Information...it’s gold dust
Data obtained from events via our platform provides business development teams that gold dust - information - and gives them a whole lot more to talk about with clients and prospects, including new avenues to sell or simply to strengthen business loyalty.
Information...it's gold dust. It’s a big statement, but we believe it’s one of the most important ways for a business or individual to reach their goals and succeed. We all know that knowing your market is great and knowing your customers is key. Having knowledge of both sets businesses apart from the rest.
While chewing the fat over lunch with my two business partners we applied this theory to the event space and came up with this overarching question and answer; What is generally the required outcome of a business event ? Sales and information.
Mitingu is a cloud based platform that enables - no, it empowers! - event organisers setting up registration sites to engage with their attendees before, during and after the event... all the time collecting information gold dust for their future use. We can’t guarantee event organisers who run an event through Mitingu will generate more sales (as much as we’d love to). However, what we can guarantee is that, by using our powerful data collection and intelligence features, they will have more and better information about their clients and prospects at their finger tips.
Our goal is to help businesses increase sales opportunities by building a full data profile on event attendees. We want to make 'databases' with just a name, address and email a thing of the past! Data obtained from events via our platform provides business development teams that gold dust, information, and gives them a whole lot more to talk about with clients and prospects, including new avenues to sell or simply to strengthen business loyalty.
Going back to my headline… we actually believe information is better than gold dust. Gold dust has value to its owner only once, at it's point of sale. Information, on the other hand, can be used time and time again to drive more sales, build better relationships and most importantly, create a great business.
There are some fantastic tools out there to gather, store and use information including social media, marketing automation and good old face to face meetings. Why not add Mitingu to that list now?
If you’d like to find out more about how we use data intelligence to build profiles of your event attendees that can be used for but not limited to; ongoing events, marketing or customer service then drop me a line greg@mitingu.com and I’d be more than happy to show you how.
Greg Wood, Co-founder
Image Credit:
©Hammonton Photography via Flickr CC
Event Tech Takeover
Proximity marketing was set to the be the next big event trend for 2015 and the Grammy Awards kicked things off nicely this month with their ‘contactless’ RFDI badges...
Many tech tools have improved the quality of our personal and working lives. From helping us save money with apps integrated with our home electricity or improving safety with mobile accessible security systems to technology and apps that help organise our workloads or connect with colleagues around the globe. The event industry is no exception to the tech takeover. Technology that improves or assists in keeping the industry innovative have made huge gains in recent years.
Event tech for large events and exhibitions in particular has been utilized to improve the attendee experience, and the newer tech has provided the added ‘wow’ factor at events. Specifically event tech that harnesses Near Field Communication or Radio-Frequency Identification (NFC or RFID). Here’s a few of our favourite applications;
Proximity marketing was set to the be the next big event trend for 2015 and the Grammy Awards kicked things off nicely this month with their ‘contactless’ RFDI badges.
Image via Event Industry News
Loopd, who we’ve mentioned before on our LinkedIn page, is a wearable piece of tech that event attendees receive on arrival. Attendees can log into the Loopd app to view their interactions and even receive digital materials from exhibitors that they have visited. By tapping the device with another, attendees can share contact information or if the proximity of the badges are beside each other for a predetermined amount of time, this information is shared automatically. Acting almost like a new-age business card!
iBeacons placed around an event space provide attendees with an enhanced event experience and event planners with a new level of data that can be utilised to improve future events. iBeacons can be used to wake up an attendees phone when in a set range with content, such as offers, marketing materials, videos or surveys. The content shown to each attendee can also be tailored based on their job title or preferences and be used to help guide their experience of the event. Although many of the uses cases reported have been retail based, it’s easy to see the potential for the events industry.
What event tech are you keeping a close eye on or even thinking about using at your events this year? We’re always on the look out for fellow event tech innovators, so share your shining stars or experiences in the comments below or tweet us!
Image Credit:
©Jonathan Nalder via Flickr
How to Increase Event Profit
Whether you are selling tickets for your event or holding a free event, there are simple ways for you to boost the profit from your event. How profitable your event is will likely be determined...
