Natalie Campbell-Reid, Autor bei EventMobi

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

Natalie Campbell-Reid — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 20:37:00 +0000

Can an Event Check-in App really make or break the guest check-in experience at in-person events? The simple answer is yes!

Paper lists and expensive scanners are not the best way to check in large numbers of attendees or set the tone for your event. Did you know that the tablet or mobile phone you use daily can efficiently check guests in and out of your events in real-time? When paired with the right Event Check-in App, it’s easy to create a fast event registration and check-in flow for your attendees.

In this article, you will learn:

What you can do to speed up your check-in process
How to reduce hardware costs
How you can use check-in data to better measure event ROI

Plus, check out the bonus tip on how to get creative with your check-in data and extract powerful insights using AI!

Use an Event Check-in App to Speed Up the Process

Long lines at the registration desk are a common frustration for attendees at everything from conferences and trade shows to free events. Typically, delays are caused by event staff checking in attendees with printed lists. This might not make a huge difference at the smallest of events with under 40-50 attendees. But, at larger events, manually checking names off a list one by one will slow down the process and create a poor first impression. That’s why planners need easy-to-use check-in technologies that move attendees out of the registration hall and into the main event experience.

EventMobi’s event management solution includes a user-friendly Event Check-in App that lets you quickly scan attendees in and out of your event and sessions. All you need to do is point the in-app camera at the QR code on an attendee’s physical or digital badge (digital badges are found in the attendee profile in your event’s mobile app!).

An attendee’s unique QR code includes all the information captured at registration—including attendee type, which allows your check-in staff to quickly distinguish between guests with different levels of access. For instance, speakers can be directed backstage before their presentation without having to explain what their role is. Likewise, your staff can recognize VIPs, sponsors, and other important guests immediately at check-in to prevent confusion or potential delays.

If an attendee doesn’t have their badge handy, simply type their name into the app to check them in. EventMobi’s Check-in App is lightning-fast, which means it won’t disrupt attendees as they enter your event and move through sessions. It also produces valuable data, making it easy to measure session performance and award CE credits. In the future, you also have the option to include a QR Code Google Form in the promotional materials for your upcoming event, like posters, flyers, and banners, to achieve faster event check-in.

To make check-in and check-out even faster, create a self-scanning station for your attendees by downloading the Check-in App onto tablets and enabling the service kiosk mode.

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.

EventMobi’s Production Services Team Manager, Ryan Sturno, demonstrates how to get started setting up your event check-in app and create a streamlined self-check-in kiosk with any tablet.

Reduce Check-in Hardware Costs with an Event Check-in App

Many event teams have tighter budgets than ever, so it’s important to invest in event technology that will reduce costs. Typically, the expense of rented badge scanners is prohibitive for many events. But, when your team’s mobile phones or tablets can be used as scanners, you can affordably increase the number of staff checking attendees in and out.

EventMobi’s Event Check-in App works on any mobile device that can read QR codes. Add staff email addresses to the check-in feature in EventMobi and an access code will be automatically emailed to them. If you’re working with external staff, there’s no need to worry about data privacy. The access code only grants them access to the front end of the Check-in App, so your event data stays safe.

The EventMobi solution also includes an easy-to-use Badge Designer and cost-effective Pre-Printed Badge Ordering—offering yet another opportunity to reduce hardware costs and make badging the least stressful part of your event. With Pre-Printed Badges, you can place your order through the EventMobi platform, so all of your attendee data is automatically synced and ready to print. Simply select the number of badges you’d like, review your quote, and enter your address, and your laminated, ready-to-wear badges will arrive at your venue within 5 business days!

Recommended Resource: Are you looking for cost-effective, easier ways to build and manage your events? Watch 8 short videos to learn how to deliver events in any format that engage attendees and offer sponsors more value.

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Measure Your ROI Better by Tracking Attendance with an Event Check-in App

Accurately reporting on in-person events as a marketing and engagement channel is a challenge for planners. Registration software can’t tell you what happens onsite! But, by leveraging an easy-to-use check-in app with powerful analytics in the backend, you’ll get valuable details about the event attendee journey.

As attendees scan in and out of sessions, you’ll see where—and for how long—they chose to spend their time at your event. This is important for awarding CE credits and reporting on sponsored session ROI. This data will come in handy when you need to prove the value of your event to potential sponsors next year! Use it to highlight attendee demographics and report on engagement by measuring time spent in sessions.

BONUS: Use AI to Generate Reports with Your Check-in Data

Did you know AI can help you generate different types of reports based on your check-in data? Say you’re responsible for member education at your association and need to award CE credits. Instead of manually calculating time spent in sessions for every attendee, you can ask an AI tool like ChatGPT to tell you how long attendees spent in sessions so you can allocate credits accordingly. Check out the video from our VP of Product Marketing, Thorben Gosser, who breaks down how to do this step-by-step.

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.

Thorben Grosser demonstrates how you can use ChatGPT to bulk-calculate attendee time spent in sessions.

