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  • 1.  How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Cvent Staff
    Posted 03-09-2022 10:28
    Edited by Ridhima Krishan 03-11-2022 03:01

    Hello everyone! Welcome back to another edition of the Tip of the Week discussion!  

    Whether you're at an in-person or virtual event, meeting the right people makes all the difference. But how do you ensure, your attendees know when and where to find such networking opportunities? With Cvent Appointments, you can increase engagement between customers, prospects, employees, sponsors, and exhibitors, and allow all your event attendees to make valuable connections with each other whether in-person or virtually!  

    Let's jump to some interesting tips to use the Appointments feature to your benefit:  

    • Creating an Appointment Event: Each appointment event comes with its own mobile-friendly website where attendees can schedule meetings and view their schedules. For example, if you're planning a conference in Chicago and a tradeshow in Vegas, you would create an appointment event for each. While creating appointments, please remember that only one appointment event can be linked to a Registration, OnArrival, or LeadCapture event, and you cannot change which event is associated once it's linked. Follow this guide to discover a step-by-step guide to create an appointment event.  
    • Lay out the rules: Limit who can make appointments with whom, and how many, by setting up rules  based on the group, appointment type, and location. To limit an appointment's visibility by attendees' company, switch "Hide attendee list" to Yes. Now when an attendee views an appointment, they will only see the other attendees invited from their company.  
    • Change the look and feel of the attendee's personal schedule: Customize the design and privacy aspects of the calendar to adhere to your organization's branding requirements. You can also customize other aspects of the website, like the background color, button colors, and error colors. Adjust the color by entering a hex code in the text box or creating a custom color. 
    • Review the email alerts: Edit the invitation to your mobile-responsive site, where attendees will send, accept, decline, and modify appointments. Those actions trigger email notifications that you can edit as well. Some additional formatting, like custom fonts and rounded corners on buttons, may not render in the recipient's email. This is dependent on the settings of their email client. 
    • Launch your appointment: This will allow you to automatically send the invitations and sit back as attendees start scheduling. You can also create or manage appointments yourself as well as on an attendee's behalf. 
    • Mine the data: Find out how many appointments your attendees have scheduled, the rooms they've booked, the time slots taken, who's accepted, who's declined, and so much more by running a report. I recommend you go through this KB article that thought can be helpful for those who want to deep dive into the reporting process of Appointments.  

     

    Questions for you: 

    • What are some other ways of ensuring your attendees meet the right people at your event? 
    • What advantages have you discovered of using Cvent's Appointments? 

     

    If you're a Cvent user, we have an amazing opportunity for you to help shape the future of Cvent's product experience and participate in research activities. Join our UX Research Panel today by filling out this short survey! 

    Share your expert thoughts below with your fellow peers in the community! #CventTip


    #ManagingOn-site
    #ManagingVirtualEvents

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    Ridhima Krishan
    Sr. Associate, Customer Marketing
    Cvent
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  • 2.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Community MVP
    Posted 03-11-2022 11:23
    Some interesting things that occurred at an event I managed with Appointments:
    • Internal groups reserved rooms for meetings - so we were able to backbill them for the use, decreasing our cost
    • Attendees found Appointments useful for reserving rooms for getting real work done - customer calls, etc., so they could attend our event AND take care of their organization's business
    • Money saved and frustration completely avoided by taking a manual "is someone in this room" process which needed 2 - 3 people to manage it to a completely requestor-managed process with discrete rooms and times
    The questions you ask leading up to your event are mission critical: 
    • surveys sent to potential attendees pre-event
    • questions asked during registration
    • pre-assigned custom info: industry, interest, role, etc.
    • incentivization, the way Cvent does with reducing event registration cost via having a certain number of appointments completed with Trade Show exhibitors


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    Brenda Ainsburg
    Channel Program Manager, Americas Channel
    brenda.ainsburg@siemens.com
    Siemens Aktiengesellschaft
    United States
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  • 3.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    User Group Member
    Posted 03-14-2022 10:51
    • What are some other ways of ensuring your attendees meet the right people at your event?  Meeting break rooms set up for specific topics, name badge flags with topics for discussion, send out pre-event communications ensuring what the attendee is after to make sure theyre meeting the right people for their purpose
    • What advantages have you discovered of using Cvent's Appointments? We don't actually use it :(


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    Rachel
    NJ
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  • 4.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Posted 03-15-2022 14:42
    We usually ensure our relationship managers are in attendance, and it's their job to not only engage with attendees, but to help facilitate networking opportunities with others.  Occasionally we will use signage to help guests "self-select" and connect with others (for example, setting up a parent's breakfast with grouped seating by state or geographical region - so other families who live in that area can find each other and connect).

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    Brianne Croteau
    Assistant Director of Donor and Volunteer Relations
    Bucknell University
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  • 5.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Community MVP
    Posted 03-16-2022 14:16
    Hello Rhidima, 

    We are not using Cvent Appointments at our events, but we do a couple of things to encourage members to mingle and meet: 
    - badges indicate which chapter the member is from, so people can group by geographical areas
    - badges indicate if the member is a first-time attendee, and at the opening session we have first time members get up and ask veteran attendees to mentor them.
    - at lunch time, tables have discussion topics on slips of papers ready for attendees to make use of as an ice-breaker

    A lot of our networking ends up being quite organic, with people meeting during group work at sessions, or the more experienced members being connection hubs because they know many other members already. 

    Cheers,

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    Béline FALZON
    Conference Program Specialist II
    California Teachers Association
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  • 6.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Posted 03-28-2022 10:56
    Using technology to create events and forums for people to connect - ex. networking events, appointments, and discussion forums - give attendees an opportunity to find the "right" people and connect at various levels

    We haven't used Cvent Appointments extensively, but I see the benefit in making this available to vendors and sponsors so that they can get scheduled face time with prospective clients, helps keep the process organized and on point

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    Bouran Qaddumi
    Sr Manager, Training
    Cajun Operating Company d/b/a Church's Chicken
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  • 7.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Posted 03-30-2022 13:30
    What are some other ways of ensuring your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    • We use name badges that share the basic information of Name, Title, & Company. Sometimes we will add the region of the company as well so the attendees know who is and is not from their region.
    • We try to get more in-depth knowledge from our host clients to cater activities/meals/meetings towards the attendees invited. At meetings or activities we try and create break out groups that either keep similar regions together or we spice it up and put various regions together so that new bonds/relationships can be forged from the program.

    What advantages have you discovered of using Cvent's Appointments?

    • At this time we do not use Cvents appointments. After reading the responses to this post and seeing the pros and cons outlined I do want to bring this information to my boss and see if utilizing Appointments is something that would benefit our programs. 
    • We are more of an incentive based company but if we started doing more meetings and conventions I think Appointments could really be a great tool moving forward.


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    Bryce Ziemer
    Registration Coordinator
    JNR Incorporated
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  • 8.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    Community MVP
    Posted 05-13-2022 13:33
    Great information for creating appointments! We don't currently have in-person events, but I have attended events with the ability to create appointments, and really enjoy that feature!

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    Lori Wildman
    Senior Marketing Manager
    DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.
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  • 9.  RE: How do you ensure your attendees meet the right people at your event?

    User Group Member
    Posted 05-13-2022 14:28
    Creating fun and engaging events that spark new introductions like team building activities can help people to meet others they might not have gone up to and said hello. I have not used Cvent appointments yet so I'm unable to speak to it's awesomeness just yet.

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    Teresa James
    Director of Sales and Marketing
    DoubleTree Gainesville
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