Many meeting professionals are abandoning the printed program guide in favour of mobile apps to inspire and communicate with attendees at their events. But with so many options available, choosing a mobile app for conferences and events can be tricky: without a clearly defined set of requirements, you may be led astray.
Here are 10 things Lumi says one should consider when choosing the perfect mobile event app:
1. BRANDING
- What value do you place on brand marketing and positioning of your brand at your events?
- Do you consider branding a way to position yourself at events as a thought leader, innovator and trusted content provider?
- To what extent can you embrace the capabilities on mobile devices to position your brand – including multimedia, rich colour, transitions and animation capabilities?
2. NUMBER OF EVENTS
- Can you quickly and easily scale to deliver apps for multiple events?
- If you host a lot of events, do you need to create a separate app for each event or can you create a single app for your organization that contains multiple event apps?
- If a single app is available for all of your events, is each individual event simply a replica of the same app or can you create unique apps with completely different functionality and user-experience?
- How is the mobile app content management system designed to make managing multiple events easy and efficient?
3. INSIGHT
- Can you monitor what is happening at your events in real-time so you can adapt on-the-fly?
- How deep can you drill-down on analytics for app usage? Is a report available showing detailed app usage, such as the most popular event activities and what attendees are planning in their schedules?
- What kind of insight do you need to make your next event better?
4. EASE OF USE
- Can you build your own app or does the vendor build everything for you?
- Does the content management system make it easy to load your data and manage all of your events?
- How long does it take to truly master the content management system?
5. PERSONALISATION
- Is the mobile app designed to share relevant information with attendees based on their personal profiles?
- Can you allow attendees to personalize their preferences to view preferred content?
- How much control can attendees have over sharing of their personal information?
