Moving On From Events

It's time for me to move on from Swapcard and the Events industry. It's been nearly a decade selling event tech to both corporate and exhibition organisers. It's been amazing, challenging and frustrating in equal measure.

Events are special. These moments in time where like-minded folks gather to share, learn and connect. With the pandemic hitting, events were in turmoil and the event landscape forever changed.

Attendees are more selective than ever. Organisers are more conscientious than ever. Scrutiny over cost and more importantly carbon footprint are top of the agenda. Therefore experiences have to be that much better to draw folks to the event in person rather than participating virtually. This represents a challenge, but also a huge opportunity for organisers to extend their audience on both the buyer/attendee and supplier/sponsor side.

The rise of hybrid means that event formats will change, business models will have to change too as will attitudes of renewal security. Digital represents huge opportunity, but also risk of disruption. Gone are the days of automatic renewal/attendance just because of brand strength.

Value is the driver. Therefore customer success and satisfaction rises to the top of organiser mindset. Data to prove the value of attending the event live or virtually for attendee, exhibitor, sponsor, partner, speaker - everyone. Irrespective of format, irrespective if you are a corporate or tradeshow.

The pandemic was horrible for many reasons but one thing it was good for was the acceleration of digital enablement for events and the realisation of data value and how it can shape future success.

In a world of economic pressure as we collectively manage the fallout of the pandemic and offset the financial measures to safeguard all of us by local and international government, adaptation and extension of business models, facilitated by the sale of high value data, client retention and growth is the path to success for many.

Many event organisers are using more event tech than ever before. The very nature of events calls for differentiation and a unique experience. This has to match up to successful tech deployment to capture standardised data to inform those success metrics. These two elements are of course at odds with each other.

However without standardised data, customer success can be ambiguous. In my opinion, organisers working with tech partners organiser should seek data above all else. Experience can be provided in other formats, not a slightly different platform homepage. The trust in this partnership to drive customer success is critical. It's the event outcomes, client ROI, at the end of the day and delivering to the core objectives, proven with data, that will secure clients for next year and enable evolution of business models to grow revenue.

The world is moving towards subscription economy. Net Revenue Retention is the ultimate measure of success i.e. can you keep your clients and grow them. It's takes such a lot of effort and cost to acquire new customer, payback comes in years 2, 3, 4+ rather in the first. This is the very challenge facing the events industry as subscription business models evolve, events move to communities for year round engagement and data tells the story of what your Community cares about.

The partnership between the organiser and event tech platform will determine the success of this, combining the two core elements mentioned before; experience to engage the audience and a platform to facilitate and capture data to tell the story.

It's been a blast at Swapcard and at DoubleDutch (now part of Cvent) before that. It's time for me to step into my next challenge and I will write about that next week when I start with Planhat where the mission is to increase NRR, reduce churn and drive customer success as the revenue foundation of any company.