This post says a big thanks to Ben Fletcher from Osney Media who decided to run a roundtable discussion with his fellow TechFest12 delegates. And was kind enough to write up the thoughts of the event planners who took part in the discussion.

Removing event planning processes with event technology

1. If your process is bad, automating it will not help.

2. The personal touch can be important – make sure technology doesn’t just save costs but damage the customer experience.

3. Make sure you have clear objectives and are not applying technology for technology’s sake.

4. Look at the current resource and the time they spend on the task – make sure there is a significant saving

Some areas to start looking to remove those unnecessary steps

1. Registration (pre event) one big hurdle to the event planning processes- get rid of paper, make them signup online.

2. Registration (on the day) – examine use of kiosks for expos, but make sure you still have meet and greet staff.

3. Dietary requirements – try to give the responsibility to the attendees and allow the caterers direct access to that information.

4. Reducing double entry and mistakes – get rid of paper first, then make sure you have a ‘golden source’ of data (one database that is the central point) that other systems feed off.

5. Sometimes the upheaval of changing a system is just not worth it, which brings us back to clear objectives – if things work OK but are slightly inefficient, you might be better as you are rather than disrupting the whole company and paying for a new system. If you are running loads of events it’s hard to put things on hold and transition over. How refreshingly pragmatic!

The feedback from Ben’s session was short and sweet. Perhaps obvious to some, but such simple changes in how you can remove processes that slow you down with the right event technology can make big changes.