BestCities Global Forum 2020: Rethinking the Future of Events

“New game, old rules, brilliantly executed and moderated.” – Digital Attendee

About BestCities

Dedicated to excellence BestCities is an alliance of 12 cities that never settles for best when it comes to business events, they continuously push for better. The quality and reach of their global community and their open knowledge exchange, allows partners and clients to develop and offer experiences that make a more positive impact and leave a stronger and lasting legacy on the world. BestCities harnesses the power of collaboration and community to create positive impact through business events.

About the event

The BestCities Global Forum is the annual flagship event gathering industry thought-leaders, international associations and partner destinations under one roof. This year’s BestCities Global Forum 2020 aimed at ending the year on a high with a chance to knowledge-share, collaborate and network for the future.

Held from 17-19 November, this year’s BestCities Global Forum 2020 was on the topic of “Rethinking the Future of Events” which was aimed to inspire and motivate delegates as the world heads into the new year.

WiT Experience Week 2020

“Working with a tech partner is as much about the people as it is about the tech. Like us, GEVME is willing to push boundaries and try new stuff.“ -Yeoh Siew Hoon, Founder, WiT

About WiT

WiT is Asia’s leading digital travel media and events platform with content focused around how technology is changing travel and consumer behavior in the world’s fastest growing market. It is a fully integrated, multi-platform content provider for Asia’s travel technology, distribution and marketing sector, which includes the WiT Conferences, WiT News, WiT Weekly, WiT Virtual and WiT Podcasts.

About the event

Held from 28 September to 1 October 2020, the 15th edition of Web in Travel (WiT) Experience Week was the first travel hybrid event in Singapore. The first three days were fully virtual, while the last day was held at Marina Bay Sands’ new, state-of-the-art Hybrid Broadcast Studio with a live audience of 50 people. Delegates shared their ideas for the future of travel around four key themes: Rewind, Reboot, Rebuild, and Rewrite.

SFFxSWITCH 2019

 “Enhancing the overall event experience for
more than 60,000 attendees”

Introduction

About the event: 

SFF x SWITCH was a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) and the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH), consisting of a week of events and featuring various sideline activities centred around innovation in FinTech and deep technology. 

SFF x SWITCH featured various innovative technologies across five key sectors – FinTech, Urban Solutions and Sustainability, Health and Biomedical Sciences, Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering, and Digital Services – to prime business transformation. This integration served as an inspirational cross-industry platform for greater exchange and learning, deepening of technology capabilities, synergistic application of resources, and partnership development for commercialisation.

The inaugural event attracted more than 60,000 participants from 140 countries. The event also saw a record 569 speakers, close to 1,000 exhibitors and 41 international pavilions.

About the key organiser: 

The SingEx Group comprises four closely linked companies that collectively provide a comprehensive range of integrated solutions for venue management and consultancy, exhibition and conference concept development and organising services; and international trade event related ventures. The companies under the group are subsidiaries of SingEx Holdings which is wholly owned by Temasek Holdings, one of Singapore’s largest investment holding companies. 

Its events arm, SingEx Exhibitions, owns, develops and manages a series of new-to-market trade exhibitions and conferences in Singapore and key emerging markets. The events span across various industries including urban solutions, logistics, information technology, healthcare and commodities. 

Among the more than 20 new-to-market events produced are the Industrial Transformation ASIA-PACIFIC 2019 – A HANNOVER MESSE event, the Asian leg of the world’s leading trade show for industrial technology, Singapore FinTech Festival, the world’s largest of its kind; and CaREhab, a unique medical event that goes beyond the boundaries of just a medical consumables and equipment show to unite professionals in neurorehabilitation, geriatrics, paediatric rehabilitation, pain management, community rehabilitation, sports therapy, ground-breaking technology, home care and more. 

SingEx Venues specialises in the management of Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE) facilities and has been managing the Singapore EXPO Convention and Exhibition Centre since 1999, and its convention wing, MAX Atria, since 2012. The venues host more than 600 events and attract over six million visitors annually.

Goals

The GSI team together with our client the SingEx Group was working on meeting the following goals:

• Provide flawless online and onsite solutions for a prominent large-scale event,
• Track and analyse attendees during the event to improve the attendee experience
• Empower exhibitors to maximise event ROI and generate more leads

Solutions

• Seamless Registration. 

