Build Your Community

For many of us in the event industry the holy grail of engagement has long been to engage their audiences beyond the day of the event. Attendees focus on the event whilst it is happening, they learn, collaborate and network and have a great experience but, when it finishes, they move on. Finding methods to build a community to continue the conversation, marketing, interaction and networking has been an extremely challenging goal.

We now have the technology, and capability, to build a community around your events. Organisers' thinking is changing from approaching events as individual, siloed and stand alone activities to a series of engagements with touch points throughout the year.

This means your audience has year round access to network, share experience, collaborate and learn. Brands can have year round access to nurture leads, increase awareness and market their products and services. In between your tent pole events you have the opportunity to run more focussed sessions to enhance community value.

Would it be useful to know who your most engaged attendees are? Would you like to find speakers and content ideas more easily? Would you like to increase your audience and sponsors? It’s possible to do this by building a community around your events supported by smart digital technology.

At the Global Event Tech Summit, community building was the first topic addressed during summit by a panel of event experts.

“Events are typically one to many experiences, the speaker being the one sharing content. Communities are many to many where the members share their knowledge and experience.”

- Ashley Friedlein, founder of Guild.

By definition, event attendees are part of a community of interest be that around a topic or an organisation. There is value in attending the event and that should be a smart event supported by digital technology in ‘event mode’. The opportunity is then to provide ongoing value by re-configuring the support to ‘community mode’. Attendees have already downloaded and used the event app to the agenda, interact and network before and during the event. After the event ends the app becomes their access to the community over the long term, providing additional features such as activity feeds and content libraries.

“In our experience, digital communities built around events stimulate growth through increased attendance, engagement and sponsorship”.

Vanessa Lovatt, of Notified.

You may already understand your audience to be members of a community, it may already be formed or you may be on the first step of seeking support for long term digital engagement. Wherever you are on the journey, events and digital communities have the potential to unlock significant value and growth for organisers, attendees and sponsors.