Author: Glen Masters

The team at Celadin work tirelessly at elite events around the globe, to make events smooth, to make events work and, most importantly, to make events a VIP experience.

When organising an event, more often than not, you should accept that issues may well arise. Perhaps a talk is oversubscribed, or a speaker is running late; maybe an attendee is having trouble accessing your app from her phone, or the polls you’re sending out aren’t reaching everyone.

What you shouldn’t do, is quietly accept that the problem has happened, or is going to continue happening, and merely promise and hope to fix it next time. I’m sure we’ve all been in a presentation where something has gone wrong and everyone in the room has awkwardly pretended that they’re ignorant of the issue. 

In these problematic situations, it’s imperative that you respond as soon as humanly possible to ensure your event keeps moving, and doesn’t come to a crashing (and embarrassing) halt. This is why it’s extremely important to have a team of specialists that can support you and aid in responding quickly.

When the experts are present on-site, issues can be addressed in a timely manner, and event-saving tech solutions can be delivered within mere hours, meaning your attendees can continue their VIP experience with minimal disruption.

A recent study by Eventsforce highlights the importance of using technology properly when planning and managing events. Almost half of all event planners who responded said that event technology plays a very important part in planning events, and more than 2 in 3 respondents were of the opinion that technological expertise is a key success factor for managing an event. 

This can lay a heavy burden on Event Managers & Planners, as the same study reveals that, alarmingly, under half of all respondents consider themselves ‘tech-savvy’. That’s why having a team of experts, like the team at Celadin, to support your tech needs can greatly remove the pressure of last-minute technological issues.

Making events run smoothly

A main hope for any event is to make sure that everything runs smoothly, even when it may not necessarily be running according to plan.

Imagine you’re running a series of talks at an event. Fifteen minutes before a talk is due to start in one of the smaller rooms, you notice it’s seriously oversubscribed. Well, first of all, don’t panic! At Celadin, we design our systems to ensure that dealing with this sort of situation is easy, but we know it helps to have a specialist team on-hand with the specific know-how available to fix it.

When event timetables and rooms need to be adjusted, having the right people there to make quick and easy changes can be a godsend. 

Making events work

Let’s face it: no matter how much preparation takes place in the run-up to an event, things can still go wrong. Every event will have a handful of attendees whose phones won’t properly load an app, for instance, or perhaps an issue arises with the notifications and some people aren’t being reminded about upcoming talks they’re booked in for. 

Celadin is equipped to deal with these tricky cases with relative ease. Having a team on-site to act in an agile and consultative fashion to fix a wide array of tech-related problems ensures each attendee experience remains uninterrupted and everyone stays in the loop.

Glen Masters, Chief Technical Officer at Celadin, recalls a time when a VIP arrived at an event and revealed that his company’s phone policy meant he couldn’t download the event app. With Glen on-site, this problem had an easy fix: he took all the information from the app and made a printable document from it, so the guest could navigate all the activities taking place.

When you’re able to be responsive to tech issues as they arise, you can keep your event on track and retain participant engagement. 

Making events VIP

As event-tech experts, we at Celadin believe in going above and beyond to meet stakeholder expectations and deliver the VIP experience. Attendees get one-on-one assistance when they need it, and the team will be on standby to make sure that everything is done to the highest professional standard. 

Furthermore, the apps that Celadin produces for the events-space can act as a hub for all the necessary information surrounding any event, and is updated in real-time.

Adding truly bespoke technology experiences in the events-space can add a touch of magic to any professional event, and Celadin is dedicated to crafting unique out-of-the-box solutions, even when responding to on-the-day surprises. Celadin achieves this by embedding themselves with the planners from day one, and supporting them as much as needed throughout the entire journey of planning and managing event-tech. 

During one event, the organisers ran into a problem – they planned on printing off a picture list to identify attendees, but they had no idea how to make sure every relevant staff member had a copy, or what to do about updates to the list.

Glen had the solution to all their issues. Within just a few hours, he produced an app which organised all the pictures of attendees into an easy-to-view grid format, viewable on both mobile and tablet alike. As a result, event staff were able to scroll through these pictures and easily identify people. 

This sort of consultative approach and bespoke, quick-fire problem-solving, combined with the technical know-how of an on-site support team, is a sure-fire way of ensuring attendees receive first-class assistance, whilst enjoying an exciting and unique event experience.

Do you think attendees at your events should be given the VIP experience no matter what happens? 

Get in touch with us to discover how to revolutionise your event experiences.
Find out more about how our app can be used to deliver instant insights from your top customers during events, read our previous blog here.

