The EventDay Blog

Author Archives: Scott Cate

On Demand Badge + Multi Document Printing

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Do you ask your event Attendees: “Will you please fill out this form?” when they arrive? Maybe it’s a Media Waiver, or Meal Preferences, or something else? If you do, it’s probably slow and painful, and you’ll love this new feature!

EventDay now has the ability to Print on Demand, additional Mail-Merged Documents as your attendee arrives. So right next to the Name Badge (also printed on demand) is the second, or third, or Nth document you needed to print.

AND IT’S MAIL-MERGED :) so that means the attendee doesn’t have to fill out the form with all the data you already collected during registration.

Print. Sign, Go.

Fast and Faster, just the way we like it.

To use this feature … setup a document under Settings / Documents. For the Mail Merge we use a combination of XML, XSLT, and SVG, which get’s a little nerdy, but it get’s the job done.

Once you have your document saved, head over to Tickets > (Edit Ticket) > Triggers, and add a new Trigger. You’ll probably use “Tendered” which fires when the user checks in, and add a document print trigger, select the document you just created, and click save.

Viola!

You could also take advantage for this, on a COMPLETE trigger, and print a shipping label in your warehouse? This would help you automate fulfillment if you’re sending something to each attendee. As each ticket is “Completed” (just after “Pending”) the print job would fire.

It’s really nice, and we’re getting great feedback from our customers on this feature.

Enjoy!

Moderation: Yeah, we have that!

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Problem Statement: You have 50-20000 people in a room or stadium, and you want to accept questions from the Audience. We have a Public, a Semi-Private, and an in room only Private solution, to the age old Moderation problem. Here is a quick run down of each solution.

Public: Use a twitter hash tag. Our moderation tool allows you to monitor twitter for a search phrase, and “Approve” comments. These approved comments show up on a monitor, or the projector, for the panel to answer.

Semi-Private: Use texting ( AKA, SMS ). We can assign a private SMS number for people to Text in Questions. If this number is only given out to people in the room, it’s pretty safe, but can still be leaked. Again, approved questions can be surfaced to any monitor or even the main projector.

Private – In this room only: We scan badges as people come into the room. This “checks them in” and then using the Mobile Application for Windows Phone, Android, or Apple, private questions can be submitted.

Please contact us if any of this is interesting for you to use, at your event or conference!

Integration Points with Infusionsoft

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EventDay offers two key points that integrate with Infusionsoft. There are other integration points as well, but these are the two main integration points.

Ticketing
Infusionsoft collects data easily with forms, payments, user data, and everything you need to know about who is coming to your event. Once you set up an EventDay Event, you can create a ticket and then, with that ticket, you can **IMPORT** contacts from Infusionsoft based on users with a specific tag. Then when the attendee checks into the event via mobile, web (with printers, iPhones, and QRCodes) the user will be automatically tagged with an “{My Event Name} Event Attended” tag.

Lead Generation
If you have sponsors for your event, this feature lets you securely grant access to the attendee data, to each sponsor. Instead of just handing over a list of all attendees, our system lets the attendee opt into each sponsor. During a conversation, the Sponsor (using Android or iPhone) can scan a QRCode on the attendee badge, and automatically have the attendee data injected into their own Infusionsoft account (and optionally start an action set, or apply a tag).

“Infusionsoft” and the “Infusionsoft logo” are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Infusion Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Scott Guthrie Talks EventDay At TechDays Netherlands

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Publicity is gold to startups. Because they lack the market share, mind share and usually an advertising budget, any time startups have a respected speaker mention them on stage they get giddy.

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie did just that in his recent presentation at an Azure conference. Here, at the tail end of his speech at TechDays Netherlands, Guthrie discusses a few tricks our own Scott Cate uses to make EventDay print from Azure using the service bus described in an earlier Guthrie presentation.

Guthrie’s full presentation is nearly an hour, so we edited it down to show our bit. Thanks for the support!

Do we need Unpublished Session Titles?

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We have a dilemma. A current customer with a 2500-person event has made a feature request that we’re not sure if we custom build just for them or add to our basic software configuration. While we know it’s not smart to build any software for one specific company, this feature could be useful to others.

