Propared’s marketing director Eric deLima calls for an organiser rethink
If current trends are to be believed, you’d think it begins and ends with attendees, or end-users. Websites, marketing, ticketing, registration, check-in, apps, data collection; everything to ensure that the people coming to your event take the actions you want them to take.
This is certainly important. Many of these tools have only recently become available to event organisers. It’s understandable that this ‘engagement technology’ is now such a focal point. But event management cannot simply be a synonym for attendee management. If so, organisers run the risk of ignoring perhaps their most important work; work that can have the single greatest effect on producing positive attendee experiences. I’m talking about logistics planning.
In a paper published by the Project Management Institute, nearly 70 per cent of project failures can be attributed to figuring out the details that make a project happen.
Events are a complex coordination of people, resources, and time. This is especially true in large exhibitions, where organisers are managing robust schedules across multiple departments with many stakeholders.
Yet, as the tools for managing end-users get better, organisers are still cobbling together spreadsheets, emails, and task managers.
The truth is that no matter how much time and effort is put into nurturing attendees, a failure in logistics will throw off an entire event. So why aren’t organisers scrambling to find better, more technologically advanced logistics planning tools? They should be. Rather than focus on enriching the attendee experience first, organisers should be maximising the quality of their own systems. Then they can focus solely on the needs of their guests, not on putting out their own fires.
