BACKGROUND
Thompson Nightingale International (TNI) offers high-quality conference management services that meet the unique needs of its clients. TNI has over 30 years of experience in presenting educational conferences throughout North America and Asia-Pacific.
TNI has been the conference manager of the General Breast Imaging Meeting since 2002.
“I'd looked at a few others [solutions], but I never actually tried any of the others, because of the costing that I was given. Cvent costs seem to be the most cost-effective,
Kathy initially began using Cvent to manage their registrations. She found their Event Management tool extremely cost-effective, efficient and easy to use. “I'd looked at a few others, but I never actually tried any of the others, because of the costing that I was given. Cvent costs seem to be the most cost-effective,” she says. Using Cvent, the TNI team was able to streamline their online registrations and payments without having to go through the hassle of checks.
The team then explored Cvent’s check-in tool, OnArrival, six years ago at one of their conferences - the General Breast Imaging Meeting. At the time, this technology was quite new to both their internal team and the delegates who attended the event. But Kathy notes that it was quite easy to leverage. From check-in to on-demand badge printing and attendance tracking, the tool helped eliminate any last-minute hassles on the day of the event.
APPROACH
Ensuring Success at the 13th General Breast Imaging Meeting
For their 13th General Breast Imaging Meeting, which was a week-long affair, TNI leveraged Cvent’s Event Management, OnArrival, and Attendee Hub browser and event app.
As the TNI team had been using Event Management for quite some time, they were comfortable enough to build their event website and registration set-up from scratch without any support from Cvent. The process was efficient and easy and saved them time. Says Kathy, “I guess because I've been using it for so long, I was in the habit of doing a lot of this stuff myself without actually utilising all the tools that were available. So, as far as building the website was concerned, we actually went ahead and built that ourselves right from the beginning.”
When talking about OnArrival, Kathy was very happy about the check-in experience: “It was lovely! Up till then, it was always about pre-printing the name badges, putting them in little badge holders, and having them set up perfectly. With OnArrival, the process was certainly much, much better, it worked very smoothly, and the project manager from Cvent was very good.”
RESULTS
Making On-Demand Content Readily Available
Attendee Hub was a great addition to their event tech stack. Following the successful week-long event, the focus of the TNI team was to make all their sessions available on demand. This is where the Attendee Hub was extremely helpful. According to Kathy, “It was fantastic. My one big concern for this meeting was the fact that people wanted on-demand access to the content. I was concerned. I'm the sole operator, and while I do have consultants that work with me, I was particularly concerned about the technicalities: how you’d find everything ‘on demand’, how that was going to work, and how we were going to go from having the video to have it on the cloud – I struggled with the idea of how I’d manage it all. So definitely, with Attendee Hub, it was amazing to see all that happen so easily.”
Kathy further adds, “The ease of actually uploading the videos once they were in the right format was wonderful! And it's very easy for people to access them. It's very easy for me as well to go back every few weeks and send out an email to people to remind them if they want to look at the sessions again, they can access it until the end of the year. Frankly, that was one of my biggest concerns as well. I mean, in theory, I just had to make a video and then make it available. But how was it going to actually become available? Was I going to need to build a whole new website for that? Attendee Hub from that point was just excellent – it resolved all those worries for me.”
LOOKING FORWARD
Maximising Event Technology for Upcoming Events
At the end of the day, TNI strongly believed that having event technology didn’t just add in features and benefits but helped foster professionalism at their event. Kathy says, “Just the fact that you've got all this reporting so easily available and getting 24 hours of actual technical response is phenomenal.”
Looking into the future, Kathy’s positive that Cvent will continue to play a crucial role as their event technology partner. “We are looking to explore new Cvent product features as well as solutions,” says Kathy, adding, “We will utilise Exhibitor Management at our next event, to help exhibitors manage their profiles and capture leads.”
