Leveraging on GEVME for Event Management

GEVME was successfully implemented into IE Singapore business processes to manage all of the events they organise and promote throughout the year.

Background

International Enterprise (IE) Singapore is the government agency driving Singapore’s external economy. They have a global network of overseas centres in over 35 locations providing the necessary connections in many developed and emerging markets. They organise and promote about 350+ events in a year. These events include seminars and conferences with attendee numbers ranging from 30 – 400 as well as internal training workshops that they conduct for staff.

Challenges

IE required the platform to be integrated seamlessly into their business processes and legacy systems in place.

• Standardise the branding and event template of all events.
• Integration with legacy system to auto populate certain events.
• Integration with financial system and eNets to compile online transactions automatically.
• Event managers located globally required training in overseas centres.
• GEVME required to comply with Singapore’s stringent security standards before launch.

Solutions

GEVME provided a number of solutions out-of-the-box (OOTB) allowing many of IE’s requirements to be met without any development work.

Landing Pages

GEVME allowed IE to brand their event pages and have a consistent look and feel across their corporate website and GEVME event pages.

Integration with Corporate Portal

GEVME provided a responsive events calendar which was embedded into the corporate website to market the latest events available.

Responsive events calendar

User Roles and Workflow

GEVME’s user roles management allowed IE to customise the roles they required based on their business processes allowing different users to manage different aspects of the event.

Financial Integration

GEVME’s set of APIs allowed for the seamless integration with IE’s financial system and eNets payment gateway to do a daily compilation of all the transactions.

Simple and Intuitive UI

With event managers globally, GEVME’s intuitive UI allowed event managers to easily create and manage events with minimal training.

Advanced Reporting

GEVME advanced reporting provided the finance division with an overall report of all the transactions that have been done across all the events.

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Seamless check-in process helps the overall experience of guests

Introduction

2014 marked a year of change for the Supreme Court Singapore as the team looked to streamline processes and increase productivity while enhancing user experience. The first event of the year saw the Office of Public Affairs welcoming over 500 distinguished guests from the legal industry coming together to kick off the opening of the legal year.

Resolving the pain points, one by one, through technology

The team at GEVME worked closely with the client, who was clear and focused in their requirements specifications.

Pain Point Number 1 – Printing of Invitation Cards

Each group of guests were assigned a color code and the need to print unique QR codes associated with the guest classification and seat number for VVIP guests was a critical step prior to the event day. The team at GEVME developed a custom template based on the invitation card size provided by the client to do a mass export and printing of the QR Codes, guest names and seating classification onto the invitation cards.

Pain Point Number 2 – Last minute changes of seats

As the seating arrangements could not be confirmed until late in the process, flexibility was retained to change the seat number right up to the event day itself. Any updates of allocated seats were done via the database management module within GEVME, where each guest is assigned their own QR code.

The Result

Nearly 90% of guests were checked-in using at the wireless tablet kiosks with up to 60 guests checked-in during any 5-minute period at the peak. The maximum waiting time for guests with invitation cards was also reduced to under a minute as each device had the ability to register guests of all groups.

“The GEVME platform used in managing the RSVPs and invitations was very efficient and effective, contributing in an overall professional image for the organizing committee. It also contributes tremendously in terms of time and manpower savings, which helps in the management of RSVPs for more than 2,000 invitations, with an eventual turnout of more than 500 guests. The entire suite of services delivered is comprehensive from email invitations to eventual registration at the event,” said Charmain Lee, Senior Head (Office of Public Affairs) for Supreme Court Singapore. “I am very satisfied with the GEVME solution.”

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Integrated End-to-End Event Solution for Board of Investment (Mauritius)

Introduction

The Board of Investment (BOI) is the national investment promotion agency of the Government of Mauritius. It is the first point of contact for investors exploring business opportunities in Mauritius and the region, and Africa is one region where BOI is working closely to accompany investors looking at opportunities in Africa.

BOI was previously using an internal system for their events but realized that it does not fulfill their end-to-end event management requirements and started an evaluation of EMS vendors out there in the market.

Addressing Past Event Challenges

With a focus on quality, BOI (which is ISO 9001:2008 certified), the IT team at BOI wanted to address the event challenges faced in their past events:

1. Ease of registration for participants
2. Ease of data reporting for RSVP
3. Delivery of participants badges

Azagen, the IT Manager for BOI, who also drives their internal IT strategies and systems, started to evaluate a few other platforms, among them Cvent, EventBrite and GEVME. The ability to handle an integrated end-to-end event solution was key for him in his selection criteria, while offering users a simple learning curve.

GEVME was ultimately chosen as it offered the BOI team an integrated end-to-end event solution without the steep learning curve associated with other platforms.

