Beyond the Ballroom™

You Know the Story of Most Event Apps

You’ve invested in an event app for your big three-day meeting intending to increase employee engagement, networking, and message retention. This is no small investment: You spend a huge amount of time debating which app to buy and even more time and money installing, populating, managing, promoting, supporting, and analyzing it. But after your three day meeting, the app becomes worthless. It’s yesterday’s newspaper. Sound familiar? You spend all that money to amp up your team members. You fly them to a nice hotel, book speakers to motivate them. You build team-building activities, you feed them and get them excited for the coming year. But what happens after that? Everyone goes home and all that excitement and energy starts to dissipate. All the information that was conveyed in the meeting suddenly has no place to live. The good intentions of new working habits and a commitment to follow that playbook fall out of their heads. When they get back to work the next day, any leftover excitement is set aside for the pile of emails, phone messages, stacked-up meetings and to-do lists that built up while they were gone. And then they delete the app off their phone. We don’t think your event was a complete waste of time and money. Unsurprisingly, your company did an admirable job articulating their messages and directives to grow the company. But do you really think the excitement from your meeting will extend out for the next year? How about for a month? Let’s be real: will anyone even remember what happened a week later? You could just call that “how it is” and accept the limitations of the system. Or you could change the system. Ready for a change that dramatically increases employee engagement?

It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way

Your smart phone and the app that works on it are marvels of modern engineering. Literally, men have flown to the moon in back with less computing power. So to say that the app has a life-span of your average mayfly seems like a waste. Because it is. There is a lot of unrealized potential waiting to be tapped in your event app that can engage your event audience all year and give you enormously valuable feedback and analytics if you simple think and plan ahead. A full-featured event app should have everything you would want or need to keep that connection and engagement going for the rest of the year: games, networking, agendas, maps, social media, etc. The question you must ask yourself is, wat is the values to the organization to have that engagement tool in place for three months, six months, or even twelve months?

This is Beyond the Ballroom™ Thinking

Look, everyone already has a smartphone. They use it all the time. The number of people who check it before they get out of bed, or right before they fall asleep, who admit to using it while going to the ballroom or while driving is staggering. Clearly, your staff is already deeply in love with these devices and you can’t stop them from using their phones during office hours. So they goal is to find new ways to get your internal campaign messages in front of them in a place they are already looking all day, every day of the year – their phone. It is the ideal space to increase engagement, excitement and connection to each other, the campaigns the company and its goals. Stop missing opportunities to keep your campaign top of mind. Increase the social proof of your campaign by embedding phone with interesting and necessary information and that requires your co-workers to engage with the information to make decisions during the year. Use games not to waste time, but to enhance productivity. And make sure that everyone sees the importance of engaging with your app content all year long. Everyone already knows this, but few companies have really leveraged this screen real estate. They assume that because no one is using their intranet is mobile friendly, it is archiving the same thing. Or worse, that because no one is using the intranet, no one must want to use their phones. It’s not that no one wants to use their phones (statistics imply that mist people still use their phone while watching movies, TV, or even in front of their laptop or tablet: people love their phones so much, they use them while using other mobile devices), it’s that your company doesn’t have a way to use these devices that create excitement, engagement, interest and action. But if you’ve properly implemented an app for an event, you do know how to do all that. Ready to impress your boss? Let’s start talking about how we can help!