Our team set up an improved onsite solution for SFFxSWITCH 2019 to provide seamless registration for attendees. 

With the help of our new products we: 

• managed onsite operations for a multi-day event more efficiently,
• enhanced the attendees’ experience,
• gathered useful insights from physical experience for future events.
• Frictionless Check-in

To speed up the check-in process and make it smooth, we came up with an optimised onsite deployment plan. We set up more than 130 fully automated check-in kiosks, as well as assisted self check-ins, which resulted in a frictionless check-in process and reduced the waiting time for the attendees. The approach proved itself to be an efficient onsite check-in process for a large-scale event. 

• Real-time Dashboard

Helping organisers to keep track of onsite registration status at a large-scale event, we provided an onsite reporting & analytics tool to capture important event insights. The real-time dashboard displayed a visualised representation of delegate and attendee data.

• Lead Generation apps for Exhibitors

At the SFFxSWITCH 2019 event, we launched a suite of new lead generation apps for exhibitors to empower them to drive exhibition ROI. More than 165 exhibitors experienced our two-way business lead generation solutions: Leads Scan App and Showcase App. The apps helped to maximise event results by scanning visitors at the booths and capturing the details of visitors who scanned digital brochures.

• Doing away with paper brochures

Moving towards sustainability with the SFFxSWITCH organisers, we encouraged exhibitors to use our eco-friendly solution – Showcase App. On top of being a lead generation tool, this app eliminates the need for printed brochures and displays rich content directly to the attendee’s mobile phone screen.

Numbers:

• 60 000 attendees
• 140 countries from around the world
• 130+ check-in kiosks
• 8 seconds per check-in
• 45% of the attendees checked in on Day 1. 
• 165+ exhibitors maximised event ROI through using our lead generation apps

Cashless Token System for National Day Heartlands Celebration 2019

Background

The National Day Heartlands Celebration 2019 is a one day carnival organised at five heartlands across Singapore on Saturday, 10 August 2019. Singaporeans from all walks of life came together to enjoy family craft activities, interactive game booths, food stalls, exhibitions, and stage performances in these heartland celebrations.

Visitors to the carnival can purchase coupons to redeem food or participate in certain activities. These coupons can be purchased from ticketing counters located at different corners of the carnival. As part of the smart nation initiative, the Bishan Community Centre approached us to digitalise the entire process of coupon purchase and redemption for the celebration @ central.

Requirements

Online purchase for coupons

In the past, the only channel for the purchase of coupon was from the ticketing counter on site. For an event which expects 40,000 attendance, the counters are often overwhelmed with queues that dissuade visitors from making a purchase. Therefore, the organiser looks for a solution which will allow visitors to help themselves with the purchase of coupons by going online.

Walk-in purchase of coupons

While we encourage the online purchase of coupons, we also recognise the preference of some visitors to make payment in cash. So, besides having an option to purchase online, the organiser also wants to provide an avenue to allow visitors to walk in, queue and make payment for the eCoupons in cash.

Encouraging engagement to educational booths

Food, drinks and certain activities booths such as pony ride and drones are popular in nature. However, there are booths in the carnival which are educational in nature and they typically suffer in getting traffic. In order to encourage visitors to interact with this booth, the organiser wants to have a lucky draw campaign which visitors will be eligible to participate after collecting 8 stamps from the participating booths.

Solution

After evaluating the requirements from the organising committee, the GSI’s product team formulated a solution by making full use of our existing platform. The solution consists of 4 applications which are seamlessly integrated together through our GEVME platform to create a positive experience for all users.

myXP

An abbreviation for my experience, myXP is a web application which visitors can access on their mobile phone. Using the application, visitors can purchase, top-up and check the balance of eCoupons. Visitors can also check the number of stamps they have collected from different booths and be prompted when they are eligible for the carnival’s lucky draw.

eCoupon Point of Sales

In order to support cash payments, we also provided the organiser with a point of sales (POS) system. The volunteers who are manning the ticketing booths used the POS to collect and record cash payments for visitors. Visitors who visit the ticketing booth their eCoupons receive SMS containing a direct link to their myXP application.

To read the full case study, please fill up the form on the right.

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.