It’s Frightening that Some Meeting Planners Still Haven’t Gone Digital

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

As meeting professionals become increasingly pressured to keep in mind all of the happenings and expenses of events, there is still an overwhelming amount of planners who have yet to implement a mobile app to keep track of their events in a simple, productive way.

For years, purveyors of mobile applications have been stressing the merits of their product, topmost of which has always been the savings by not printing a show directory.

While ROI remains a concern for any meeting in the digital age, new buzzwords have settled in: Big Data. Lead Retrieval. Survey Response. Real-Time Analysis. Accountability. Add to that the chirps, burps, and beeps of those now ubiquitous smart devices, and you’ve got quite a symphony.

All of which is telling you that the tipping point has arrived. According to Pew Research, at least 64 percent of U.S. adults have smart devices – generationally across the board.  And according to a benchmark study created by the Event Marketing Institute in partnership with CrowdCompass (a Cvent company), meeting planners believe that 56 percent of their attendees will use mobile apps by 2016. With analysis based on surveying more than 300 leading associations, exhibition producers, corporations with major event and meeting programs, and meeting planners, the report goes on to state planners also maintain that 83 percent of their attendees are currently not dependent on a printed guide, and that that number will rise to 91 percent in 2016.

With 60 percent of the survey respondents saying their sponsors are interested in mobile advertising options instead of print, the future is clear.

The Death of the Overstuffed Binder

Every planner has at least one overstuffed 3-ring binder: a door-stopper testimonial of the conference plans and promises to meeting partners; also known as a visual representation of your lower back pain.

With the maturation of the mobile app, planners are now offloading some of their binder contents onto their smartphones. These include – but are not limited to – event agendas/schedules, floor plans, personalized scheduling, and exhibitor profiles.

So how does one choose an event app? There are many of them available, as the Event App Bible can attest, running the gamut from free to not-free. Conventional wisdom would lead you to go for the lowest price available. Some people like free, but you get what you pay for.

True wisdom would lead you to find a solution that relieves today’s pain points but also has the ability to grow with your event. According to the EMI/CrowdCompass survey, 42 percent of event producers have a low opinion of inexpensive, entry-level app providers, while 31 percent have used entry-level apps but later upgraded, and 24 percent of planners are using and happy with their entry-level solution.

That adds up to 97 percent. Don’t get left behind.

To learn more about how your colleagues are approaching this issue, download The Momentum of Mobile Event Apps Benchmarks Study.

This content was created collaboratively with our sponsor Cvent.