Logistics, promotion, and all the unexpected hiccups along the way—organizing an annual, multi-day event involves a lot of hard work.
But it could be easier.
Building a community around your annual event can help you maximize its benefits year-round. It can help you build loyalty, improve engagement at the event, boost long-term community retention, get feedback to improve future editions, and more!
Drive Value Before, During, and After Your Multi-Day Event
Networking opportunities along with knowledge building are consistently cited as the top reasons people attend events. So don't let participants wait until the day of the event to start networking! Drive value before the event begins by helping attendees get to know each other before the big day!
An online community connects attendees, facilitates meaningful relationships, and fosters a sense of belonging. Attendees can reach out to each other before the event, organize to meet up at the event, and remain in touch after the event.
Hivebrite's community engagement platform enables members to create profiles detailing demographic information and interests. Members can search the interactive directory, connect with people of interest, send private messages, and chat.
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"With Hivebrite, we created a sub-community within our existing community dedicated to our annual event. This sub-community looks great visually and is extremely user friendly—it helps both our organization and our attendees get more value from the event year-round!" Aricia De Kempeneer, TUFH Programming Manager, The Network Towards Unity for Health |
Create Pre-Event Hype and Gather Feedback
Pre-event marketing is essential for event success! You not only need to make sure people are aware of your event activities, but you also need to build anticipation so your attendees get excited about what's around the corner. Bear in mind that not everyone who registers for your event will attend it. Keeping attendees engaged in the run-up to the event will help combat attrition!
With Hivebrite, you can share news on the upcoming event with the community using the Live Feed. Create and share teaser videos, video highlights from the previous editions, and create buzz around your program and speakers.
Create polls to discover what your attendees are most excited about and start gathering questions for the Q&A sessions at the event.
Putting in place a feedback loop is an essential part of advancing your event management strategy. Post-event, you can get feedback from attendees on how to improve future editions of your multi-day event. You can also ask what they want to hear more about at the next edition to ensure that your program will match their needs.
Harness the Power of User Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is any content created by an individual (not a brand). A good UGC strategy enables you to strengthen your relationship with attendees while leveraging relevant content to benefit your marketing efforts.
We are increasingly paying more attention to experiences shared by the rest of their community. User-generated content is often viewed as more trustworthy and authentic than traditional marketing content. Think about it, who would you trust more: an event organizer telling you last year's edition of the event was phenomenal or photos, videos, and testimonials from participants showcasing the excellent time they had?
An online community offers a great place to share user-generated content. Encourage attendees to share event photos, videos, audio clips, and anecdotes in the community during and after the event. This will boost exposure for your event, reduce marketing costs, engage your community, and attract new visitors—all while putting your attendees at the heart of the experience.
With Hivebrite, you can invite attendees to share content directly within the Media Center, Live Feed, or Forum. With the Projects feature, attendees can share what they're working on and facilitate opportunities for future collaborations, thanks to the event.
Offer Personalized Event Experiences
A one-size-fits-all approach to organizing an event won't cut it. Understanding what attendees want, their interests, their goals for attending your activities and tailoring the event experience to those categories is critical to success.
Personalization can help drive higher engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty as attendees feel that your event was inspiring and met their expectations.
With Hivebrite, you can send personalized and automated emails based on information attendees shared when registering, such as job role and interests. You can also send out customized reminders and app notifications as the event draws closer. For example, you can send them an email about the first session they have registered for to generate excitement.
With Hivebrite's Group module, you can easily create sub-communities within your broader community dedicated to your multi-day event. Create a dedicated area for group members to exchange and delegate the group's management to members of the community. Group leaders can post news or share documents with event participants, and more!
Creating a Vibrant Community Around Your Event
Growing a vibrant community around your event can have powerful marketing outcomes. You'll achieve stronger connections between your organization and your attendees, increase trust in your organization, boost engagement between (future) attendees, and add incredible value to your participants. The bonus is your community is something that you will be able to build on every year—strengthening the community identity and the value it brings.
Beyond providing all the features to create a community around your event, Hivebrite's enhanced Event module gives you everything you need to organize your virtual, offline, and hybrid events. The module provides tools to create branded event pages, manage ticketing and payments, send invites and reminders, promote the event, and more!
Hivebrite is a comprehensive and flexible community engagement platform. It empowers organizations of all sizes and sectors to launch, manage, and grow fully branded private communities. Schedule a demo today!
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