Whether you are selling tickets for your event or holding a free event, there are simple ways for you to boost the profit of your event. How profitable your event is will likely be determined by the number of tickets you are able to sell. The same can be true for free events. The more free tickets that are ‘bought,’ the more people at your event and opportunities to sell merchandise or food and drink.
Driving registrations to sell the maximum number of tickets is the first step to a profitable event. A great looking event site, painless registration forms, simple payment and good promotion are all things we’ve talked about before to increase ticket sales. Typically someone will sign up for your event, months, weeks or days before the actual event date, so the key to boosting your event profit is working out how to keep them engaged until the day of the event so that they actually attend!
Communicating who else is attending, is the number one piece of information that boosts attendance. If you’ll have special guests, speakers, music acts or demonstrations at your event, send your attendees the details. If there will be an opportunity to meet the any of the above, include this in your email too, or use this an opportunity to up-sell to a VIP ticket where they can meet the music band, for example.
Only 35% of RSVPs will attend a free ticketed event. Over 95% will show up to a paid ticketed event. Free events can often have a high no-show rate due to the fact that the attendee doesn’t ‘loose’ anything in not showing up to your event. Are there trade-offs you can make to charge for the ticket? For example, you charge £15 for your event but for each ticket sold the attendee receives a £15 voucher upon arrival at the event, which could be used on refreshments or merchandise.
Sending a reminder 1-2 days before the event will boost attendance by 8%. This is especially true for events that you started promoting and receiving registrants for months or weeks ago. For those whose mind it slipped, a simple event reminder email can boost your attendance, seeing more people at your event. This could mean more food sold, more drinks sold, more giveaway tickets sold or whatever you are selling at the event.
Don’t forget about the opportunity to pre-write and schedule emails to go out at the time of the event. With almost all your attendees likely to have their mobile with them, sending emails with exclusive discounts or offers can encourage additional spending at the event. If it suits your event type and audience, offer free wifi and tell guests on arrival that exclusive surprises will emailed during the course of the event.
And finally, don’t forget to say thank you! Emails sent within 24 hours of your event are likely to get 150% more clicks than a thank you email that is sent out later. Use this opportunity to promote your next event, if there is one or even better, have the event site already set up so you can start taking early registrations.
Roughly planning out your email communication using these stats and ideas will help increase your event attendance and add to your event bottom line. Choosing an event registration platform that captures your attendee information and enables you to create email templates for you to schedule and track your email correspondence will help you stay organised. Our platform lets our users do just this, and is designed for everyone, no matter what your experience level is or the kind of event you are creating. Create a free account and have a snoop around.
Image Credit:
©epSos.de via Flickr
What's your post event strategy?
No matter what type of event you have organised, engaging with your event attendees following the event itself can be extremely valuable. Why? Communication and engagement following an event helps to make your attendees feel valued.
You’ve just thrown a successful, sell out event. You couldn’t have imagined it going any better. Congratulations! But before you take a well deserved step back to relax have you thought about your guests and completing their experience post event?
The inspiration for this post came from a #EventPlannersTalk Twitter chat a couple of weeks ago. Post event engagement came up as being a crucial factor to extending an event lifecycle and building loyal relationships with attendees, however the focus is often on promotion and the event itself, and then engagement and communication following the event is almost non-existent.
No matter what type of event you have organised, engaging with your event attendees following the event itself can be extremely valuable. Even if you haven’t got another event planned in the near future there are still huge benefits to reaching out to your attendees. Why? Communication and engagement following an event helps to make your attendees feel valued.
How can you continue engagement following your event?
Social Guests at your event most likely shared images, content and thoughts via multiple social channels. Take time to follow, repost/retweet and publicly respond to attendees who made a lot of effort to share during or after the event.
Email An email scheduled to attendees a day or so following your event that’s personalised to them can go a long way. Perhaps you could personalise it based on the ticket type they purchased (i.e. early-bird or VIP). If you held a community event, you could share the highlights, for example, money raised for the community, photos and details of upcoming events or activities. If you have another event coming up you could segment your attendee data and send details of this event to those who would be interested in it. Our easy-to-use tagging feature enables users to organise and segment their attendee data in this way.
In this example, you could send only those in Customer Services an email for your next training event on handling customer queries.
Reports Did you carry out an on-site survey of some sort? Publish your findings on your website or blog, or keep it private to event attendees by emailing or mailing them your report.
