
You’ve planned for months for your conference/trade show/expo/road show/whatever for months now – heck, maybe a whole year.
Let’s look at part of your checklist:
You are the master of your universe! You’ve thought of everything! Nothing can stop you now!
Here’s the problem: your plan is perfect but as the saying goes, “No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.” Ok – your attendees are not your enemy. But, they do have a way of blowing up even the best of plans.
This has been how event planning has always worked – make the plan, then spend all your time on-site, cleaning up the exceptions. Technology is changing event planning – with all the data at your fingertips you are now able to adapt your plan in real time. You can see where things might be going wrong and fix them before they become a problem. You can anticipate the pitfalls and traps and let technology keep an eye out for you. You can literally see more than ever before.
Here are the kinds of questions that you use to anticipate, monitor, and correct at your event.
These all set up the big question: are you running your event, or is your event running you?
Technology is so abundant and cheap that there’s no reason that you shouldn’t have this information at your fingertips. Having the answers to these questions give you more power than ever before. So, how do we get there?
EventOps: The Heart of your Event, in Your Hand
There’s so many ways to streamline your event operations with the device already in your hand. (Or your pocket.) At EventHero we call your digital nervous system “EventOps” (short for Event Operations). This is where all the data generated from your event is collected, and presented in a usable fashion.
The key to setting up EventOps is to optimize your event data, starting with information about your attendees – your registration data. Don’t just throw up a registration form online and expect to “sort it out later”. Just like your agenda, how you capture and use your data needs to be considered way in advance.
Correctly setting up your data flow is beyond the scope of this post but if you’d like to learn more, we frequently write about it on the EventHero blog.
It’s also important not to think of this post just as a word of caution – this is also a huge opportunity.
You’ll be able to provide a better experience for your attendees by giving them real-time updates, more opportunity for your sponsors to engage in a relevant manner, and finally, letting you spend less time on brush fires and more time creating a fantastic experience for everyone at your event.