Using Smart Audience Segmentation for Real-time reporting

The team at BOI had specific reporting requirements, and needed a quick turn-around time for reporting of the registration numbers on a daily basis. Using GEVME Smart List functionality, they pre-created approved registration list on a daily basis, so that the reporting officer can easily retrieve real-time reports for reporting back to Senior Management.

Audience Experience – RSVP with One-Click

As the conference is an RSVP event where the guest list is pre-defined, GEVME offered BOI an easy-to-use drag and drop email campaign builder, where with one-click, invitees can easily respond to the invite where the response is centrally captured onto the cloud-based platform. The emails sent are also personalized at both content and subject level.

BOI has enjoyed the experience and benefits provided by GEVME and has extended the subscription of GEVME until 2016.

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Using a flexible and reliable platform to satisfy Pico Art’s event management needs

Introduction

Pico Art was tasked by Autodesk to organize their Solution Day in Southeast Asia, primarily in Manila, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. With more than a thousand registration expected within each city, there is also a need to capture key data fields during the registration process. Thus, flexibility to accommodate various form fields based on attendee’s profile and response while providing a reliable, always-on platform is key to meeting the client’s requirements.

One Team

Distinguished guests from the legal industry were classified into 3 different categories, with assigned seating for the VVIP guests. This included luminaries from overseas, which makes management of the entire customer experience much more challenging, as seating arrangements can change right up to the night before the event.

The checking of guest names based on the invitation cards that they receive were against printed hardcopies, which takes time to browse through the hundreds of names manually. The fact that some guests forgot to bring their invitation cards added to the time taken, resulting in queues forming during the peak check-in period. This impacted the start timing of the event, as well as the overall event experience.

Resolving the pain points, one by one, through technology

The team at GEVME worked closely with the client, who was clear and focused in their requirements specifications.

Pain Point Number 1 – Printing of Invitation Cards

There are 3 color codes associated with the guests classification, and the need to print unique QR codes associated with the guest classification and seat number for VVIP guests was a critical step prior to the event day.

The team at GEVME developed a custom template based on the invitation card size provided by the client to do a mass export and printing of the QR Codes, guest names and seating classification onto the invitation cards.

Pain Point Number 2 – Last minute changes of seats

As the team had not printed the seat number on the invitation cards, flexibility was retained to change the seat number right up to the event day itself. Any updates of allocated seats were done via the database management module within GEVME, where the QR code is tied to the unique guest identification in the system.

Pain Point Number 3 – Snake queues

As the team foresee from last year’s experience the possibility of guests not bringing their invitation cards, an additional queue was set up for manual check-in. With the GEVME Access mobile app, it allows the guest registration officer to do a global search of the guest lists via a tablet, which in turn is inked to the database stored in the cloud.

In addition, three queues were set up based on the seating classification, with an additional queue for VVIP guest who are accessing from the car park. For guests with assigned seats, the seat numbers were dynamically pulled from the cloud and reflected on the tablet kiosks, which were wirelessly set up.

Zero physical cables were used throughout this set-up. In event where one queue is much longer than the other, the guests were ushered into the shorter queues to expedite the check-in process, since the database is centralized and synchronized across all devices.

“Great Service and Support provided by the GEVME Team”

“QR Codes, guest names and seating classification were printed enmass seamlessly onto the invitation cards.”

“The check-in was fast and seamless. Credit to the team for a great improvement this year.”

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An Event Management Platform Built From The Event Organizer’s Perspective

Introduction

Raven Chai, together with a group of passionate professional designers and student volunteers, founded User Experience Singapore (UXSG) in 2012. UXSG serves as a platform to facilitate conversations and exchange ideas among UX professionals, designers, developers and business owners within the industry. UXSG holds bi-monthly meet-ups and organized two UX conferences in 2013 and 2014 that attracted more than 250 professionals and experts from over 20 countries each year.

To get connected with the community, visit http://www.uxsg.org/ and join the discussions!

Designer turned event organizer: a steep learning curve

“I have been traveling and speaking in UX conferences in other countries but there weren’t any UX conferences in Singapore at the time.” Raven Chai told us when being asked about how the idea of the UXSG Conference came about. “We have a growing community that thrives on knowledge and connections, so I decided to take the plunge.

The first ever UXSG Conference was set to take place in 2013. As a newbie in the field,” Raven continued, “we would like to be on the safe side and chose a popular event ticketing platform, E.B. without going into what other options were available. We didn’t expect that this impulsive decision would lead to many pain points that I will mention later. The learning curve was steep.”

There is no “one size fits all” event-ticketing app

“Have you ever wondered why there are so many event ticketing apps and platforms out there? As an event organizer, how do you differentiate them? To me, the most popular is not always the best.” Raven went on to bring up the first problem he encountered in organizing UXSG 2013.

