Introduction
Officially launched in August of 2010, the VMware User Group (VMUG) is an independent, global, customer-led organization, created to maximize members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events. They are managed by an association management firm, Innovatis Group.
Every year they produce a Global event series called VMUG UserCons. At these one-day conferences, attendees can connect with hundreds of VMware users, attend educational sessions led by industry experts, receive an inside look at exciting VMware and partner products, plus much more all at no cost to the members. This event provides an excellent opportunity for VMware Users to learn and network. It also provides an excellent opportunity for other companies to sponsor and exhibit to get access to this community to generate valuable business connections.
VMUG Needs
VMUG is a non-profit organization focused on maximizing knowledge sharing, enhancing the attendee experience and finding efficiencies, all while keeping expense mitigation top of mind. The Innovatis Group works with several vendors and because VMUG was in the market for a solution that would deliver a best-in-class attendee experience prior to and during their event, could track content consumption, and score content effectiveness they sought out Validar to be their partner.
Event Tech Platform Value
Validar was chosen to be VMUG’s onsite registration and attendee tracking event technology provider. This decision was based upon Validar’s ease of deployment, live remote support capabilities, and the depth and breadth of their products. The Innovatis Group team also made the decision to take on the on-site responsibilities to lessen deployment costs for the organization of VMUG. The Validar solutions deployed in a self-support fashion were:
Validar® vCheckin Onsite Registration integrated with Fonteva
Validar Session Attendance Tracking – self scan stations
Validar vCapture Lead Retrieval
EventHub® Attendee tool integrated with CrowdCompass
EventScore Gamification
With these solutions VMUG members were able to receive a best-in-class attendee experience and the team was able to track each journey, score session content on a Likert scale, and recognize / reward attendees that engaged in an exceptional fashion. More specifically, they used EventScore to reward attendees for going to sessions, engaging with Exhibitors, and providing feedback on session content.
Self-Scan Session Tracking
Being a free event, human resources are not as plentiful as they might be for fee-based events. Most companies require a human resource to man a session scanning device to make sure attendance counts are accurate. VMUG was originally concerned that attendees would bypass self-scan stations. To over come this, they provided incentive to their community, and leveraged Validar’s EventScore Gamification platform. EventScore was used to recognize and reward session attendance, and session feedback. This proved to be so effective that some attendees attempted to scan themselves into multiple concurrent tracks to earn more recognition and points. Subsequently, Validar had to add a feature to the solution to only allow points for one session per concurrent track. The incentive did resonate well with attendees in all markets.
Session Evaluations Gamified!
The best way to gauge your performance as an event producer is through candid feedback. The Innovatis Group recognizes this, and they did a brilliant job leveraging EventScore to foster active participation and feedback on session content to better inform real-time decisions for VMUG.
Validar believes evaluation response rates (% of session attendees that complete the session evaluation) need to be at least at a 15% or above to have a data sample representative of your audience. We also benchmark best-in-class event performances across common Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). The VMUG UserCon Series results were extraordinary, especially regarding evaluation completions. With the Validar solution, each attendee was invited to provide session feedback via the Validar EventHub® Attendee tool, integrated with CrowdCompass. If an attendee was tracked going to two (2) sessions, they were presented with a unique
survey for only those two sessions, with content scored on a Likert scale. Attendees were recognized a rewarded for this feedback. VMUG performed very well!
Attendees completed on average 38% of evaluations presented across 23 events globally!
The average across 10 of our best-performing events for this KPI is 11.65%.
Exhibitor Engagement Gamified
The VMUG UserCon exhibiting community is a vital component to their event program, and making sure their exhibitors receive the lead volume and quality they expected is a big focus. VMUG also leveraged EventScore to recognize and reward attendees for visiting their exhibitors. This event series has proven that gamification can increase attendee to exhibitor engagement rates. One of the KPI’s that Validar benchmarks is Attendee to Exhibitor visit percentage.
55.64% of Attendees visited at least one exhibiting sponsor across 23 events globally! The average across 10 of our best-performing events for this KPI is 36.59%.
Conclusion
Getting results like this requires not only a great platform, but a great team that knows how to leverage technology. The Innovatis Group sets high expectations for the organizations they support, and they expect their technologies partners to match their level of performance and excellence. We’re very proud to have been of service.
Let us know if you are into a deeper dive into these solutions.
