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  • 1.  Tip of the Week #10: Your Total Events Program

    Posted 06-10-2020 09:57
    Edited by Danielle Czark 06-10-2020 10:00

    Hi, Cvent Community!

    For this week's tip, we want to take a step back and focus on your total events program, and how Cvent can support your goals and account holistically. It is crucial to evaluate how your events program is showing your organization's ROI and use clear reporting and analytics to do so seamlessly. This allows you to align with other teams, such as marketing and sales, and have a clear picture of your similar goals and metrics. Let's walk through some of the essential functions of the Cvent platform that can support your organization's outcomes and success.

    • Improve Processes and Efficiency – With technology comes efficiency, right? Typically, but there are still many ways that processes can become overwhelming and key tasks or updates can be missed. That is where the Cvent platform comes in to implement your organization's workflow and instill productivity across all teams who have hands in the total events program.
      • Meeting Request Forms - The key way to start the event process with efficiency and create consistency across your entire events program is through Meeting Request Forms. Meeting Request Forms eliminate the difficulty of tracking via emails and notes and instead act as an online questionnaire that houses all of the relevant data for an event. This form will tie together all stakeholders in your program, as it allows the requestor to input their required details and stay in the know on the approval process, the approver has direct visibility into said details and can access their decision and next steps, and the planner or Cvent user can close the loop by creating the Cvent event once approved. Throughout this process, you can utilize Notifications to alert stakeholders on changes to the form and overall decisions that are being made through the system. To look at the requests holistically, there are several helpful reports, such as the admin-level Meeting Request Change History report that outlines all requests and changes that have been made over time.
      • Budget and Reconciliation - Take a look at the Budget Module within the Admin section of your account. You are able to customize your settings at the account level, which will allow for consistent and clear budgets within all of your programs. You have the control to set your Budget Columns, Savings Formulas, Budget Categories, Tax & Gratuity, and even more, all at the Admin level. Once you have everything set, turn this into a template which can be applied to each of your events. From there, it is simple for the event planner to add the unique budget items and costs. Take it one step further by publishing your Budget Reports to a Portal to allow the marketing team and internal stakeholders to review the data easily and in real-time.
      • Admin & Cross-Event Reports - If your organization collects fees within your events, it's likely that you're looking to track the revenue you're bringing in. There are always event-level financial reports, but you can also review the Admin and Cross-Event Financial reports to review your revenue from the past quarter, specific series of events, or any customization that you are looking for. A go-to report is the Transactions report within Admin > Standard Reports.
    • Sales/Revenue Generation - Achieving your revenue goals often starts at the beginning of the event lifecycle – by simply hitting your attendee registration goals. There are many ways that the Cvent platform can assist you in doing so, and then telling the story through reports and integration.
      • Event Calendar: Give your invitees and your stakeholders a seamless way to view your full event schedule through the Event Calendar. This can be configured in a list view or calendar format and can include all events or just the ones you choose. Events can be searched through keywords and a date range, and you can display pertinent information including location, description, or any custom event fields. The calendar can be viewed easily through its generated weblink, or can be inserted as a web widget on your external website.
      • Cross-Event Reports: Review the data of all events through the Cross-Event report Return on Event. This report returns a list of events with conversion rates (% of invitees who registered) and response rates (% of invitees who responded to invitations).
      • Cvent Integrations: To close the loop on the attendee lifecycle and your revenue generation, you can implement an integration with your organization's CRM. Cvent offers many out-of-the-box integration solutions, such as Salesforce, or even an API for a more customizable option.
    • Lead Generation – It can be difficult to demonstrate your event's lead value and validate the connections your events facilitate, but with data driven technologies, you can capture, qualify, and simplify the process.
      • LeadCapture: With the flexibility it allows in scanning both badges and business cards, LeadCapture simplifies inconsistent collections and allows you to easily qualify leads with custom, logic-based questions. After your event, Cvent's reporting capabilities prove your event performance and bring value to your exhibitors and sponsors, easing the marketing process.
      • Appointments: This tool adds value to your event by allowing attendees to meet with the right people and increase valuable connections. Allowing customers and prospects to set meetings with other attendees and company representatives, Cvent Appointments can increase your pool of leads with effective meetings. As part of the greater Cvent platform, this tool seamlessly integrates to ensure updated attendee profiles, locations, and schedule changes.
    • Attendee Engagement/Satisfaction – While anecdotal feedback can be valuable, it's important to have both qualitative and quantitative data to back up your events.
      • OnArrival: Whether it's handheld session scanning, badge tap-n-go, passive RFID, or booth tracking, onsite attendee tracking allows planners and marketers determine which event programs have the highest traffic and engagement. While we may not be meeting live now, reviewing past tracking reports can provide valuable insight to different teams on which event aspects are most valuable to attendees.
      • Mobile Event Apps: With gamification, live Q&A, dynamic event guides, activity feeds, and more, mobile event apps offer endless ways to engage your attendees – in an entirely trackable way. With over 100 metrics, CrowdCompass collects data and creates dashboards to easily demonstrate real-time attendee engagement. Read how these apps can bring value to virtual events too in a past Community Tip.
      • Feedback Surveys: Perhaps the most obvious way to measure attendee satisfaction, feedback surveys are a simple but powerful tool to ask attendees any questions your marketing and sales teams may find valuable. As part of the Cvent platform, these surveys can easily tie to any event and target specific session attendees.

    There were many different goals and functions highlighted here, and now we want to hear from you! Do you use any, or even several, of these features to improve your internal processes and events program? Have you received any helpful feedback from collaborators and stakeholders in other departments or divisions? Let us know what you find most crucial in the Cvent platform to demonstrate the value that is produced from your events.

    If you have any questions, let us know below! #CventTip


    #Classic-Creating/ManagingEvents
    #Flex-Creating/ManagingEvents
    #ReportingandInsights
    #ExecutingStrategicMeetingsManagement

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    Danni Czark
    Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
    Cvent
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  • 2.  RE: Tip of the Week #10: Your Total Events Program

    Posted 06-10-2020 10:07
    This is so helpful as we are about to overhaul our system entirely! I'm wondering if anyone else uses MRFs like we do so that only the events that are not managed by our team (the formal event managers) will be submitted into the system via MRF. I'm working to keep the meeting requests repository as clean as possible so that only those events that are new/requested by non-managers live there, if that makes sense. Anybody else do that?

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    Stacy Wright
    Event Manager, Commercial Excellence
    Galderma Laboratories, L.P..
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