In the coming weeks we’ll be posting a series of blog posts featuring an interview with Chris Lind from CrowdComms’ partner, Shore Events. Over the course of the series Chris will give invaluable insights into how event apps work at real events, the benefits of event apps, his experience of using the CMS platform and additional hints and tips on getting the most out of an event app.
We start the series with Chris providing an overview of his introduction to event apps and how he went about choosing CrowdComms as his provider. You can also view the video of our interview with Chris which includes an introduction to Shore Events.
CC: Tell us a bit about your experience using CrowdComms event apps and some of your events.
SE: So when we started the company one of the main philosophies we had was to do things a bit differently. We looked in the marketplace for ideas on how to do things differently – from hotels to communication tools.
We also looked at event apps as a possibility. Obviously we were in the infancy of event apps coming forward. People were a bit worried about do they do. Do they do what they promise, plus the pricing behind them. People shy away from event apps because they assume they’re very expensive.
Companies that I’ve talked to in the same industry have looked at doing their own event apps (building them themselves) which is something we also considered. But we decided to look in the market place to see what was out there.
That’s how we came across CrowdComms. From when the first email went in to say ‘look we’re interested’, the guys have been great. CrowdComms came back to us straight away and talked to us about what we were trying to achieve and whether they could match that.
Other people we talked to, either no one contacted us back or they tried to sell us a full package rather than looking at individual events to see whether the event app was appropriate or not.
From there we decided to move forward with CrowdComms. We did an event app trial were we looked at case studies and looked at the different elements and importantly the pricing behind it. And that’s why we decided to go with CrowdComms.
We’ve run event apps with them for two years now. We’ve done incentive work and incentive trips with the app and we’ve now built it into the core offering for all of our events – whether they’re one night conferences, large pan-European conferences or small incentive pieces of business as well.
Key Takeways:
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Consider whether self-build or provider build is right for your event app
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Make sure the event app package offered is perfect for your needs. Don’t buy what you don’t need and demand that what you do need is included.
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Ask for an event app trial to make sure it’s the right fit in terms of functionality, scale and pricing.