You’ve probably noticed that the use of online polls at business events is becoming increasingly common: ‘What did you find most interesting?’, ‘Which talk was the most memorable for you?’ or ‘What’s your opinion of X?’. Although the use of polling platforms is adding a new level of interactivity to business events, these technologies have a wider wealth of untapped potential.

We live in a fast-paced digital world where the life-cycle of products and services is getting shorter and the demand for customer-centric development is ever-growing. The future of interactive events and quickfire audience polling lies in gathering invaluable insights directly from those who know your product best: the VIP customers you’ve gathered in one venue. Let’s say you’ve assembled a whole host of experts in your field, distinguished people at the highest levels of their respective organisations – now’s the time to make use of their collective knowledge and insight by sending quickfire, snapshot questions straight to their phones.

‘Here are four things we’re planning on developing on our product over the next year: Which of these would you want us to roll out ASAP?’ 

‘We’re thinking of adding this feature to our systems, would this be an asset? How big an obstacle would this feature help you overcome?’ 

When companies are talking to their biggest customers, the ability to capture data in rapid snapshots provides the necessary tools for product development teams to ensure their product is being shaped in line with market expectations. These raw insights can be gold dust to businesses able to act in an agile way to incorporate customer desires into their product development.

Tapping into the raw data available from event technology during business events and forums can revolutionise the way in which your organisation remains relevant in an ever-changing, fast-paced, competitive environment.

Interested in gaining access to immediate insights from your top customers? Get in touch to learn more about what the Celadin app can do for you. And if you’re curious about how event technology can be made digitally secure, read our previous blog on how event tech can help handle some of the most sensitive business issues.

Event tech is becoming increasingly sophisticated and the most ambitious speakers are waking up to it’s potential to really impact the talks they give. While speakers are waking up to the potential, event organisers in the largest blue chips can be reluctant to use it. Why? Because the topics being debated are so sensitive that data security actually becomes a problem. 

Most of us have seen how voting and interactive polling tech can add drama and excitement to a talk. The speaker introduces the debate and the audience takes part instantly using the personal voting tech they’ve been given or the special app they’ve been asked to download.

But what if the information that audiences are asked to vote on is top secret? What if the audience comprises the top 100 VIP customers and the questions they are being asked are about real strategic business changes that could deliver untold commercial advantage?

That’s pretty sensitive information being collated and, in the wrong hands, it could be anything from embarrassing to ruinous. It’s not hard to find shock stories about data being misused by third-party services. Companies are now having to do their utmost to ensure that the data they collect is not only relevant but is only used for what it was intended for in the first place. 

As the business trusted to support big blue chips with event tech, we have encountered this problem before. So, we’ve worked hard to create interactive voting and polling systems that are safe and highly secure.

“We promise to anonymise all information shared during seminars to protect attendees identity. We encrypt the data we collect, which means no third-party apps are included in our process. We also make sure that the data we collect is deleted as soon as we share our findings with our client,” says Celadin’s Simon Walker.

The entire meeting is managed through the app so when speakers share results to various questions everyone’s identity is protected. Our process also ensures that the data collected is not shared with any third-party app and is used only for its intended purpose, research.

The trend of using interactivity during live sessions doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. So how do you create a safe environment where the brightest speakers, speaking about the most sensitive topics, can use polling or voting tech to create more engaging seminars? Get in touch to learn a bit more about what the Celadin app can do.

We know that dedicated mobile apps can help businesses manage all the admin hassles that come with large events: notifications, attendee lists, and locations. We also know that you can use those apps to analyse the data after an event to see who went where and when, providing insights into what your attendees want, need and think. But now things are getting even more sophisticated – and Celadin is at the forefront.

We recently created an app for a major global technology business that is running an in-house event. Many of its top salespeople would be attending and, most importantly, so are dozens of their biggest clients – CEOs and senior executives from some of the biggest brands in the world.

Rather than tracking attendees’ activity and interests after the event, it is vital to do so in real-time. Those salespeople need to know which areas are of the most interest to individual clients. So they can work with and advise them there and then, while the subject is fresh in their minds.

So, as well as all the usual technologies to keep the event running as smoothly as silk, we designed the app to hold information on the key areas the business is covering in its various presentations: everything from cloud and quantum computing to AI and blockchain. There are short articles inside the platform, plus links to more information on the business’s own website.

In real-time, the salespeople can access the app during the event and see what their clients are attending in terms of presentations, as well as which subjects are attracting their attention and are nearest and dearest to their hearts. This type of real-time analysis is valuable for any event organiser that needs immediate information on their attendees – not just what they’re doing, but what they’re thinking about.