Blog Write up an event summary and publish on your blog. Share this content across your social channels and even include a link in your email to attendees. If you held a music event, your blog will likely include lots of photos and maybe even a thank you or quote from your headline act. For a seminar or workshop, you might summarise key points from speakers and trainers or the top takeaways.
A mix of just 1 or 2 of these channels can heighten interest and extend your relationship with attendees. It can also be the stepping stone to finding advocates for your events or brand.
Choosing the right event registration tool can help make post event engagement much simpler. Many tools simply focus on the registration and payment collection piece of the pie. Mitingu provides its users with a full circle tool enabling event organisers to create and promote an event, register guests and collect payment, schedule during-event engagement, as well as create post-event engagement and build an insightful database of attendees and non-attendees.
Image Credit:
©Drew Coffman via Flickr
Get Intelligent...with Mitingu's newest features
When building event registration forms in the past, have you ever thought it would be clever if the form questions could change based on an attendee’s selection or preferences? Our new features are designed to do just this and more in order to add a level of intelligence to your event registration that benefits you and your attendees. Find out more...
When building event registration forms in the past, have you ever thought it would be clever if the form questions could change based on an attendee’s selection or preferences? We did. We wondered why most online event registration platforms don’t offer this or if they do, why is the solution often very basic and rigid. We couldn’t find a good enough reason for why this is normally the case and set out in an attempt to recreate the standard for event registrations. In doing so we’ve developed a few new features.
If you’re a Mitingu user, you’ll be familiar with our tagging feature. If you’re new to Mitingu (welcome!), tagging enables you to literally tag attendees so that you can communicate with them in a more individual way or to help plan your events. Our new intelligence feature means you can now tag attendees based on their registration type in order to display or hide particular questions at the registration stage. For example, if your attendee registers as a VIP you can set questions to appear for only this type of registrant. You might want VIP attendees to only be offered a deluxe room booking option or choose from different menu options. You might want to find out their reason for attending as a VIP in order to use this information when marketing VIP tickets in the future.
How you decide to use it and the options for this feature are endless depending on how intelligent you want to get. What it means for attendees is a targeted, unique experience right from the registration stage. For you, this gives your brand and event a great first impression! It also means you can save time and money by getting all the important answers you need at this point rather than sending an email or subsequent questionnaire following an attendee’s registration.
If you build a brilliant form for an event, when you come back to organize your next event using Mitingu, you can now copy across forms from your previous events. This is great if you organise a recurring event where your questions will always be the same.
Our new features are designed to add a level of intelligence to event registration in order to benefit you and your attendees. Sign in now to start building your intelligent form for your next event or create a free account (we don’t ask for payment information) to take a snoop around and try it out.
How to Promote an Event for Free
When was the last time you bought tickets to an event the old-fashioned way? The reality is that, since nearly all ticket sales have moved online, event promotion has drastically changed. These are our top tips and a few creative ideas to get you started...
When was the last time you bought tickets to an event the old-fashioned way? Quite a tough question? Perhaps you bought tickets for your child’s school play. The reality is that, since nearly all ticket sales have moved online, event promotion has drastically changed. Whether you’re promoting a conference, music festival, training workshop or charity fundraiser, there are many free ways to promote events online.
These are our top tips and a few creative ideas to get you started;
Digital Media
Video can be expensive to produce but there are creative ways to whip up a video to draw attention to your event. Do you have footage from a previous event? If so, consider pulling out specific elements and freshening it up with a new background track. If you're hosting a music event, ask your acts for permission to use their footage to promote your lineup. Once you’ve got a video put together, embed on your event page, and share to your audience via social media.
Content Marketing
Create a unique content that ties into your event. If you’re organizing a conference, engage your speakers to answer a few questions for an interview style post or find out if they have content to share as a guest post. If you’re planning a theatre show, ask actors to share their stories or engage your social audience to suggest questions. Tell the stories of those touched by your charity or cause, if you’re organizing a charity event.
Social Media
This is probably the most referenced method for promoting an event for free online. Just beware that over-promotion on social media isn’t well received. Promotional posts shouldn’t account for more than 10-20% of your daily or weekly updates. Find creative ways to plug your event by sharing a blog post like those mentioned above or an infographic related to the theme or topic of your event. If you’re managing a conference or business event, check out Evvnt’s post on using LinkedIn to promote events.