In the above video, co-founder Scott Cate talks about an upcoming event product launch that is meant to be kept secret from the audience. The big reveal will be during the keynote, and the rest of the event consists of classes designed to make working with the client’s new product easier.

Ideally, they’d like to be able to set up speakers, sessions and tracks but NOT publish them until after the keynote. The programming to do this takes time, and we’re wondering how many event organizers out there would find this kind of feature useful. Anyone with an unconference (speakers/sessions are chosen the morning of the event), a product launch (the need for secrecy, obviously) or some kind of members-only information could use this.

Do you see yourself needing unpublished session titles? Is the ‘big’ reveal something your attendees would appreciate? Is the ability to add a bit of mystery to your event worth it?

Let us know!

Giant Step for EventDay May 6, 2011

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Over the last eight months, we’ve worked with many many events. Some as low as 25 attendees with the City of Chandler, and some with thousands of attendees such as Microsoft. And every size event in between. We’re event planners for life at heart, and we’ve been studying your event bottlenecks. As an Event Planner, which you’re running you’re own event, it’s sometimes hard to see how things could be improved, although we all long for improvement. Nothing is more gratifying than the end of a show with a client that keeps talking and bragging about how great PHENOMENAL of an event you and your team created. Our main goal for Event Planner technology is to make a better experience for all the personas of your event. The Organizer. The Sponsor. The Speaker. and of course the Attendee.

During these events, EventDay has fully supplied the hardware, the staff, and all the technology. So, to-date, we have been on site for every event. This means that we were using our own tools, or “Dog-Fooding” as it’s known in the industry. Today, May 6, 2011, we successfully deployed all the technology for an event, where we were not present, and the entire event was a huge success.

This is a huge step for us. We obviously can’t scale if we have to be in person at every event. So our goal is to learn from our own experience, as well as take advice from our clients, to build great software that assists in running great events. We’re now in the process of sewing all the technology together into a debut version that is publicly consumable. An app where you’ll be able to sign in, and then create and manager your entire event online.

We’re aiming for very simple software. Riding on the success stories of many Internet leaders, we’re aiming for small, fast, easy to use software. Watch for our new home page design in the coming weeks. (today we redirect the home page to this blog)

To the hundreds of early adopters that have trusted us with your events, we thank you. We look forward to many thousands of great events, and working with many millions of attendees at those events.

@scottcate

EventDay QRCode Scanner for iPhone and iPod Touch

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This will be the documentation landing page for the EventDay iPhone QRCode Scanning application.

Details to be provided on Launch of the Application, scheduled for March 14th, 2011

Success! Our application is available for download in the Apple App Store. Search for “EVENTDAY” and you’ll be able to download it. We even have the ability to Private Label out application, which is why you’ll also see the InfusionCon. Both are the same application, so you’ll just need to download the EventDay Scanner Application.

Can you process your attendees fast enough?

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Can-You-Process-Attendees-Fast-Enough
Artwork drawn by BigRedApe Company

You’ve spent months planning the perfect event, meeting, or conference. Now everyone is planning to show up at the same time, and you have to check them in as fast, and as accurately as possible. No matter how well you plan, no matter what expense and no matter how much time anyone spends planning an event, there’s always one moment where nothing goes exactly to plan. In that moment, the most prepared staffs will thrive.

Professional event planners, like yourself, will do their best to avoid that moment at all costs. When thousands of people show up at your event when you planned for only 500, or when you have to process more people than you have registration space for, our approach can absolutely help.

Here are a few tips-and-tricks we rely on to process a lot of people in a limited amount of space and time.

Single Queue
Provided your event doesn’t have personalized material, having a single queue decreases processing time immensely. Having the badges printed on demand allows every terminal to handle every customer. Airlines and Banks are finally doing this. Everyone stands in the same line, and then is processed by the next available rep. This avoids anyone line from getting backed up, because of a single complex issue.