Outside of the technology sector, imagine a toy manufacturer able to immediately see which products its retail partners are most interested in, or a consulting firm whose experts can see at a glance which of its service lines are of the most interest to clients for potential cross-selling.

Any event can use this app-based technology to provide invaluable data and insights to the organiser while it’s still happening, rather until waiting until later when interest might have cooled.

If you’d like to know more Celadin and how we continuously support event organisers through technology, before, during and after the event itself, please get in touch with us.

So, you’re an organiser gearing up for that huge event or trade show. You’ve even invested in a specialist mobile app for attendees and delegates to download. What can go wrong?

Unfortunately, quite a bit. We’ve spoken to several big event organisers in the past and determined that, on average, the main event app is usually downloaded by only about 30% of the audience

Why so few?

Often, because the app simply isn’t good enough. It’s not uncommon to discover that event apps just aren’t really intuitive – or for that matter, functional. Many of them claim to do some pretty dramatic and impressive things but in practice they fail to deliver on their promises.

For example, at a recent big trade show in Cannes, France, the official app put its meet-up feature front and centre. It looked great in principle. Visitors and delegates would be able to search for contacts (all of whom were expertly profiled), connect with them and even book meetings.

In reality, it simply didn’t work. Some messages didn’t get through. On occasion, messages from one contact were allocated to a totally different person. The chat features were flaky and patchy internet connections on-site prompted the app to freeze or crash entirely.

It’s incredible that this type of thing still happens in our tech-driven business world, but unfortunately it often just doesn’t get the attention and focus it deserves. Many event organisers still see a specialist app as a niche or peripheral option within the portfolio of products they have to offer.

And yet at the same time, a misfiring app can have a considerable negative impact on an event:

• Firstly, the people at the event will be massively inconvenienced if the app doesn’t deliver on its big promises. Just like the delegates in Cannes who were unable to line up the meetings they wanted
• Secondly, the organisation that actually sponsored the app and has its brand all over the app, will suffer significant levels of reputational damage. The sponsors of the Cannes app were incredibly embarrassed because people assumed it was their technology that was to blame, even though it was nothing to do with it.

Since it was a technology company, that’s hardly the sort of word of mouth publicity it was seeking.

However, done correctly and well, an app can be an invaluable technology addition to support a big event. It allows the event organiser to deliver a better experience to delegates and gathers important data about attendee activities and behaviour, which is then used to inform the sales process.

It can be customised, used to provide feedback and integrated with gift and stock allocation. In short, the right app can be the difference between a good event and a great one. A flaky and malfunctioning app, on the other hand, can ruin it for everyone.

If you’d like to know more about Celadin and how we support event organisers through technology, please get in touch.

New privacy regulations like GDPR have made everyone more aware of the personal data they share, and their right to know and manage the personal details companies hold on them. For event managers organising high-end corporate events for VIP customers, the new age of privacy is changing everything, explains Celadin’s Simon Walker.

Balancing good event management with respecting both laws and culture around privacy and security is a growing challenge for event organisers we’re working with today.

Privacy is one of the defining issues of this digital age. Initiatives like GDPR are spearheading worldwide changes that present new challenges, but also new opportunities, for the events industry.

 

The technologies that we use in our event management software deliver an unprecedented amount of data to the companies we help organise events for, but in the new age privacy, where customers are quickly coming to understand the real value of their own personal data, being able to demonstrate good data governance has become a strong differentiator for events organisers.

When conference attendees agree to provide personal details these days they usually want to know three things: 1. Why is the data being collected? 2. What will it be used for? and 3. What happens to the data when the event is over?

Trust comes when delegates feel their privacy is respected

Integrating NFC (near field communication) technology such as Beacons – which pinpoints the location of individuals – provides event organisers with legitimately useful information, such as where they have been and when.

Attending conferences – and specific sessions such as keynote speeches – can be a condition of being at the whole event and, in some instances, is also a key test of whether the cost of the conference is eligible for tax purposes.

So, proving you were where you were meant to be at the right time is important for everyone. And if attendees didn’t attend a particular speech or breakout session then they should not be surprised to receive a text or email soon after the event from their line manager or conference organiser asking about the absence.

However, it is probably less important for the event organisers to know that you were still knocking out moves on the dancefloor or knocking back tequilas at the bar at two in the morning. That is …well… between you and your liver.

Keeping up to date with evolving privacy regulations

All event managers strive to comply with data privacy laws and inform delegates of their privacy rights when they download the app and sign up for the event.

Staying up to date with different privacy legislative provisions in different territories is a must for event organisers, either through in-house IT governance experts or external advisers. And part of that includes telling delegates their privacy rights including all important opt-outs.