Get Fans to do it For You
Incentivize your audience and attendees to share the event with their friends. For example, if an attendee signups up 5 friends they receive a free drink, free ticket upgrade, free track of your headlining artist. Alternatively, you could giveaway tickets to your event to create shares and buzz around your event. Encourage your audience to share the contest in order to boost entries or chance of winning.
Email Marketing
Send event invitations to your existing database. If you don’t have an existing database, once you’ve started to receive registrations you can email them updates and news about your event as well as any special offers. If you are collecting personal information in order to create a tailored event experience, consider how you can start using this information through email ahead of the event.
We don’t profess to hold the secret formula to promoting events for free or argue that these ideas are revolutionary. We do however, focus on providing our users with the best possible, free-to-set-up platform, enabling them to create uncluttered, professional event sites, promote and sell tickets, register attendees and view the success of the event with at-a-glance analytics.
Create a free account and explore the platform in your own time. We’re just a click or call away to answer your questions and if you’re planning an event in January, don’t forget we’re still running our 50% off January promotion!
6 Must Follow #EventProf Personalitities on Twitter
We’ve found brilliant content curators and storytellers providing insightful, original content for event professionals and the events industry so we thought we’d share a few of our favourite must-follow personalities on twitter for 2015
Twitter and LinkedIn provide great networking and knowledge sharing forums for event professionals. Although, still relatively new to twitter (tweeting for less than a year) we’ve found brilliant content curators and storytellers providing insightful, original content for event professionals and the events industry.
We thought we’d share a few of our favourite must-follow personalities on twitter for 2015. This is most definitely not a definitive list and we’d invite you to share your own favourites with us on twitter or in the comments below.
Sharing her blog posts and views as a corporate event planner, Irina consistently provides frequent updates and interesting content. Be sure to check out #EventPlannersTalk. Hosted by Irina, the chats are engaging with thoughtful commentary shared by the event professional community. A great place to make meaningful connections.
Another London-based event manager, sharing reviews of venues and restaurants around town and links to her own blog content. A familiar face in eventprof twitter chats, TheEventsGirl provides insightful thoughts on topics and questions.
Sharing content relevant to corporate event professionals, as well as event and wedding planners, EventsUncovered daily tweets provide followers with a well-curated stream of content from third-party sources as well as content from Silvia’s own blog.
Best known as CEO & Founder of @BizBash, David shares top stories from the BizBash website and magazine, as well as links to other event news and event idea.
Editor of @EventMB, Julius shares links to the most recent posts on Event Manager Blog. What really stands out, however is his interaction with followers, supporting those in events by frequently answering questions or providing useful links.
Author of Conferences that Work, Adrian shares his tips, ideas and secrets through his twitter feed, as well as links to helpful articles from around the web.
We were really trying to stick to sharing our favourite ‘personality’ twitter accounts but this trio must be noted as excellent sources for relevant articles and industry news (in addition to @BizBash and @EventMB mentioned above, of course!).
We’ve been overwhelmed by the support and engagement that can be seen on twitter from those in the event planning space and are pleased to be a part of such an interactive community. Do share your favourite twitter accounts with us or say hello to us.
Christmas Gifts for Event Planners
What do you get an event planner for Christmas? We've got a last minute gift idea that will keep on giving throughout January...
So the big day is just 2 days away and we've been wondering, just what do you get an event planner for Christmas? After coming up with a list of thoughtful, but likely overdone gift ideas, we thought about something that will help provide true value for an event planner, no matter what kind of event you're planning or type of event planner you are.
Throughout January we're giving all Mitingu users 50% off registrations. Just enter the code 50in15 for the promotion to apply. If you don't yet have an account, create one for free in a matter of seconds and you'll be on your way to supercharged event registrations!