Pain Point 1

Over-simple registration forms with limited options

“We required an interactive registration form where attendees can choose from various options, from different workshops, to different cuisine choices for lunch,” he said. “This sounds simple but humans are fickle. Attendees changed their preferences at the last minute. Speakers changed workshops’ names. Restaurants reached maximum capacity of serving and stopped accepting meal orders. There were just so many permutations that the forms didn’t understand. Neither could we twist the rigid forms to work for us. They were oversimplified and thus inflexible.”

Pain Point 2

Lack of payment gateways and tax calculation in ticket prices

Raven became very energetic when he mentioned payment, emphasizing a few times that this pain point gave him so much trouble. “Since E.B. doesn’t cater to GST – which is essential for the government sector, I had to manually calculate the ticket price. Cheque as payment was not accepted and therefore handled manually. It involved hard work as 20% of my attendees were paying by cheque.

PayPal didn’t help much either when some of our attendees from Hong Kong and Indonesia couldn’t get the payment go through. Furthermore, for big organizations, it’s often not the ticket buyers who will attend. Ticket buyers could be HR or agencies. There was too much manual work and coordination just to get the ticket delivered to the attendees.”

Raven looked upset when he explained, “It was very bad because I didn’t have control over my financial accounts. I wasn’t sure how much I was earning or losing from the ticket selling. Even worse, it took me 3 weeks after the conference not doing any work, just to tally the paperwork and settle the accounts as there were so many discrepancies.”

“I would never want to experience all that again, ever.” He concluded before we moved on to how he found the solutions. “The ticketing app might be very well-known. It is well designed. It’s easy for attendees to use. Its pricing is cheap. But how would you feel wearing a pair of shoes that don’t fit? Pain.”

Hunting for the best event-ticketing platform

“We didn’t find the solutions immediately. After the conference, the bad experience kept me awake until 3am every day for three months,” Raven said, “I was thinking about backend management and scouting for better candidates.”

“We found out that despite the large number of players in the field of event ticketing, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable company for our needs. Most platforms are suited to simple and casual events”, he shared with us.

A fated meet-up with GEVME and the team

“While other [event] apps focus on attendee experience but forgot about the organizers, GEVME is built from an event organizer’s perspective. It makes life easier for us to bring the best experience to attendees,” a satisfied Raven Chai finally smiled.

Solution 1

The forms are highly customizable

User-friendly form builder

“You can create a form by simple drag-and-drop. It’s common sense and friendly to even non-tech users. Create your own fields, set criteria and the possibilities are limitless. Since we are also programmers and designers, it was pretty smooth for us to work around the features.

Logic added to forms

But even if you are unfamiliar with handling technology, there’s always ready help from the GEVME Team. They went the extra mile to help us customize a field,” Raven mentioned our CEO, Veemal Gungadin and our Creative Director, Jonathan Easton as his good friends. “They listened to our sometimes blunt feedback, assisted us relentlessly, and appreciated the chances to improve the product and user experience. They are the people who I can trust,” he added, “Compared to E.B. which is a faceless platform, the GEVME Team has passionate people who will always be there for you.” GEVME has recently launched GEVME Academy, which will further assist our customers in making the best use of the platform.

Read more about Forms in GEVME: https://www.gevme.com/l/support/forms/forms-in-gevme

Solution 2

Full-fledged payment gateways for seamless payment experience

Payment methods

“This is the best thing about GEVME,” Raven remarked. “The GST was accounted. The cheques were accepted. There are separate forms for buyers and attendees. I have nothing to complain. The payment processing was well thought through. GEVME is highly suitable for government events, high value ticket events and international events in terms of payment.”

Ticket report

At GEVME, customers can set up both online and offline payment methods. Online payments include PayPal and Credit Card. There are 6 payment gateways for Credit Card option. Offline methods include Cheque, Bank Transfer, and Onsite At the Event. Hence, everything was taken into consideration. Better yet, GEVME’s advanced reporting provided the finance division with an overall report of all the transactions that have been done during the event.

Read more about Money and Paid Events in GEVME:

https://www.gevme.com/l/support/money-paid-events/paid-events-gevme

A Happy Ending

Since 2014, UXSG has been using GEVME as their only event-ticketing platform for both regular meet-ups and annual conferences. Raven Chai has become our strategic partner and one of our speakers in GEVME Exchange 2016, an annual event where we connect event management and event marketing professionals.

We’ve done a short video showing how the UXSG team was delighted to use GEVME to provide a fabulous online and onsite registration experience to the attendees in UXSG Conference 2014.

Watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0AC4nA2nH4

Your Enterprise Event Management Software

About GEVME

GEVME is the cloud-based solution for your event marketing and management needs.

Simplify your organising processes by using key productivity tools available on a simple platform. Go through the different stages of event management with everything you need in one place.

Start event pages easily. Create a frictionless online registration experience. Run responsive email marketing campaigns. Make event onsite check-ins seamless. Get feedback to craft better events in the future.

From start to finish, GEVME makes event management easy.

Enhance the overall event planning and client experience.

Power your event experiences – anywhere, anytime.

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