any case, Eventsforce can help.
The Multi-lingual module will make your event website easier to navigate for non-English speaking visitors and will highlight the multi-national appeal of your event - filling more seats.
We have 14 languages available for immediate use with a single-click, and have access to most any other language with a bit of notice. So, you can appeal to a wider audience, but mange data from one single location, without having to know multiple languages yourself. What better way to obtain competitive advantage?!
Are you appealing to a wider, more international audience for your events? Get in touch to see how Eventsforce can help you increase your registrations with Multi-lingual prompts, today!
Posted on Mon, Aug 22, 2011
While it is still early days in the lifespan of Google+ we've identified 5 ways you can use it as part of your event marketing and even for planning. Not to mention impressing all your colleagues with your social savvy...
Circles
According to Google, "Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another and your boss in a circle all on his own—just like in real life." Circles allow you to segment the people in your life and what you communicate with them- regardless of where they fit. You can create circles for "sponsors," "industry press," "registrants" or "members" - creating tailored messages to each circle to make sure they each only see the messages you want them to see.
Hangouts
We recommend the Google+ video chat system for teamwork and collaboration - between rooms or across countries. The business application for Hangouts is for teams to interact or present new information to one another quickly and face-to-face. Sales people could have quick face-to-face meetings with prospects or partners. The list goes on, but it is easy and effective for connecting a group of people for a chat, either in planning an event or setting up.
Sparks
"It looks for videos and articles that it thinks you'll like, so that when you're free there's always something to watch, read and share." While this feature is far from incredible, it can still serve a useful purpose by sending contacts and groups an interesting link (say, to your event) and start a discussion. It engages them beyond the event website and makes your event community special before it even begins. If an event organiser is managing an upcoming event that is in a particular niche, area or interest group, then Sparks can be a useful tool to gather relevant content. Use different keywords depending on the genre of the event (e.g. food, medical, etc.)
Video and Photos
Google+ lets users upload video and pictures instantly. Google’s Instant Upload feature encourages users to post pictures or videos to specific networks or groups of people instantly. Normally, if an event organiser wanted to share content with a specific group of people, for example those are are attending an event, then it would take some time to get everything together. By using the Instant Upload tool, Google Plus users can take photos or videos on their phone automatically and share them with their groups.
Huddles
Huddle is a group chat feature that aims to collect people together to make plans to meet up or create an event. Event organisers could find this useful to liaise with different small groups during the organisation stage of the event or use it to gather questions to ask at a conference from a small target group of people.
It is still early days, but we're eager to see how Google+ develops. We'll keep you posted if we come across other ways to use it for event marketing or as part of your planning process, but let us know below if you can see any other uses we left out!
Update: Eventsforce has a Google+ page! Add us to your event/supplier/partner/technology circle today!
Posted on Mon, Aug 15, 2011
One of the best ways to measure the success of your events is to simply survey attendees. Efficiently gathering feedback, analyzing it, and acting on it in a meaningful way can increase attendance next time, set a benchmark for future success and strengthen your relationship with attendees.
To help you gather feedback from your attendees, sponsors, members, registrants, suppliers and exhibitors, we’ve assembled the top 13 best practices for effectively building and promoting an event survey online.
1. Have a single, well-defined objective
What feedback do you really want from your audience? Narrow down what you want to know to the key questions that get to the bottom of what you’re wanting insight into. For instance, if you want to learn about satisfaction with a new initiative, importance of certain break-out sessions, or impressions of your brand -stick to questions relating to those specific themes. This will keep your survey focused and help avoid the “just one more question” syndrome when building your survey. Take a few minutes to plan your survey and consider what you want to get out of the results before building your survey questions.
2. Keep your survey short
You should strive for your survey to take 5-10 minutes to complete in order to get the best response rate. Anything longer than 10 minutes should be re-thought, or survey takers should be given an incentive for giving that much of their time to answer your questions. Make sure you tell them in advance how long it could take.
Another key for keeping your survey to the point: Avoid questions with more than 10 answer options. Too many options for a single answer can confuse the survey taker and slow down completion time. Break the question into multiple questions or consider another way to phrase and answer it.
3. Design your survey for easily measurable results
The key is to ask closed-ended questions that generate results that are easy to analyze, spot trends, and set base lines. A good example of a closed ended question is: How did you hear of Event X 2011? a) Magazine b) Search Engine c) Email d) A Colleague e) Other. When giving an option for “Other,” it’s best to provide a dependent text box for write-in answers.