Create the Best Event Check-in Experience for Your Guests

What happens at check-in will set the tone for the rest of your event. Paper lists and expensive scanners will slow down the check-in process—not the best start for your attendees! EventMobi’s Event Check-in app will help you get your guests faster, save money on hardware, track session attendance, and measure event ROI. Plus, you can feed that data into an AI tool to get even more insights if you need to.

Interested in learning more about EventMobi’s Check-in App and onsite features? Book your personalized demo today!

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The post Get Your Guests in Faster with an Event Check-in App appeared first on EventMobi.

Best Practices for Event Check-In: Tips for Success

Natalie Campbell-Reid — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 15:00:00 +0000

We’ve heard it before, first impressions matter. But what does that mean for event planners? According to Forbes, you only have seven seconds to make a first impression. That’s it. In less than 10 seconds, your attendees have formed an opinion of your event. Where are attendees most likely to spend their first seven seconds at an event? The answer for most will be at your event check-in desk. They haven’t had a chance to experience the content, connections, and experiences you have designed for them, yet they are already forming an opinion of your event.

How you check in your attendees matters.

Imagine you arrive at an event with no clear check-in signage, disengaged staff hidden behind a desk, and a long lineup that doesn’t appear to be moving.

If the check-in process is clunky and chaotic, it will negatively impact the overall attendee experience and detract from the main event.

In this article, we’ll explain what tactics and event technology you can use to you can offer your guests a smooth check-in experience designed to minimize their time spent in line.

Cast yourself in the role of your guests at event check-in

When designing your event, it is essential to step out of the organizer role and put yourself in your attendees’ shoes. Imagine where they might travel from, how they will arrive at your event, and what that first interaction with your event will be. This mental exercise is foundational to creating a great attendee experience. It allows you to identify things that may feel obvious, but can easily be overlooked in the event design process.

For example, an attendee during winter is likely to arrive with many more layers than they would in warmer summer months. Consider how they would feel approaching a registration desk, where they receive a pass, swag bag, and welcome drink to juggle along with their other belongings. An event planner in this situation may decide to create comfort for guests by having a coat check facility ahead of the registration desk. Alternatively, they may decide to set up a conference program and swag bag collection point after the badge pick-up and coat check. These minor tweaks and considerations can significantly affect how your attendees feel entering your event.

How you greet attendees at registration is also essential and often overlooked. Consider standing to greet attendees instead of sitting behind the registration desk, creating a feeling of being welcomed into someone’s home.

Avoid long lineups at event check-in

Over 20% of visitors mentioned line-up times as their primary frustration when attending events (UFI, 2019). You may not be able to eliminate lines altogether, but with careful planning, you can reduce the pain. One way to do this is by offering a variety of ticket types:

“Recently, I organized an event with over 1,000 guests, and I wanted to build in contingencies to get eliminate long lines at the check-in desks. To do this, I staggered guest arrivals based on ticket types. First, we welcomed VVIPs, who were incentivized to come early with a free breakfast program including a keynote speaker to kick off the day. Next, we welcomed VIPs with access to an exclusive lounge with pre-event networking opportunities. After VIPs, general ticket holders were invited in. Later on, we had a specific entry time for after-lunch ticket holders attending afternoon-only workshops and keynote sessions.”

– Lori D’Agostino, President, Momento Events.

If alternative ticket types don’t work for your event, you can also ease the burden on the registration desk by having a welcome party the evening before your main event. Invite guests to start networking at your pre-event welcome party, and use this as an opportunity to check them in early.

If long lines are unavoidable for your event, consider how you can keep guests entertained while they wait. For example, at Comic-Con, organizers use this time to create an experience for their guests. Cosplay characters interact with guests waiting in line to keep them entertained and create unique, shareable moments ahead of the event. Take the entertainment out of the event hall or conference room and into the arrival area. Delight your guests by having a live string quartet play while your team (or sponsors) provide a welcome drink as they wait. Think about what makes sense for your event and what your attendees would most appreciate.

Pick the right event check-in app

The technology you use has a significant impact on the pace of your event check-in process. Spreadsheets and printed lists are time-consuming and can lead to long lines as registration staff does their best to locate names. One of the keys to avoiding long lineups is picking the right event check-in app. Event check-in apps are the perfect partner for any planner who wants to create an effortless check-in experience.

Using an event check-in app allows you to streamline your registration and check-in process by:

eliminating the need for printed spreadsheets
keeping the check-in desk free of laptops and clunky scanning hardware
making it easy to capture attendee and event data

Eventmobi’s event management software solution includes a lightning-fast check-in app that makes it easy to create the right guest arrivals experience. Event staff can use the app on any mobile device and scan attendees into your event by pointing the in-app camera at the QR code in their mobile event app profile or printed on their physical badge.

Conclusion

An attendee’s first impression of your event will likely be formed during their check-in experience. When long lines are inevitable, consider how you can keep them entertained and excited. Think about the event technology you can use to create an efficient, seamless check-in experience. Look for an event check-in app that will help speed up the process to ensure your attendees have the right experience the moment they walk through your venue doors.

Ready to create the right first impression at your next event?
Watch the EventMobi Product Tour to learn more about the event check-in app, plus access 7 other videos that will change how you plan your events forever!

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The post Best Practices for Event Check-In: Tips for Success appeared first on EventMobi.