Events App Launched for Clients in 2018

19 Dec Events App Launched for Clients in 2018

In recent years CBA Events have been predicting and reacting to market trends within the events and meetings industry.

“Over the last 12 months we have witnessed an increase in web streaming due to the economic uncertainty surrounding Brexit and the associated costs of mobilising the workforce to attend a large conference, explains production and events director Tim Green.

“The exciting development now, however, is that clients have a renewed appetite for the on-site meeting but want the delegate experience to start in advance of the face to face element of the event, have a heightened level of engagement whilst there and then guarantee the sustainability of the messages by keeping the engagement going for the weeks that follow”.

In order to facilitate this we have looked at the event apps currently on the market and whilst the functionality existed the price point was regularly the sticking point.

The existing app offering was servicing the larger event and exhibition market but was generally not within the budget of smaller conferences with less than 100 delegates.

We therefore made the decision to form a new partnership to bring an app to the market that was affordable whilst meeting the needs of our existing client base.

The first question was whether to produce a native or HTL5 app but as Tim explained: “I remember that in 2012 Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook’s biggest mistake in their mobile strategy was to focus on HTML5 rather than Native. It’s very hard to ignore that kind of advice!”

In a fast-moving industry where tech innovations have such a short life cycle speed was imperative and so CBA Events decided to utilise existing technology and concentrate more on driving down the cost based on the volume of orders they could generate with their client base and passing on this saving.

This approach has led to us to roll out the event app to several clients in a short time and host live demos to prospective app users who are set to invest in the tech for their next events.

“The apps are really revolutionising the way we’re running smaller meetings, says Tim.

“From unlimited push notifications to polling, submitting questions to presenters, in app social media, site beacons, gamification, personalised agendas, strong analytic tools and post event surveys, we’re seeing a huge spike in the level of engagement achieved by our clients”.

One of the biggest challenges facing app developers currently is Apple ramping up their efforts to clean up the app store deleting literally hundreds and thousands of apps. The clever way that CBA’s container app manages our client’s events within, alleviates this issue and is giving peace of mind ahead of the unprecedented purge scheduled for the end of the year.

However, we don’t want to rest on their laurels.

When asked what the next step will be Tim answered: “At the moment our event management team are moderating input and answering delegate queries from within the app. In the next two years this will seem archaic, labour intensive and delegates who were excited about the technology only months earlier will start to despise having to wait upwards of 10 seconds for an answer to their questions. That’s when it will be time for us to step aside and make way for the Chatbots!”