How We Run A 12-Month Campaign

Here’s the plan. Keep in mind that when we use this method, we typically see an 85 percent increase in downloads and engagement rates in open events; internal events with proper promotion can see even higher rates. You’ve got a three-day sales meeting in Vegas. A month before the event, the event app is loaded with your company’s logos, branding, messaging, event content, and a promotional campaign is developed to make sure people know how the app should be used and the value of the content on it. The event app runs for the duration of the event, complete with on-site activities to get your sales staff moving around, doing things, meeting new people, reading content and generally engaging with your message. A support booth is staffed by our agency’s event app specialists, helping every attended with the app and people engaging with the app. During the event, your company’s leadership announces the internal campaign for the coming year and how everyone at the event will be playing a part, so they should keep the event app as their campaign app. At the end of the event, we pulse attendees with an array of data generating surveys, aggregate all the content and begin to analyze and form conclusions from the results. At the same, we populate your app with periodic visual meetings, new and relevant content to download, and announcements. Leaderboards are refreshed so new games can start. Each week or month, everyone is expected to reach campaign-related materials delivered on the app, check into the meeting, engage in the discussion, and complete a short post-meeting survey. During the meeting, leadership can ask questions about how well the campaign is faring in the field, either in the general forum or through more specific survey questions. Results can be kept internal to leadership or shared with the team. This is a closed app, meaning this it can’t be accessed by anyone outside the company or department. All comments and content are safely protected from outside eyes so you can manage frank and valuable conversations on the app. You can even send push notifications through the app. Rather than through emails or possibly an existing intranet site, sales performance metrics can be posted on the app with analytic content and comments. In between these meetings, the team can, through best practice conversations via the social network, help each other with challenges. They can check champaign leaderboards, post field photos and download content, all while standing in line at the store, waiting for a sales appointment, in between meetings, or while relaxing at home. At the end of the year, as the campaign winds down in preparation for the following year’s initiatives, all the year’s data will be aggregated and analyzed. A strategic analysis and recommendations document will be written and presented and this data will be used to enhance the net year’s meeting and how the app will be used. Read to take employment to the next level? Let’s talk!

So Let’s Compare

You can spend as much as $15,000 for an event app. You’ll spend another $15,000-50,000 in hard costs to an outside agency or in internal resource value conceive, write and design our event app content, promotional campaigns, activities, on-site support, push message planning, integration into your agenda, message and conversation monitoring, and data collection. That means you’ll spend from $10-20,000 a day for an event app for a three day meeting that people actually like using and that provides you with valuable actionable insights. OR You can spend essentially the same amount of money from the same app, and spend a little more on planning, promotional, activity, support and analytics that extends its utility and value for a year-long campaign. Same features, same great support and excitement, but this way the cost is only $300 a day. $10,000 a day for three days of value or $300 a day for 360 days of value. Your choice. The value proposition is clear. You get perpetual engagement, increasing interest and alignment, deeper insight and actionable results for an entire year. This isn’t about saving money. It’s about building something awesome for an with your team, showing them that you are interested in what they have to say, in using the latest technology yo drive meaningful conversation and embracing innovation. When everyone has the campaign app in their pockets and in their hands everywhere they go, they will show it off, play with it and push it to new heights. Isn’t that the kind of thing you want to inspire your coworkers to do every day? Ready to talk about internal communications’ biggest bargain?

Exceeding Expectations

All of the great features and services you get from a full-featured event app can now be applied as a campaign app. When we help you develop a complete Beyond the Ballroom project, you can expect all of this:

Polls and surveys at regular intervals
Announcements and
Pre-planned content pushes
Push messaging to all app users
Peer-to-peer connectivity
A closed social media channel that focuses solely on your campaign and your team
Photos uploadable and viewable from their phone
Games and a leaderboard
The ability to upload and download PDFs and web content
Links to outside content like news and intranet content
A year of activity that can be collected and analyzed for deeper insights, like who is the most influencial member of your team, and who is participating the most
An iOS app, an Android app, and an HTML5 version that works on Windows phones and laptops
The app will get frequent platform updates, so new features can be added over time.

All of these features can be applied at any cadence that serves that company and the message. Your new 365-day campaign app can accomodate and enhance any other external events and activities your team is involved in, or it can help connect teams spread out over remote geographic distances. It takes a little time to think of all the ways you can use your new campaign app, but we have years of experience helping people understand its potential and executing successful implementation plans. It’s what we do best. Think this might solve your problems? Let’s see how we can help!

Who We Are

Beyond the Ballroom is an idea from FLIRT Communications, an expert in internal engagement. We have more than five years experience building and orchestrating integrated campaigns that build alignment and passion around your company’s annual objectives and key messages. We have created and managed over 200 corporate events and experiences for global, regional, and local clients. Using both live and digital environment, FLIRT crafts fresh, inspired thinking and innovative solutions for clients and their co-workers, customers and strategic planners to create dialogue around what matters most. When it comes to creative, our philosophy is simple: creative should always be in suporrt of your business priorities and objectives.

Contact Us

Let’s talk more about this idea and how it might be applied to your event and campaign. Contact us directly or fill out the form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss your fit with our Beyond the Ballroom mobile engagement platform.