Check-In Stations
The number of check-in stations you setup, should be determined by the number of attendees, the avg time to process a check-in, and the time allotted for check-in. If you have 1000 guests, to be processed in an hour, and it takes you 11 seconds per guest, you need to process about 17 guests per minute. (17*60 = 1020). So now the question is, how many stations do you need to process 17 guests per minute? With EventDay, we would set you up with 5-7 stations, leaving about 20 seconds per guest to process. We would leave one or two stations open for complex cases, while the other 5 or 6 would be scanning registration tickets, and lighting up the Badge Printers.

(Side note) You may be asking, why we would ever need to process 1000′s of guests/attendees in a single hour. If you have a large multi-day conference, you probably have more than an hour for check in. But we’ve processed dinners and large single day events, where everyone shows up at the same time, and has a very limited time to get processed, and into the venue.

Automation
File>Print>Press Return>Print seems like only a few clicks or keystrokes, but when you’re processing a crowd, every movement counts. Our technology automates the entire print sequence, allowing you to move on to the next in line as quickly as possible. We so wish every event planner did this, as it’s as annoying to watch someone click away on their computer, making that line longer and longer. Image a check-in system with no typing? Scan a barcode on the attendee ticket, and the badge prints. Distribute material, and you’re done. Of course the exceptions here (which take the most time) happens when the attendee doesn’t have their printed confirmation (about 15-20%) and/or need a name correction.

Fast Lookup
If you don’t have barcode or QRCode scanning technology, then manually looking up attendee names, can be enhanced as well with our Live Search. Attendees with common first or last names take longer to find in a traditional check-in system. Our Live Search (filters the attendee list as you type) process requires only a few letters, and those letters can be the for someone’s first name and or their last name, company, or email address. This always let’s us find what we need in seconds. Either way, typing out entire names is completely unnecessary now. Your fingers will thank you.

Badge Printers
Most printers take a while to warm up, a while to process a print request and too long to actually print. The seconds add up quickly the longer a queue gets. We swear by badge printers that print in a matter of seconds (yes seconds). Other options are available, but if you’re looking to get through a line fast, there’s no better solution.

Preprinted Badges
If you must pre-print, print shells, and then print-on-demand the names and attendee information during checks in. A little forethought here might let you design and purchase enough badge blanks to use for next year. With printing, you’ll find that the cost difference between 1000, 2000, and 5000 might be almost nothing. Avoid printing the year on your badge, and reuse the assets next year. Especially on the lanyards if you’re having them customized.

Name Correction
Names will always be spelled incorrectly. An assistant, or friend, signed them up, or just a plain typo can easily happen. When you print a badge, it’s nice to be able to easily correct and reprint the badge. This is a nice touch that goes a long way, and is 100% lost, if you’re pre-printing badges with attendee data.

 

(Click to watch drawing)

Fail Fast(er)!

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While we all want to achieve success, I now think it can only be done through a lot of failure. Sure it would be nice if King Midas were on our team, but unfortunately he’s not. In past projects I have been a perfectionist to a fault. Spending too much time over producing and over engineering software. And to be honest, nothing was ever perfect, even after trying so hard (and so long) to get it that way.

Today, with EventDay, we are no longer striving for perfection out of the gate. First we’ll throw two or three or ten ideas against the wall, and see what sticks. Find out what customers like and don’t like. What they like, we’ll make better. What they hate, we’ll rework or ditch completely. Perfection will come through the art of failure and correction, not getting it right the first time.

Failing fast allows for corrective action, while we still have motivation, funding, and customers.

If you see us doing something you don’t agree with, please let us know so we can try to fix it, or stop doing it all together. And our commitment is that we’ll try not to proof read our own work, and take the constructive criticism as it comes, with open arms.

Thank You!

Mobile Notifications: In App or SMS – That is the question

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When thinking about a mobile offering, it doesn’t take very long to get to a point where notifications come into play. You want to tell the user “Hey – something you’re interested in just happened”. Each mobile platform offers stronger Pros over Cons for using In App Notifications over SMS.

SMS Costs money for the sender, and may or may not cost money for the receiver based on their current data plan.

With In App notifications (on IPhone, Android, and Win Phone 7) you can offer a popup (similar to a received SMS), but additionally can include directions for the application to do something.

So in the end, for notifications, we’re tending to lead towards native In App notifications. Do you agree that we’re on the right track?