If you're new to Mitingu, these are the reasons that our users chose our event registration platform for better event outcomes (take a peek at a few of the brands using Mitingu on our homepage);
•Our well thought out and designed User Interface makes it simple and intuitive for every user
•The attendee gets a great event experience from the very first communicaiton
•Tagging gives you the control to build attendee profiles and communicate based on their needs and preferences
•Dynamic emails give you the power to deliver one to one personalisation
•Intelligent forms ensure your attendees are asked the right questions at the right time
•The freedom and control to design and brand emails and registration pages to suit your business or event
•Registration take up using Mitingu is faster and better
We want to say thank you to all of you who have used Mitingu through Beta and beyond. We can't wait to share new updates with you in the New Year and see how your 2015 events perform. Don't forget to use the promotion 50in15 to receive 50% off registrations throughout January 2015.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone!
From all of the team here at Mitingu
What kind of event planner, coordinator or manager are you?
We’ll be honest. This is a loaded question because no matter how you answer we can shamelessly plug Mitingu as the answer! What we’re trying to boldly say is...
We’ll be honest. This is a loaded question because no matter how you answer we can shamelessly plug Mitingu as the answer! What we’re trying to boldly say is that Mitingu can be used for any type of event from a conference to a gig at a local pub, a by-donation charity gala to a training workshop, or even a cooking class or family BBQ.
At the heart of all of these events are people. These events need people to attend in order to be a success and that’s just what Mitingu focuses on - driving event registrations to maximize your event success. We’ve also kept it really simple so that you can have your event up and running in minutes and start accepting RSVPs or registrations right away. And it’s definitely worth mentioning that our pricing structure is one of the most flexible and competitive on the market.
The next time you’re planning any of the following remember to look us up;
Conferences
Networking Events
Music & Festivals
Community Events
Parties
Classes & Workshops
Charity Events
Sports Events
Although we don’t like to use our blog to talk about ourselves too much, we thought it was really important to illustrate that any event can be organized with Mitingu. We dare you to find an event that can’t!
5 Simple Steps to Creating a Great Event Website
Read our 5 simple steps for creating a great event website to engage potential delegates at the earliest possible point.
Last week we talked about event email marketing to drive event registration but perhaps we should have started with the most important first step in getting the word out there about your event...your event website. If you haven’t sent a potential delegate or attendee an email promoting your event and the site, this could be the first impression they get of your event. You may have a lot of information that you need to get across which can often dissuade visitors. So what makes a great event website? These are our 5 simple steps;
1. Attractive, clean, clear event webpage
Web design trends are focused on the minimalistic look and feel, which is a long way from what event websites just a few years ago looked like. A number of event sites still follow the old-school event marketing techniques where everything on the page is fighting for attention. What ends up happening is nothing stands out. Creating a clean-looking webpage with all the key event details up front, along with concise copy as to what the attendee can expect is essentially all that’s needed to give a great first impression.
2. Simple navigation
With this being said about over-the-top content, content that relates to your audience and the event theme or topic is an asset that you should utilize, perhaps not on the main event page. Include simple navigation that either takes visitors to another page within your event site or links back to your main website where people can find out more about your brand. Just remember if you’re taking potential registrants away from your event website, to include a call to action at the end of your related content in order to get them back to your event website to register.
3. A strong proposition
So many events fail to provide a proposition that clearly lays out the purpose and value to the delegate/attendee without simply pushing your event key messaging out there. Planning a successful event starts way before you put the content on the website with your target delegate or attendee. Articulating why they should care about your event needs to come through loud and clear. You’ll find that with a strong proposition a delegate is more likely to buy in to the event.
4. A clear call to action
The registration price (if applicable) shouldn't be hidden in copy or found on a separate page. Registration options and pricing should be accompanied by a clear call to action to register.
5. User-friendly registration form
Well done! You’re doing all the right things to get your website visitors to the registration page. If you’re noticing a drop-off from here, revisit your registration form. Does it take longer than 90 seconds to complete? Have you marked every field, even the ‘nice-to-know’ questions, as mandatory? Are you asking too much? If you've answered yes to these questions, then it’s almost certainly your registration form discouraging visitors to register.
The only old-school technique (that was clearly ignored in previous years by some event websites) is KISS - “keep it simple,stupid” or “keep it short and simple” if you’d rather skip the insult.
