Event Tech of the Week: @WhovaSupport

Today we’re talking about: Whova

Company/Tool Name: Whova Event App

Website: https://whova.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/WhovaSupport

Facebook: http://facebook.com/WhovaApp

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

Besides having a great program and speakers, another important factor for successful events is how well your attendees engage and connect with you, the speakers and each other. A great attendee experience can improve retention, foster relationships and build community. Whova app directly focuses on this problem by leveraging mobile devices to help attendees easily and conveniently participating in the event and also network with each other. It goes beyond a digital mobile brochure, and can make attendees be an active part of the event and further extend the engagement beyond the event’s location and time limit.

Various research has shown that active participation provides significantly better experience than passive attendance. The Whova app makes attending events an active experience. In comparison with other apps, the Whova app has the highest download ratio, typically around 60-90%. That’s why we have very high customer retention rate.

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

While many events can benefit from Whova app, events that value community building, attendee engagement and attendee networking can especially benefit from Whova app’s unique features such as one-to-one chats, announcement, comments on talks/sessions, business card scanning and exchange. Such events include corporate events, business events, expos, trade shows, and also social events.

What does your tool help event planners do better?

Whova helps event professionals create a new memorable experience for their audience. Event planners work so hard to make their events successful, while attendees always expect more outcome from the events. Whova provides the mobile solution and services to help event professionals keep event schedules, maps, floor plans and all types of logistics organized.

Beyond that, Whova helps foster attendee engagement, and gain insights for future improvements by analyzing the data collected from the engagement during and long after the event. The Whova app helps engage attendees by helping them match-make with new connections and keeping them up-to-date with any last minute changes. The Whova engagement platform makes it much easier to collect data from the event as it goes and long after the event as the engagement continues.

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

From our customers feedback, we are different from our competitors mainly in two things: (1) Advanced technology. Our main technology was based on research from University of California, San Diego. It makes it very easy for event organizers to set up their event and push tothe mobile app in just minutes. It also provides many cutting-edge functionality to attendees including business card scanning and exchange, automatic draft profile preparation, one-to-one chat, and soon-to-be released group chats. (2) Excellent customer service. Our highly capable engineering team (majority of them have Ph.Ds in computer science) directly support customers. Our customers were very impressed with our customer support as their questions are often answered within half hour, even during weekends or holidays.

What is the single coolest feature of your product?

Our customers love many of our features such as personalized agenda, attendee networking, photo sharing, twitter integration, announcement, etc. Our organizer platform has integrated with various registration systems, making it very easy to set up event. We have also used various machine intelligence to automatically recognize event organizers’ data format to minimize the amount of manual data entry by event organizers. From the app side, our very unique feature is business card scanning and digitalization, and attendee networking (one to one chats and group chats).

Anything else we need to know?

Whova founders started from University research. Although Whova has attracted thousands of customers worldwide, we have never forgotten to give back to community. In the past 2 years, every month, tons of academic events (events with >50% students participants) are using our app for free.

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.