While being able to purchase groceries, cash checks, fuel a vehicle, or send funds to a foreign country at a single location often do provide convenience and savings to the shopping experience, the bundling of services does not always have a similar effect for events.

Below are some points or considerations for why we believe including activities or optional tours with conference registration does not provide guests convenience, nor result in a more strategic outcome for all parties.

At GruupMeet, we believe that successful meeting and incentive experiences hinge on simple, effective and smart communications. Today’s event teams and attendees are tired of inefficient mobile app notifications and disruptions. Therefore, they seek convenience and timely, relevant information without having to change the way they already prefer to communicate. We believe that today’s focus on personalization and ease of use for all parties will help shape and lead the way as our industry continues to evolve. Thus, here are some relevant questions you should ask event technology vendors:

1. What business processes and data practices does the event technology provider implement to ensure that customer generated contact information or data does not inadvertently integrate with the event tech provider’s own business data? (This may be particularly important if permission to read and modify contacts is granted when downloading and installing the app). 
2. How many app downloads iTunes and/or Google Play is reporting there have been, AND the percentage of app reviews compared to installs?
3. How might iTunes and/or Google Play app install data relate to the event tech provider’s estimated number of paying customer accounts? 

Evolving Objectives and Participant Expectations
Meeting technologies and automation have improved and advanced in many capacities such as registration, networking, surveys, maps and check-in but this is the tip of the iceberg. Meeting logistics involves many meticulous processes, and most are still being managed and monitored manually with little innovation past an Excel spreadsheet. While more meeting planning processes are being automated today, intricate processes like on-site logistics, such as airport arrivals, are largely executed manually.

There are many factors that make it difficult for meeting planners to manage the meticulous and continually changing logistics. Meeting planners typically invest about 150 hours of time managing each meeting. For fear of significant potential risks and unknowns, meeting technology has generally been slowly adopted. People impact return on objectives (ROO), and bad meeting experiences hurt businesses as valuable time and stakeholder money are wasted. For example, for internal meetings, the sales participants have a direct impact on the organization’s revenue so engagement and return on objectives are important. However, the process of managing constantly changing logistics, like arrivals, inherently deters the focus on people and consumes time. Successful transportation logistics hinge on effective communication with all parties. While each airport presents a different set of challenges and each meeting’s objectives are unique, participants are increasingly expecting convenience and relevance regarding meeting communications.

​We’ve all seen the Consumer Cellular ads and know that “text size” can easily be enlarged on mobile or GrandPad devices, which is important to keep in mind when creating event text communications from your business desktop or laptop. The interface and experience of that of the attendees that receive event-related text messages are likely to vary, regardless of the type of mobile device.
 
Just because message length or choice of diction looks great for you, doesn’t necessarily mean this will be the case for guests that receive this message on their mobile devices. Today, text messaging continues to shape the way people communicate. The first text message was sent around 1992, and in a relatively short period, today there are over 5 billion texters globally with about 2 billion of those in the U.S. And these figures will continue to rise. According to a study by Twilio, “90% of people say they’d rather receive a text than a phone call from a business.” This article will guide your business towards writing clear, concise event text messages with confidence.