Creating event websites can be a big task depending on whether you are creating your own template, attempting to personalize a pre-made template, or even instructing a designer. Our philosophy is to keep the things that need to be simple, simple. We’ve created a...you’ve guessed it...simple event website template that you can populate with your event details. If you want a little more in terms of design, we’re enabling full customization of event sites, without the web designer price tag.
You can explore the platform for free (we don’t request payment details on signup) and you can even use the platform for free depending on your event registration price. You’ll won’t be surprised when we say that we’ve kept our pricing simple! If you’re looking for more, and would like to see the fully branded and customizable platform and dashboard, we’d be happy to show you around.
6 Ways to Create Better Emails that Drive Event Signups
We've taken a look at Mitingu's data to share our insight as to what makes a great email that drives event registration. Over 12,000 invites and responses later we've summarized the results into 6 points in our latest blog post.
With thousands of emails going out to our customer’s delegates everyweek via the Mitingu platform we’ve noticed a thing or two about the kind of email that drives event signups or sales. We’ve analysed over 12,000 thousand invites and responses to find out what it takes to create the best email for driving event registration;
1. Be Attractive
Start off with a well designed, clean, crisp and clear email template that is well branded and easy for the recipient to read and follow. Consider whether the email needs to be all text based. Could you include a 15-second video from one of your event speakers, or an interesting infographic relating to your event theme or content? If you’re sticking with text, make sure paragraphs are succinct and ask yourself if paragraphs can be broken down into lists or bullet points.
2. Get Personal
Think about how you can tailor your emails to your database to ensure relevancy, then decide on how best to segment your email list based on the data you have. Think about location. Do you have customer personas that you can divide by? Or perhaps you know the recipients’ purchasing type or history. If they’ve attended one of your events before, you could segment based on attendance history or preferences they provided in a previous event feedback survey.
Users of Mitingu who have been smart with their segmentation, creating very relevant, personalised emails, have seen a clear engagement boost, with 49% of event signups occurring in the first 5 hours.
Mitingu makes this really simple, no matter what your understanding of data and databases is. The platform enables you to tag delegates so that you can then segment your email sends based on this information.
3. Get Organized
This tip may seem obvious but we’ve seen this happen too many times so we’ve had to include it. Schedule email sends to delegates as a single campaign rather than ad hoc send outs to lists here and there. Where ad hoc emails have been sent in Mitingu we’ve seen that emails have a disjointed look and feel or the communication is completely disjointed, i.e. some delegates miss out on receiving further event details altogether.
4. Don’t Ask Too Much
We’ve seen a real mix of event emails littered with a comical number of calls to action and those that have almost left out a call to action in its entirety, i.e. the link is typed out but not hyperlinked to the event page or signup form!
You may have an agenda that delegates can download, links to speaker bios, location map, sponsors or a registration page. Be careful that you’re not asking the recipient to click to view or download these pieces of information if it’s not the main goal of the email. We recommend choosing the most important call to action and emphasising this at each individual stage of engagement.
5. Be Unique
Steer away from taking too much inspiration from the typical event emails that you see in your inbox. This includes emails covered in sponsor or partner logos, and full of event jargon such as, “Hurry, early-bird discount ends soon” or “Don’t miss out.” These phrases have become noise so try to think about how you can make your headings or copy standout in a unique way. Rather than an overly sales focused message, could you offer the recipient a useful, unique piece of content that relates to the event? Perhaps you could provide an interesting snippet from a whitepaper or book that delegates will receive at your event.
6. Get Social
Ensure that your email or aspects of your email content can be easily shared by the recipient. For example, if you embedded a video make sure there is an integrated social feature that allows the recipient to share it with their network. Even the most simple email can include a social share option by including a prompt for the recipient to share the key event information. However, remember tip 3. when deciding on where to place this button or option in your email.
If you’ve got great content that’s undeniably interesting and relevant, paired with good design and spot-on targeting your event signups should have a high score on our engagement scale. If you’re experiencing a lower than expected (or wanted) engagement from your event emails, we’d be happy to share the insight we’ve gleaned from Mitingu. We can also provide you with a quick walk-through of how the platform can make all of the above much easier, leaving you with more time to question, test and refine your event email engagement.
The best thing that just keeps getting better – Episode 2
"Nobody said it was going to be easy." Mitingu's co-founder, Greg, shares the 5 questions every start up should keep handy for those moments when doubt sets in along the way.
