Simon on: Event apps

Every meeting planner needs apps – right? Well, not necessarily. It depends on how useful the app is to the attendees, how painful it is to set up and how reliable it is at the event.

This is the balancing act that a planner needs to understand. For example, if you’ve got a significant number of breakout sessions at your event, an app might be useful to remind attendees that a session is starting.  That said, the app is still not going to be popular if it is too fiddly to set up. This is the pain threshold: some attendees will be happy to grapple with a tricky set up operation but the majority will probably give up before getting to the end of it.

Even if it’s useful to users and easy to install, if it doesn’t deliver consistently onsite, it will still fail. How many event apps rely on having an Internet connection? The best download and store their information on the phone itself so the app will work even if the wi-fi or the mobile network is groaning under the load from other attendees.

So before diving in and having an app developed think: is it useful to the attendees, pain-free, reliable? If the answer is no to any of these, then think again.

Originally published in Conference News