Get Your Guests in Faster with an Event Check-in App

Hey Everybody, Ryan Sturno here and I run the Managed Services department here at EventMobi. Offering your attendees a smooth Check-In experience to your in-person event and session is integral to event success. Making sure that this process is simple, easy and seamless is essential to ensuring your event kicks off without a hitch. EventMobi’s new Event and Session Check-In is easy to use, works on any mobile device, therefore does not require special hardware and allows you to track attendance using the same platform you use to manage your events. So let’s go ahead and open up Experience Manager and the back end of the event where all the settings are and I’ll go ahead and run you through how to set it up. Next, you’ll see that the Onsite App feature is populated in the menu there and you’ll want to go ahead and invite anybody that you’ll have on site doing the check in, if that’s manual. We also have kiosk mode, which we’ll go into a little bit further. Soon as you hit in their email, it’ll send it out to them along with an access code, we’ll go ahead and to go into our settings, enable kiosk mode, enable checkout so you can check in and out, and then enter enable search by name or email, which we’ll go through. As in with all EventMobi stuff, we try to keep things on brand as much as possible, so you’ll be able to put in a hex code for your color for the kiosk mode. Go ahead and save all of those settings. Here’s the email that they get with an easy readable access code. Next, we’ll go over to our iPad and we’ll search for the EventMobi Onsite App. This will be used for the check in, whether it’s for kiosk mode or for manual checking in and out. Of course you’ll want your iTunes password that we all seem to forget from time to time. Go ahead and let that install. And there it is. Go ahead and open that up. We’ll log in with our access code. You can also log in with your Experience Manager password. But this allows everybody, whoever is going to be on site during the check in, whether it’s volunteers or people within the organization, they don’t need access to the Experience Manager in the back end. They can just go ahead and sign in with the access code. So we’ll go ahead and let it enable our camera. Also, you’ll note here at the bottom, there’s four tabs, check in, check out search and kiosk mode, and we’ll go through each of those. Check in: scans, that badge. Real quick. Check out.. Check out. And it’s time stamped, as you can see. And then here is the search function. So if somebody loses their badge and their phone is dead, you can search them up by name or by their email search for Brona. Here. There she is. We’ll check her in. Done. Search for Brona again to check her out, and she’s been checked out. Next, we’ll go over into kiosk mode. So if you have an iPad on a stand or multiple iPads on a stand, you can switch over to kiosk mode and you can enable it to do check in or check out. Which is nice because at the beginning of the event you can have it check in and then at the end of the day or the end of the event, you can set it as check out so they can only do one on those iPads to keep it a little bit easier for them. You want to go ahead and name this kiosk. And here we are. I show my QR code and we’re all set. The best things about the new feature is it’s integrated with the EventMobi platform, so it’s super easy to use. You have the ability to track attendance at events and sessions without any other third party tools. It eliminates the need to use paper, it allows multiple staff to check in attendees at the same time and process check ins quicker. It’s easy, fast to use, the physical check in kiosks are lightning fast, so you really need to, you know, appreciate that, especially when you have a long line of people. You want multiple kiosks depending on your attendee size, but the quickness is lightning fast. It was hard to even record this this demo because it’s so fast. The other thing is, just to reiterate, is it’s secure. So like I said, if you have 50 volunteers, you know, you have 50 breakout rooms. Obviously, you don’t want all of that staff to have access to the back end of the EventMobi platform for your event. So it’s really nice to have that quick access code that you can send them. So all they have access to is the Check-In App. Any mobile device that’s able to use a QR code with their camera is, which I believe is from 2016 on. So the majority of phones out there, even if you need to rent it from an AV supplier, you know, the technology is there and it’s compatible.

