Event Tech of the Week: @Bonfyre App

Today, we’re talking about: Bonfyre App

Company/Tool Name:  Bonfyre App

Website: https://bonfyreapp.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BonfyreApp

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bonfyre

Bonfyre was featured in our Event Tech of the Week series a little over 6 months ago, but the product has made some significant strides that we’d like to share with you.

What is the “problem” that your tool seeks to solve?

Bonfyre was born out of the frustration with broadcast social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and their connection-based model. As you go through life’s stages, you accumulate more and more connections, but they decay over time. After all, how many Facebook “friends” are your friends in real life? We felt that there had to be a better way to share, communicate and engage with the people who matter most – friends, family, co-workers, or even a captive audience around an event, live experience or community. We like to call it “social narrowcasting.”

What is the best audience for this tool? Corporate events? Social? Other? Large? Small?

Companies are using Bonfyre to transform corporate events, employee engagement, learning programs, internal communications and more. We’ve worked with customers for events of 100 people all the way up 2,500. ~500 seems to be the spot, but a sound activation and engagement strategy (services that we provide along with technology) will help an event of any size be successfully.

What does your tool help event planners do better?

Bonfyre increases event lifetime, engagement and ROI for our customers, spanning all types of events including meetings, conferences, incentive trips, celebrations and more.  Here’s how:

• Features like Global Connections, Trivia and Photo Contests are designed to help guests discover new commonalities and connections with others
• The first thing you see when you enter a bonfyre is people sharing content. It may seem subtle, but this makes a huge difference in driving meaningful utilization
• Human relationships are naturally emotional and we’ve spent a great deal of time designing the Bonfyre experience to delight those who use it
• Actionable insights through Bonfyre utilization data, sentiment analysis, pop surveys and more make event planners smarter to create an even better experience for the    next event.
• Go “paperless” and save money — improve the event experience with agendas, session info and more all virtual and at everyone’s fingertips

How is your tool different from/better than the competition?

There are dozens of other companies that provide custom mobile applications for events and all share common DNA in delivering a “paperless event” experience – agendas, maps, etc. And while many support content sharing, access to information is their core focus.

At Bonfyre, we believe that experiences are above all else about building human relationships and, as such, devote our product to driving meaningful human interaction while still providing access to the information guests need. Bonfyre creates an evergreen community for each event to engage before, during and after the event.

Events are by definition big investments of time and money over a very short period of time. Just as there is value in bringing the attendees together for the event, there is value in these event communities continuing to engage long after the event has concluded. For our customers, what begins as an event community quickly becomes a communication channel to share knowledge, collaborate, build camaraderie, socialize core values and more. In this way, Bonfyre has a much greater shelf life than other one-off event apps.

What is the single coolest feature of your product? 

Well, we’ve added many over the past couple of months, so we’d like to point out a few.

TRIVIA: Create a lightweight trivia game to support knowledge development, training, educate users about a destination, company history, particular topic of interest and more. The game features a string of multiple choice questions and can be upgraded with leaderboards and prizes.

PERSONALIZED AGENDAS: Create and/or deliver a personalized mobile agenda for every guest via the bonfyre. Utilize our web application to create and manage an agenda – create sessions, events, activities, etc. and include a description, image, date, time, location and associate each with speakers, sponsors and a track. Import existing registration data via .csv.

INTERACTIVE MAPS Guests can see and learn more about activities or the places they will visit. Plot points of interest on a map for activities, destinations and more. With each point of interest, users can view additional provided information, mark the location as having been visited, or even add a custom note to the location.

Anything else we need to know?  

Bonfyre can go beyond events and really is a cool for ongoing engagement for employees and other key stakeholders or groups. Often using events as a rallying point, Bonfyre has also been a vehicle to companies build culture through employee engagement programs such as diversity initiatives, development and leadership programs, internal communications and more. Our goal is to foster meaningful human interaction by prioritizing access to people (e.g, co-workers), not process, systems or information. After all, highly engaged employees are not just motivated by what they do, but also who they do it with. Anecdotally, we can all appreciate that if you don’t like or feel connected to the people you work with you are less likely to work hard and stay long term. This, it turns out, costs companies a lot of money directly (attrition) and indirectly (lost productivity) — a core issue we’re trying to solve with our customers.

This weekly series spotlights a new tech tool that is designed to help make planning events much more seamless. Whether it’s using event software to track every detail from start to finish or mobile apps that deliver content to attendees’ fingertips, these technologies allow planners to divert their stress to more critical issues like deciding which napkin color looks best.