Using too many open-ended questions that require respondents to type out responses take time to read, code and trend. Plus, they make for a longer survey completion time. Closed-ended questions make it easy for the survey taker to whisk through the questions and give you easily quantifiable data.
4. Ask one thing per question
Seems simple enough, but it’s an easy trap to fall into when compiling questions. Avoid such inquiries as “Did you like your hotel and dining selection?” These are two unrelated topics and should be broken into separate questions that will allow survey takers to answer both independently and give you better insight.
Make sure to give respondents a full opportunity to answer the question with an “Other”, “Prefer Not to Answer”, or “Not Applicable” option where necessary. These answers, while vague, can provide better insight than a non-answer.
5. Avoid biasing the response
Ask questions in a manner that doesn’t trend answers in a particular way. For instance, when gauging a customer’s likelihood of referring your event to colleagues, use a scale that ranges from “not very” to “extremely” with a few options in between. Avoid using “Always” or “Never” extremes as they can bias responses in the opposite direction.
6. Limit required questions
Too many required questions in a survey can ruin the flow and likely decrease your response rate. We recommend making required questions only those that you absolutely need to reach objectives or understand motivations for future planning purposes.
Want to learn more? Download the rest of our tips for great event surveys.
Posted on Mon, Aug 08, 2011
The truth is - probably not as much as they should be.
Emails come from various sources. Email inboxes are piled high with work to-dos, newsletters, notes from family, forwards from coworkers- the probabilities are endless. The result? Without a personalised, clear, and attractive design for your event invitations, you'll be lucky to get click throughs to your registration. Here's what we recommend to increase your invitation success:
1. Maintain a balanced ratio of text to images in your emails. Spam filters often look at the text-to-image ratio of an email. So if an email contains excessive images—or, conversely, too much text—it could be flagged as spam, never to be seen by your intended audience. Properly integrating text with images ensures that your messages can be easily read by recipients; equally as important, doing so ensures that your email stays out of the SPAM folder.
2. Assume that embedded images won't appear properly. If every image in your marketing email is replaced with a tiny red "X," will you still get your invitation message across? Event marketers must assume that their invitations will be displayed without the images showing. Many email clients don't automatically display images without prompting the user to first take action (e.g., "click here to view images" or "right click, then download images"). It's imperative that your key messages - who, what, when, where, how much - aren't embedded within an image. If the images don't appear, how will your email look? Make sure to use height, width, and alt attributes for every image tag. Doing so will ensure that images are replaced with an empty block the same size as the image, keeping formatting and layout intact. 
3. Don't leave out a call to action. Every invitation should be constructed to present the most important and relevant information first. Place your call to register at the top of the message, where readers are most likely to see and internalise it.
Event Takeaway
Invitation design often takes a backseat while event marketers focus on more tangible, fun aspects of planning events. But, put a bit more time into your next invitation, with other things constant, and see if you have increased response. We're willing to be you get more opens, click throughs and registrations!
Posted on Mon, Aug 01, 2011
The bottom line to any successful event is filling seats. But, it can be increasingly difficult to do that with increased competitive clutter, free online events and other budgetary constraints. Here are some of our easy to implement suggestions to increase attendance to your next event:
Early Bird Pricing: By offering at least two types of pricing based on the date a person registers, you'll increase the sense of urgency of your prospective attendees to register for your event.
Discount Codes: Creating and distributing discount codes via email or direct marketing to those whom you'd like to provide an incentive for attending your event can work wonders. Previous attendees, those who registered interest previously, contacts on social media, industry thought leaders and partners can each be sent different codes which you can measure.
Social Media: It is a no-brainer, but encourage visitors to share your event with their social networks. Or, if they've already registered, encourage them to share their attendance with friends and offer a referral discount/incentive for them to become an event evangelist before your event even starts!
Website Integration: If you already have a dedicated event website, insert the entire registration process into it and direct visitors to register with appealing call-to-action prompts and engaging content.
SEO: Once you have your website, ensure the right people find it by optimising your site's content to come up in organic search results. You never know when people are going to stumble across your event when looking for another similar event!
Send Custom Email Invites: Upload or develop invitation lists and send out branded, personalised, attractive email invitations to potential attendees. The more tailored, the more successful.
If you are still managing events manually, get in touch to learn how we can help you not only manage your events, but helps get bums on seats doing everything above!
What are some ways you increase attendance to your events? Do you do anything creative or unique to ensure your seats are filled year on year?