Given all the publicity over recent months on online privacy issues – a quick search will reveal dozens of articles on the subject – it is not surprising that awareness among the majority of digital users is on the rise.

A recent US survey showed 78% were aware of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytics survey and that is proving to be a major turning point in the way consumers feel about their data privacy.

 

However, we at Celadin have known about the importance of privacy for some time. The people who attend the conferences that we help to stage have always been sophisticated users. That means many have always chosen to keep privacy at the highest available settings, turning down the opportunity to share data with other colleagues at the event.

That is absolutely fine. But it has always been interesting to see how different cultures have had different attitudes to the opt-in/opt-out option. Looking back a decade or more, it is fair to say that delegates from central Europe – such as Germany and Austria – were asking questions whereas delegates from the US and the UK used seemed to be more relaxed.

For instance, quite often the more concerned/curious would ask us what was stored on the chip on their delegate badge: the answer which we were happy to give was ‘nothing’.

And all that data which was collected during the event? It was never ours, it was always the clients, so we never kept any of it. Anything we had for the duration of the event was always stored securely. And afterwards our clients, of course, would manage all the event data in line with their normal data governance protocols.

Privacy questions are here to stay. With the advent of integration and sharing of images into digital technology, the need to respect privacy will constantly pose fresh questions. But they are not insurmountable; answers lie in understanding law, technology, best practice and – most importantly of all – the objectives for the event.

If you want to discuss any aspect of privacy please contact us

For the last couple of years, a product called PhotoTap has been used at some of the events where our event-management system has been helping to run the show.

Based in Florida, PhotoTap supplies photographers who attend the prestigious events we help to run and are on hand to take photographs of the delegates during the event. You know the sort of thing: at the keynote speeches and sessions; in the workshops and roundtables; at the gala dinner and even – if the delegates get the chance – on the golf course. The snapper/photographers have been a staple of these events since the camera was small and light enough to hang around the neck.

However, we are collaborating with PhotoTap to bring corporate photography to the leading edge of the smart, digital age. Gone are the days of the photographer having to ask everyone who they are – and possibly mishearing and misspelling names, companies and job titles – or landing some junior in the marketing department the task of trawling through the photographs for weeks afterwards: “Are you sure that’s Frank from Wisconsin?”

To cut out such fun and games, on arrival every delegate is given a unique, wearable tag. After taking the delegate’s photograph, it is a moment’s work for the camera operator to also scan their tag using a device on the wi-fi and NFC-enabled [near field communication] camera, which then digitally identifies who is in the picture.

That in itself is pretty smart, making the task of capturing the event much more efficient, but this year we were asked to become involved with PhotoTap and we’ve pushed things along even further.

We succeeded in integrating the data that had been on PhotoTap’s tag into our badges which are linked to our event-management software. Our badges are the size of a credit card and use a unique serial number as the key for data posting. The result was neater (one less badge) and smarter.

A backend API [application programming interface] operation automatically fed the data we had on the badges to PhotoTap’s servers.

By doing so, PhotoTap were able to post each individual’s photographs in their personal app.
This was a new development for PhotoTap, previously the delivery had been by email only.
So imagine: you’ve just had a great photograph taken of you with some colleagues at an event session and the next moment it is on the secure event app on your phone.

The app is polling all the time so if it’s on it will receive the latest photograph.
After that, what the delegates choose to do with the image is up to them. Don’t worry, we’ve sorted out the privacy issues beforehand. The image is personal to the individual and no one else, unless those caught on camera, can choose to share it.

That means individuals are free to use the image on their favourite social media channel if they wish, it’s entirely up to them.

PhotoTap’s servers also automatically send the image to the email address the delegate has provided.
Cutting down on the number of badges the delegates required made life just a little easier for them and saved the client some money.

Making all that work – such as pushing all the data up to PhotoTap – wasn’t a big issue for us, although it did take some time. We did have to overcome one or two technical hurdles: for instance, delegates could have multiple badges so we had to allow, in our specifically-designed code, for the fact that they could present any of those badges for tapping but they still needed to receive the image.

It was great to work with PhotoTap and we look forward to collaborating with them again. We also think the process and work we did was a great snapshot (so to speak) of Celadin’s flexibility and ability to work with other software services to make our clients prestigious events run even better.

Integrate with anything

Other examples of integration include Celadin securely connecting to IBM’s identity-management and event-registration systems thereby allowing access to data such as travel arrangements and logistics, including which flight a delegate is on, which hotel they are booked into and which activities they are due to attend at the event.

Celadin pulls data from IBM every five minutes during the event to ensure changes such as travel arrangements are managed well. So, for example, delegates will be told when check out is due and where to meet the transport for the airport transfer.