Actual article date: Jun 6, 2014

The events industry is very much like an ecosystem. Just like the ecosystems of nature, the ecosystems of the events industry involves a community — a community of stakeholders (event organizers, attendees, exhibitors and sponsors), venue locations, as well as event technologies. These components are linked together within an event environment, interacting as a system and working in tandem with each other to produce a sustainable continuity of valuable exchanges.

In the natural state, the underlying purpose of an ecosystem is to facilitate the transference of energy through the creation of linkages between and among both biotic and abiotic factors within the environment (i.e. food chain). This would undoubtedly be a means for the survival of all the living things within that ecosystem.

Coming back to our context of the event ecosystem, I believe that the true purpose of an event is to, similarly, create linkages/connections between and among the event stakeholders. These linkages are created at the event, where industry players can discover opportunities and most importantly meet face-to-face with relevant others.

Thing is, the underlying task of facilitating the establishment of these relevant connections is a huge and daunting one that many event organizers dread. Why? Simply because people are dynamic creatures who are unpredictable! Delegates are picky with who they want to meet, and their networking needs vastly differ from each other. Furthermore, the operational load needed to execute a system for relevant peer-to-peer matching requires a tremendous amount of money, manpower and time to get right.

The question to ask is this. Would putting the effort to have a business matching system really make the difference? What is the ROI on having an offering like that at your event?

Acceptable answers would be improving the level of event satisfaction and boosting the attendee experience of your event. But the answer for me really is gleaning pertinent dynamic data of how the stakeholders at your events are interacting. After all, these stakeholders are very fundamentally your “intellectual property”!

With a business matching system that funnels corresponding data onto a central platform, events can quantify and qualify the networking potential and overall “health” of their event. Are event budgets getting smaller and tighter due to time and budget constraints faced by delegates? Would it really be the lack of perceived value of the event to the attendee? With these data sets, we can finally get the answers and solutions that we’ve been looking for. And maybe, we can prime ourselves to prevent this “lack of perceived value” that is permeating our event industry.

Organisers can know how many meeting requests their delegates made with others, identify the top networkers, and even understand the experiences of VIPs at their event. This data is sieved and transformed into strategies that can be used to better events. For example, data is used to determine marketing campaign effectiveness, identify customers with the most potential value, and even ease budgeting! Sponsors, who were never able to justify their ROIs and brand exposure accurately at events before, are now able to. According to the Big Data Study by TATA Consultancy Services, the expected return on investments in big data is 54.3% for sales! All of these can help better an attendee’s experience at the event and increase the event’s ROI.

The power of data allows organizers to play a more personal and active role in contributing to the event satisfaction of their delegates because they would be in the know of what delegates want, and they are in the position to make it happen.

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