Building A Business Case For Event Technology In Your Organization
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As an event planner, identifying event-tech that will help you throughout your event lifecycle is not as difficult as getting approval and buy-in from within your organization. We discuss how to build support for event-technology adoption.
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Building A Business Case For Event Technology In Your Organization
- 1. Building a Business Case for Event-Tech in Your Organisation Justin Panzer Eventuosity, Founder & CEO ETL16 Campfire 1
- 2. 2 Upgrading The Events Process
- 3. Adoption & Implementation Challenges 3
- 4. Gaps In The Events Process 4
- 6. Measuring Event Tech’s Impact 6
- 7. 7
- 8. 82016 - Eventuosity, LLC. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
- 9. 9
- 10. Summary: Benefits of Event Tech 10 = Greater Efficiency Improved Accuracy Smarter Collaboration Deeper Business Intelligence + + + Increased Event ROI
- 12. @eventuosity eventuosityapp /company/eventuosity /user/eventuosity www.eventuosity.com @eventuosity Justin Panzer, Founder & CEO +1 (443) 538-6465 justin.panzer@eventuosity.com 12
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon. My name is Justin Panzer. I am the Founder & CEO of Eventuosity Few initiatives in corporate, associaton, and non-profit organizations have as much cross-functional impact as events So it’s critically important to consider how to build management and peer support for the event-tech that you intend to use to produce your events.
- By your presence today at Event Tech Live, you’ve clearly recognized the added value of event technology to your events process and the events ecosystem as a whole. Whatever part, or parts, of your process you’re targeting for improvement, it’s virtually impossible to think that you won’t find a solution for it here. But when you leave here, you’ll need to compete for resources to purchase event technology and argue for the buy-in of management or peers by presenting event-tech’s value-add to them.
- It’s likely that your organization has already committed resources to other technologies such as CRM, Marketing Automation, or Travel & Expense Management, among others. Because many decision makers are comfortable with the metrics in the functional areas that those systems support, there is often little resistance to purchasing them. But what would Sales, Marketing, New Member Growth, Education or Advocacy initiatives be without events? Events play an important role in strategic organizational initiatives so it’s surprising to find so much difficulty in gaining approval for event-tech solutions.
- So let’s start there. It’s very likely that few people in your organization really understand what you do. They often see the final product of all of your hard work – a well-staffed, nicely designed, glossy event. But they don’t realize that to get there, you have had to wear many hats and perform many functions. Whether you are 100% dedicated to events, or they’re only part of your job, it’s likely that you are responsible for some or all of these roles. If your management and colleagues don’t know that, it may not be readily evident to them how technology may improve what you do…with direct positive impact to them. It also means that they won’t recognize the event-related functional gaps in the CRM, Travel, and other platforms that you have today. So begin by providing some insight into what you do and what you’re stuck doing it with today.
- Which likely is some ad-hoc combination of things like these. There are few event organizers that don’t get this right away so I’ll say nothing further about it.
- Once you’ve built the message for a shared understanding of what you do, you can use that as a foundation on which to create quantitative measures of improvements in your events process. Obviously, there’s no better way to justify event-tech purchases than to show that it will directly improve event ROI. The people from whom you need support understand that events contribute to business objectives so no discussion of events should leave those out. But we need to include both the ROI of our events and the ROI of the event-technology. The two things are very closely linked but they are not one and the same. So what we’ll touch on next are three areas around which we’ll build our business case for event-technology. In each of them we’ll mention direct impact on event ROI but we’ll spend more time discussing broader business implications of adoption. We hope that this will help you to make the case for event-tech whether you are just starting to build support or you are looking to make a final case for approval and adoption.
- The first category of measures is Efficiency And as you see here, we quantify – and qualify – efficiency in terms of speed improvements, quality upgrades, and cost reduction. As far as speed goes, we need to think back a couple of slides to the multiple jobs image. If you need to do all of those things, you may need to find more hours in the day to be able to do them all. Anything that reduces the amount of time you spend in planning or managing your event is valuable to the organization. And time can be measured in dollars by simply calculating hours spent before and after event-tech implementation. At first, you’ll likely need to estimate but if you’re good about keeping records of your time in relation to events you should have some idea of how much you can cut with the right platform. Of course, speed can often have a negative impact on quality. If the tools you’ve identified can manage accuracy in your planning process – things like staff coverage, task completion level, resource allocation, etc. – you’ll again have the ability to easily measure the result. As a very simple example, just think about all of the last-minute items you put on your credit card during the final set-up of an event and the premiums you pay at those times. If you have fewer of those requirements due to better quality controls, you’ll have a head start on the next attribute of efficiency which is cost reduction. Events are traditionally one of the least controlled areas of corporate spending. Yet, they account for over 40% of the marketing budgets in organizations where they’re an employed tactic. So what can your event-tech do to control costs? Will it reduce on-site staffing, ensure you meet deadlines, improve allocation of resources? Any such improvements should be included in your event-tech business case so that even your CFO will get the picture.
- Our second business case category is Strategic Focus. Event planning may be something you’re responsible for on top of your day job. If you’re a marketer, a training manager, a fundraiser, or have some other function that is core to your organization’s mission, then you shouldn’t be distracted from that by managing tasks or doing what may be considered low-value work. Chances are that not only is it a distraction from ROI-creating activity like content production or attendee engagement, you probably don’t enjoy it very much. If your event-tech can reduce the percentage of time you spend on tactical work (spreadsheet wrangling, sending emails, tracking tasks) in favor of more strategic activity, your event will yield better results in the end. This is also the case if you’re requiring less tactical help during the planning process from sales, marketing, operations, etc. as they can all get back to their “regular” jobs. There’s an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review rom June of 2016 on eliminating low-value work. You can check it out here: https://hbr.org/2016/06/stop-doing-low-value-work.
- Finally, let’s talk about Business Intelligence What does event-technology help us to learn about our events before, during, and after them? While there are many tools that capture leads or other outputs of our events (like funds raised), what about seeing the inputs to the ROI equation? We’ve discussed resources, costs, time, etc. but are we able to see details about them? What about plugging into the existing technology stack as we discussed earlier? What kind of reporting capability or technical functionality links our event-tech to other tools that we already have so that we can see end-to-end across our business? Lastly, what advantages do we gain by having a strong decision support structure that is enabled by our access to data and reports/analytics?
- In summary, we know that there are a number of benefits of event-technology to our business and the events themselves. But justifying event-tech spend by simply stating that it’ll help you do your job better is not enough. Maybe that’s because event planners often make things look good even in the face of chaos. Again, people may not realize what the challenges are. We know we’ve got to show improved event ROI. But, demonstrating improvement in many areas that we can show will impact ROI is something that we don’t often think about. Consider each of these potential benefits and their place in your organization when making the business case for your new platforms or products.
- For more on evaluating event technology, building your event-tech business case, and implementing new tools in your organizations, please visit the Eventuosity website for these free guides.
- Thank you for your time. If you’d like to continue this conversation, please stop by stand #216 or connect with us online on any of the channels you see here.