The Importance of Communication

Keep your participants connected before, during, and after your event.

How do you measure the success of your meetings and events? Is it as simple as calculating ROI after all the dust settles and vendors have been paid? Is it the “in the moment” reactions your participants provide during key scheduled activities? Or do you calculate the efficacy of your meetings based on attendee feedback and how much they apply what they learned to improve their performance?

There’s not one definitive answer for every organization, but one thing we’ve learned at Creative Group is that communication is key to maximizing value before, during, and after a program, and it takes an experienced team to maximize participant engagement and create motivation that builds the bottom line.

While many planners still tend to focus solely on keynote speeches and breakout sessions to deliver on key communications objectives, Creative Group promotes a more holistic approach to defining and shaping i|xperiences^® that capture attendees’ imagination long before the suitcases ever get packed. With advancing technology, increasingly mobile lifestyles, and event-specific apps, we now can engage participants throughout the journey with pinpoint accuracy.

Before the Event

Your pre-event communications shouldn’t be limited to break room posters and standard-issue registration emails. Instead, take every opportunity to engage your participants, solicit their input, and provide them with chances to connect in advance. Dimensional mailings and branded travel gear can put your people in the frame of mind to dial-up performance. Also, provide them with the information they need and tools they can use to ramp up enthusiasm and do a little networking beforehand. Think along the lines of speaker profiles, attendee directories, personality quizzes, private messaging, and public discussion forums.

From a tech perspective, our proprietary end-to-end meeting management platform, CreativeEDGE^®, offers fully customizable registration, attendee management, reporting, and airline ticketing. We’ve had great success engaging client teams with games, leaderboard standings, and opinion polls to create a robust attendee experience and provide greater efficiencies or create value for our clients. As technology evolves for meetings, trade shows, and events, we work quickly to bring those concepts to our clients.

During the Event

Event signage can certainly help communicate your organization’s brand in a crowded environment and direct traffic to group gatherings, but there are dozens of prospective touch points to convey your organization’s commitment to its most valuable resource. A personalized welcome gift can set the tone for a convivial meeting or event. A message-centric scavenger hunt can reinforce team building. And don’t skimp on the tech, because the level of meaningful engagement your next event achieves is right in the palms of your attendees’ hands. An overwhelming majority of today’s generation use their mobile devices to socialize, network, play games, and stream entertainment, so if you want to ensure your event resonates with attendees and keeps them riveted to your program agenda, reach out to them with interactive apps that encourage networking, socializing, and sharing.

Creative Group’s proprietary EventAPP™ empowers our clients to take meetings, events, conferences, incentives, and tradeshows to the next level with deeper, richer engagement for all participants. It was created by people who understand the group experience and the importance of real-time communication to keep everyone connected. EventAPP provides personalized two-way communication at every stage to educate and engage your audience – all with a seamless platform that’s easy for your team to manage, update, and customize.

After the Event

The main event may be where the rubber hits the road, but reaching out to your participants after the event is where future programs can gain some traction. A keepsake photo album commemorating your event can keep the memories fresh for months or years to come. A carefully crafted post-event email campaign can reinforce your message and inspire company loyalty.

The conclusion of your meeting or event also presents the ideal time to check in with attendees to make sure your program hit all the right notes and resonated with your people. Shifts in trends and market changes can make previously strong programs inefficient and outdated, and if you’re not asking the right people the right questions, you’re asking for trouble. That’s why Creative Group conducts participant surveys to learn how the i|xperiences we create were perceived by those who participated.

Communication is Key

Based upon our observations after executing thousands of successful events over the years, the right communication strategy is critical to maximizing the effectiveness of your programs. From the planning stages through the post-mortem, the key to shaping a successful meeting or event is engaging your participants at every stage of the process to capture their attention, solicit their feedback, and level-up their overall experience. Ready to maximize the power of communication for your next meeting or event? We’ve gotcha covered from start to finish!