Nobody said it was going to be easy…5 questions every start up needs to keep handy
Starting a new business can be an emotional and financial roller coaster. In my opinion, the highs far outweigh the lows, but there can be tough times that have to be met head on.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have deep pockets, or have an investor with them, funding a start up can be overwhelming, especially as a number of obstacles can typically arise due to not having enough money in reserve or the revenue coming in doesn't cover all the start up costs. It’s at this point that doubts can creep in and thoughts such as, “I’ll get a job for a few months to pay the bills and then come back to this,” go round in your head. If you go down that route you may well "go back to it” once you've got some additional cash, but the opportunity may have passed. What’s also likely to happen is that you won’t go back as momentum and enthusiasm may wane or priorities change.
It’s at this point that you should ask yourself a few questions:
1. Are we nearly ready to launch?
2. Has there been a good level of interest and positive feedback to date?
3. Is there enough interest to show that there is a large enough market for it?
4. Will initial sales come in quickly?
5. Have we got (or can we get) enough in reserve to keep going to plug the gap between new sales and actual money going into the bank account?
I know there are other factors to look at and you will have asked yourself some of those questions at the planning stage, but if you can answer yes to all of the above, then stick with it and don’t give up. If other people believe in what you are doing and there is a genuine interest in the product or service that your new business is offering then you’re onto something.
We went through the same moment when doubt creeps in, like many start ups, but we had a real belief that Mitingu brings something new and fresh to the events industry. We had some terrific feedback early on, which has only continued since and we're working with some outstanding brands who are seeing brilliant results with Mitingu. It goes without saying that you need to continue to monitor your monthly costs (just as any business does no matter how old or new) and in turn how much business you need to bring in as you grow your company. Pairing a good sense of accounting, with being invested in your company and/or idea is what we believe is a basic formula for a start up.
But our biggest lesson and the moral of this story, is that every time that voice in your head tells you maybe this wasn't such a great idea, ask yourself the 5 questions above. If you can say YES to all 5 then put that thought to rest and go and make a success of your business!
Greg (Co-Founder)
Read the first episode in this series to find out more about our journey so far.
November Product Update
We've added some great new features that our customer have requested or suggested. Take a look at what's new...
We have added some great new features that our customers have been requesting.
Donations
You can now easily accept donations rather than only offering a fixed registration / ticket price. When setting up a new event simply tick the 'This registration type is a donation' checkbox (see above) and your registration cost becomes a suggested donation amount that can be edited by your customers at the point of sale. If you have a minimum cost per registration, simply add that cost as a fee by editing the registration/ticket type after creating the event.
Attendee Details
Although most business events will want to capture their attendee's name and other information we do have many events (especially entertainment events) where you just need to sell tickets. You can now simply untick 'Require attendee details' (see above) when setting up an event and your attendees will skip the details page when registering and go straight to the checkout page.
Scheduled Event Emails
We recently added the ability to schedule emails before, during and after your event. You can choose a custom designed template, edit the content and schedule the send based on contact tags and who has or hasn't registered giving you a powerful way to schedule reminders and send individually tailored messages to your contacts based on their registration information.
To get started checkout our article in the support site.
Custom Themes
We quietly rolled out this powerful new feature a few weeks ago. At the moment you can create and customise the templates for your order emails, tickets, invitations, reminders etc with full HTML/CSS editor access. This is just a phase one and in the coming months we will be adding the ability to have full HTML/CSS control over your registration pages.
Our templates are easily created using the same liquid templating system used by sites such as Shopify. To get started creating your own theme checkout the article on our support site.
Engagement Scores
As delegate engagement is core to what we want to achieve with Mitingu, we've added a new metric for you to quickly see the engagement of each of your contacts. The engagement score is calculated when you invite to, or email contacts about, an event. It is then calculated based on how they engage both with the email and the event itself. You can now find the engagement scores as a traffic light icon on each contact in your contact list.
The best thing that just keeps getting better – Episode 1
As a start up we often get asked about what inspires us or what we've been up to, so here's the scoop! Including our top sources for entreprenial inspiration.
