Does your event online community app create & enhance community?
Most event community applications are built from the organizer’s perspective. Think about online event communities you’ve been a part of recently.
  • You register
  • You sign in
  • You fill out a profile
  • You view a preset schedule of events
  • You can see a list of sponsors/vendors who support the event
  • You “connect” with others in some sort of antiquated forum environment (maybe) prior to the event
  • You attend the event
  • The event site/portal shuts down

I’ve been looking for a great example of a conference attendee application. One that makes it easy for me to connect with others, builds community prior to the event, serves to continue to connect me during the event and then furthers those connections after the event.

While on my quest I’ve developed a list of guiding principles for building an event community platform. I felt it was time to share:

Simple Registration

Make signup/registration easy. If I’m already a member of your association or community tie my user login to my registration. User experience is everything. Challenge your team to make the experience simple and with as few clicks as possible. I’ve done event registrations that were 5 clicks from the home page of the site to the thank you (and that included the hotel registration).

Think Mobile

Make sure your community platform plays well in a mobile world. Said another way, “make certain there is an app for that”. There are several who have created mobile sites but that leaves too much of the user experience up to the browser. Create a mobile app for all of the major platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows). It’s through this channel that most of your event engagement occurs.

Connect People & Learning

OK you’ve launched the online community. Will it be used? I’ll answer the question with a question. Have you created ways for attendees to engage with others? Have you made your platform/app a “must have” for attendees?

Post educational sessions, with details (topic, speakers, date, time & location) into the app. That’s simple enough. But what about allowing session attendees (plus any others interested) to use this session record as a place to “meet” and collaborate on session details prior to the event. Imagine speakers/facilitators posting to the community (as well as on Facebook and Twitter) and allowing others to answer the questions. Imagine being able to use this same area as the backchannel during the session as well as a continued education watering hole after the session/event. Yes, even the place to post the session recording including audio, video and slides post event.

Remember, more than ever before people are searching for answers from others, “just like me.”

Modify the “Field of Dreams” reference a bit:

“If you build an engaging, connection, sharing-oriented platform, they will come (and come back, and come back).”

Make it Flexible

Remember that your community is about allowing people to connect in ways they find interesting and meaningful. Make sure your community solution allows for collaborative chat, building public and private groups, file and picture sharing and other creative ways to connect. Give them a platform on which to build conversations and ideas they find interesting and they’ll come back time and again.

Sign up for the Marathon, not the Sprint

Your face to face event is a few days long. Your online community can live past the event and continue living to shape your current event. Keep it up year round. Reach out to your attendees. Every event has attendees who will gladly serve as online ambassadors. These are the people who are the glue that keep the community going on those days where there’s a lull in online conversation. They’re special folks. Treat them well and they’ll reward you with unending support.

Include Analytics

Remember the saying, “Anything worth doing is worth measuring”? That applies here. How can you measure success of your community if you don’t track it’s growth and reach. In addition, your platform should be able to provide influence analytics to the community (who is currently yielding the greatest social influence within the community). Analytics not only help you measure the success of your community as a whole, they can serve to further the engagement of the community as members look to raise their influence score.

Consider the Virtual Attendeed

If your event contains a virtual component, build it directly into your community platform. Just as virtual technology extends your event so does it extend the life and depth of your community platform.

Capture Session & Conference Feedback

Why not capture session feedback directly in the community platform? Why not build upon that feedback to allow the community to see how their feedback is shaping the next event? I’m not much for the standard forms on rating sessions. What I would find interesting is a feedback channel similar to mystarbucksidea.com. Let session attendees post ideas on how to make the session better, vote on their ideas and then when a similar session is presented at the following conference show transparently which ideas were implemented.

The recurring theme in this list is that all aspects of the community are built for a living community with the goal of connecting them to others (“just like them”) and allowing that group of people to build the community into what they want it to be.

What other principles would you add to this list? What does your killer conference app look like?

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