Did you know you can improve your event technology with artificial intelligence? I’m going to show you how. So artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. And you can also use it to make your event technology even smarter. Sometimes you may want to find data in your event technology that your tool is not giving you straight away. I want to show you an example. Imagine you’re an association and you want to track CEU credits. Some associations track them just by checking in attendance, which is something that you can easily do with our Check-In & Check-Out tool. And it even provides you with reports that look like this. So I can see here how many people checked in, who checked in, who checked out, and so on. However, some other associations do track it also by looking at how long somebody has been in a session. And right now, that data is not visible on the dashboard. By the way, after we came up with the idea for this video, we built that feature. So if you need to track duration for your event or any session attendance, you can just email support@eventmobi.com and they will help you out. But I want to show you how you could solve similar problems with artificial intelligence. So the first thing that I’m going to do here is I’m going to click export and export to report of my check ins and check out. And so once I’ve done that and I’m looking at them, this is what a check-in and check-out report looks like. So it has a timestamp, a type, so this is where it describes whether it’s a session or the entire event; Name. Action, which can be check in or check out; first name, last name, email. And then the groups of the people affected. Now, if I wanted to create a report that looks like what I need, so that shows me the duration, I would need a time duration for every, for example, email address in here. So instead of having this separated, I would need it for each email address. And the other thing that I need is how long have people been there. Now, the thing with time stamps that a lot of people don’t realize, which is really cool, is you can actually just add and subtract them from each other. Computers are pretty good at handling time, but how do I do this? So I could do tons of Excel formulas and tons of other things here, but I can also just ask artificial intelligence to write a program for me. And I don’t know how to code. And you don’t need to do either. So let’s have a look. We’re going to use a model called Chat GPT, which is really popular right now for all kinds of things. And it’s essentially a bot that you can talk to. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to start a new chat here and I’m going to start by describing the problem to it. What I want to get out of there is a so-called HTML file with some JavaScript, which is a programing language, and that’s something that I can just run in the browser. So what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to start explaining my problem to this computer and I’m going to be back in a second. So let’s start typing. All right. So let’s check out what I’ve typed here, and you may be able to see that this is pretty normal language. So the first thing I’m going to I’m doing here is I’m describing what I wanted to do. So I wanted to get all the check-in timestamps and check-out timestamps and just subtract them from each other. And in the next step, I’m explaining the file that I’m delivering to the software. So I’m describing what columns there are, what information is to be found. And I’m also delivering a copy of a sample timestamp so it exactly knows what to look for. And finally, I’m telling the computer to display the results in a table. And one more thing that I didn’t discuss earlier. Obviously, this only works if you have consistent check-in and check-out timestamps. If a check-out timestamp is missing, we don’t know when a person left, so we don’t know how long they’ve been there. And so in order for us to not have wrong data, we try to have a warning that says, sorry, I didn’t know what’s going on. So this is what’s happening in that last sentence here. So I’ve typed this no computer programing at all, and now I’m going to send this off to this computer. And you can see already it starts coding it. So this is something that’s interesting about Chat GPT: Just like normal people, sometimes it falls asleep. So all we need to do is to be nice to the machines and tell them to carry on. All right. Isn’t that magic? There’s my ready code. So all I need to do now is I need to bring over a text editor, and it can be any text editor that you’re using. I’m just using the standard text editor on the Mac, which is called Text Edit, I’m copying the code in there. And I’m hitting “File”, “Save” and I’m saving it as an HTML file. So this is really important. So I just call it checkin.html, I click “Save”, it asks me do I want to save it as an HTML file? I say yes. And so essentially now I have my script ready. So what I need to do now is I need to open it in my browser. This is what it looks like. And I need to select my check-in file. So here we go. And I need to press calculate. And so you see, for each email address, it’s giving me the duration. And for people where there is not the right number of check ins and checkouts. It’s telling me that that data is missing. Now, one thing that’s also really cool is if you want something to be changed about it, you can just tell to Chat GPT. So I can just for example, now say “thank you. But can you also add first and last name?” And here we go again. So that’s how you can use artificial intelligence to beef up your event technology. As I told you before, if you need the duration for your sessions or your event, just email our support. We have these reports ready for you. But if there is anything that your event technology doesn’t give you, you now know how to use artificial intelligence to get it.