This is a sponsored post by Roger Meier, Director of Sales and co-founder of SpotMe. More information about Event Manager Blog’s sponsored posts
The year is 2013 AD. The event is about to start. Everybody has your mobile event app installed. Everybody? Well, not everybody… One small village of your indomitable participants still doesn’t have a compatible device, doesn’t want to install your app because of privacy concerns, or simply finds it too cumbersome to do so.
And life is not easy for you. You’ve been working hard, implementing best practices, promoting your app and supporting multiple platforms… and are still running around late at night, producing paper binders and making last-minute changes because you don’t want to marginalize a significant number of your participants.
It doesn’t have to be that hard.
You can complement participant-owned devices with loaner devices.
Case Study: The Biggest Medical Congress to Connect EVERYONE
At ESOT Vienna 2013 creating a level playing field for the 3,412 participating transplantation specialists was a key priority.
See how a mobile app transformed the ESOT medical congress
To achieve this 47% of participants brought their own tablets. SpotMe provided loaner iPads for the other 53%. The investment paid off: Over four days the participants posted 1,246 session comments, made 2,284 appointments and exchanged 27,735 messages.
They also used the SpotMe mobile event app to document their event journeys, saving 47,133 abstracts, posters and notes to their online briefcases. Thousands of .pdf abstracts and posters replaced the “phone book” distributed to every participant at earlier ESOT congresses, saving 4,675 kilograms of paper.
One of our favourite voices at ESOT was Carl-Ludwig Fischer-Fröhlich from DSO, telling us how a new research initiative covering several countries was spontaneously organized through the SpotMe mobile event app:
Watch the story of a participant’s first mobile event app experience.
Carl-Ludwig used an iPad provided by SpotMe. He had never used a tablet before. At the end of the interview he mentions how he will buy his own tablet because of his experience at the congress – “I won’t tell which company :)”.
In Conclusion
Carl-Ludwig’s example nicely illustrates how providing loaner devices at one event gets you closer to the ideal of 100% of participants bringing their own device at the next event.
The 1,808 iPads that SpotMe handed out ensured that all 3,412 participants were equipped with both a compatible device and the SpotMe mobile event app, turning the congress into a total participation experience.
Providing loaner iPads and iPod touches is one of SpotMe’s strengths.
We own the largest device inventory in the world, and we’ve built the most efficient transport, charge and management cases to reduce shipping and prep costs.
Credits
The innovations grew out of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Stefan Schneeberger, who championed the project as a member of the ESOT board, ESOT Executive Officer Annalisa Ponchia, Ruud Janssen of TNOC, who consults with ESOT on the overall vision of the event, Sascha Tretenhahn of AIM Group International, ESOT’s PCO, the SpotMe team and many more.