I’m regularly asked how things are going at Mitingu and generally my reply is “it’s the best thing I’ve ever done”, because in terms of my work life it is! We’re always looking at ways to do things better and give our customers the best experience possible, so “the best thing” will just get better and better.
Being a start up in the events technology sector is great fun. Like any new business just starting out, we have lots of ups and downs, but staying focused on our goals and objectives makes getting through the tough periods so much easier. Reading books written by successful technology entrepreneurs like Delivering Happiness by Tony Hseih of Zappos has also been a great source of inspiration.
Mitingu has been around since February this year and we have come on leaps and bounds, working with some fantastic people and businesses. I thought I’d write a regular update to let you know about some of those highs and lows, our goals, aspirations and how we plan to get there. I’ll keep it short and sweet as I realise we all live in a busy world.
Feb 2014 – Sept 2014
“Follow your dreams, they know the way”
We started out with all the excitement, dreams and aspirations I believe anyone starting a business must have. We had to find the right people, not just with the right credentials, but who shared the same ideas and bought into our customer focused culture. It took a while, but we have a team leading the business that I am now proud to be part of.
When it came to the actual product, we started with a huge list of features that we thought would be great for event organisers. We then did a lot more research and managed to take loads of those features off and agree a “core” list of features that we felt were essential and that would be released as phase 1 of the product. We held a brand strategy workshop (sounds very grand, but it really was eye opening) and it helped us to focus on what we were, a delegate registration and engagement platform. That helped us chop a lot of the features on our list that weren’t directly related to this.
We also had to deal with funding. How would we do it? Would we be able to self-fund, need investment or maybe a combination of both? Would we want investors to buy into our ideas and be an active part of the business or just someone who invested and wanted to see an agreed return on that investment? It has to be said at this point that we did have an ace in the pack…one of our founders (hello Jon Baker) is a software developer! This gave us a huge headstart and a massive saving on initial product design and development. He was, is and will always be a huge influence on Mitingu and that’s only a good thing as he is hugely talented and a privilege to work with. As much as that helped, we still had bills to pay, so we decided that we would self -fund initially and review regularly (keeping on top of the money coming in and out is such an important, but regularly overlooked job). By June we realized that some additional funding and expertise would be really useful in helping us get to first base (we decided to go down the route of getting an investor that would also add valuable input into the business), so Andy (Jordan) was the perfect fit and in July joined us as a shareholder and partner in Mitingu.
Where we are now
We’ve been in BETA since July and we’ve had lots of live users putting the platform through its paces. There’s been no major issues, lots of great feedback that has helped us made it even better and we are set to come out of BETA on November 31st.
I’ll be keeping you all up to speed every week from now on, sharing the good times and the lessons learnt along the way.
One last thing to say is we’ve received amazing support and feedback from our customers and our friends. Our families have been super supportive and made this whole journey worth all the effort to date.
Thanks for reading and have a great day.
Greg (Co-Founder)
All of the Benefits, With No Strings Attached
Which of the following best describes you?
a: You like to keep your options open
b: Commitment makes you feel secure and taken care of
If you’re thinking that you’ve stumbled across a dating website you haven’t...
Which of the following best describes you?
a: You like to keep your options open
b: Commitment makes you feel secure and taken care of
If you’re thinking that you’ve stumbled across a dating website you haven’t, in fact when we put together the pricing and access options for Mitingu - an online event registration and delegate engagement platform (just so we’re clear) - we knew commitment varies for different professionals and companies.
That’s why we decided to create a fully-customizable platform that suits either the A-type or B-type personality above. You can choose to have the platform branded with unlimited use and access or you can pay for what you need as you need it, giving you the flexibility and control that we know event planners, managers and coordinators need.
Whether you are planning hundreds of events, attended by many, or a few smaller events each year, your role in events is most likely, to centre around delivering good customer service - or good delegate service. Mitingu focuses on exactly that, no matter the size or format of your event.
What’s more is that we won't strip back all the goodies if you choose the pay as you go option. You’ll still have access to all the features needed to increase event registration, communicate with attendees, manage guest lists but above all engage your delegates.
If you want to check out what we’re about you can sign up via the pay as you go pricing page. Or you can talk it out by contacting us. Alternatively if commitment is what you are looking for, take a look at our whitelabel options and get in touch.