It’s no secret that in the 21st century your event should be taking advantage of connectivity and technology to create a great experience for your attendees. But are you using technology—and specifically apps—effectively?
Events and conferences should be jumping into their attendees pockets and palms to help them: Get complete information about the event program, gain access to panels or keynotes they may miss, easily communicate with other event attendees, follow up with speakers, get reminders about conference extras, and engage in polls or offer feedback in real time.
Here are the apps we recommend to do just that:
- DoubleDutch: This app boasts it will “turn passive attendees into active participants” through its activity feed, “gamification,” live polling, surveys, and ratings and reviews. The app also sends location-based push notifications to conference attendees to alert them to events in their area, and allows direct messaging between attendees.
- Slido: One of the easiest ways to add engagement into a panel or keynote, Slido makes Q&As easy. We use it for LAI events to have audience generate questions for speakers in real time—and allow the audience to “boost” questions they are interested in hearing more about to the top of the list.
- CrowdCompass: This is actually an app for meeting planners. In addition to helping you create a powerful mobile app for your next event, it also has built in lead retrieval tools.
- Eventbase: Used by major conferences including SXSW, Eventbase helps you organize and monetize your event. Full screen commercials and branded placements are a few ways this socially-geared app can make big conferences money.
- PollEverywhere: Looking to boost audience participation? Poll everywhere allows you to embed polls directly into your PowerPoint slides and aggregate the data in real time. Yo u can map answer grids for interactive answering and generate instant word clouds onstage.
What do you think about event apps? Have you used any? Did we miss any on our list? Let us know!