Planning and executing a successful event can feel like planning a long road trip. You might think you’ve thought of everything: food and drinks, what you’d like to see, and how you’ll reach your destination.
Let’s compare the opening day of your event to getting on the road for your first day of the trip. Imagine that you get in the car only to realize you’ve forgotten to charge your phone, which you were going to use as a map. You know where you want to go and what you’d like to see, but you don’t know how to get there. So you start driving and just hope for the best.
However, hoping for the best and seeing success are two different things. Without that one key component that tells you how to achieve your goals, you’ll never get where you want to go.
That’s essentially what happens when you host an event without using comprehensive, powerful event attendance tracking software.
The Costs of Poor Attendance Tracking
Nearly all event managers include the initial check-in process in their attendance tracking. But neglecting to track attendance throughout the remainder of the conference is where these event planners go wrong.
No Real-Time Updates
When guests come to your event, they’ll expect the very best in terms of service and technology. Without a detailed attendance tracker, you won’t be able to meet their standards.
Tracking attendance at the beginning of an event is a start, but only powerful software can track attendance at every session within your event. When you know who’s in the room, you can provide your guests with accurate information on everything from session availability to last-minute schedule changes or room assignments.
Without this information, you’ll be leaving your guests in the dark—not exactly the stellar support you want to provide.
Inefficient Resource Allocation
If you’re in a room with your guests, you might have a general idea of the attendance numbers. But you can’t be everywhere at once. Even if you send an employee to every session at once, you’ll only have a rough attendance estimate.
Knowing the exact attendance numbers in every session is crucial for allocating your resources effectively. Resources can include food and beverage orders, chairs and tables, and employees available to handle tasks.
Here’s one example of how accurate attendance counters can help you allocate your resources. Let’s say one session at your event is getting exceptional attendance despite low marketing efforts and few session registrations.
When you know exactly how many attendees are in the room, you can quickly move extra seating into the room to prevent forcing guests to stand for the entire session. Additionally, you can quickly adjust the schedule and room assignments for future sessions so that the same speaker can repeat the session in a room that’s a better fit. (And you’ll know exactly which room to put them in because you know the precise attendance numbers.)
Insufficient Analytics and Future Planning
Not understanding the exact attendance rates of every session throughout your event can spell disaster for future events.
When you’re analyzing the data after your event to determine its success, it’s vital to know how well-attended each session was. Understanding the numbers can help you focus your marketing efforts, determine future session speakers and topics, choose the ideal venue, and much more.
Without this data, planning future events becomes much more difficult and subject to errors. Even sending post-event surveys isn’t enough—you need hard facts.
Another aspect of planning future events is knowing how to market to past attendees to foster repeat attendance. You might know which attendees registered for each session, but you won’t know who actually attended. And if you don’t understand that, you can’t send personalized marketing messages to them, which makes your marketing almost completely ineffective.
What Should You Look for in an Attendance Tracker?
After understanding the risks of using inadequate tracking software, you may wonder whether one powerful enough to do it all even exists. In that case, we have great news: the software you’re looking for absolutely exists. Here’s what to look for in the ideal attendance tracker.
On-Demand Badge Printing
At first glance, integrating on-demand badge printing rather than pre-printed badges might seem more about check-in than attendance.
However, when you use pre-printed badges, it’s much more difficult to know who checked in to your event (since you’ll always have registrants who couldn’t attend). Aside from avoiding all the problems that pre-printed badges create, you’ll have a much better gauge of initial attendance when your software program uses on-demand badge printing at check-in.
RFID Badge Tracking
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is changing the game in the event world. Introducing RFID badges for events is essential for attendance tracking success. This simple implementation will allow you to see who’s in each session at all times. It also shows you the drop-off rate or number of attendees who joined a session but left before its end.
Both the overall attendance rate and the drop-off rate of every session help with future event planning, budget allocation, post-event surveys, and marketing efforts. RFID badges also tighten security at your event because you understand where your attendees are within the event.
Real-Time Updates
If your attendance tracker is only built to help the event manager, you’ll only have half the recipe for success. You also need to use attendance tracking to help your guests.
You can do this by providing them with real-time, to-the-minute updates. Make sure your software program allows immediate updates to show on your event’s landing page so guests can access them, whether at the event or in their hotel rooms.
Attendance Tracking: A Powerful Tool for Event Management and Guests
In all the intricacies of planning events, few things are more critical than ensuring safety, accuracy, and convenience for your guests. You can accomplish all of this as well as enhance your future event planning and marketing efforts when you use powerful attendance software at your next event.