Mike Bushman is the CTO of RainFocus and the driving force behind the event marketing platform's technology. With 20-plus years of software experience, Mike brings a passion for architecting solutions and a wealth of knowledge on distributed architecture, building-block components, and cloud computing.
Events are an integral part of our society – from the concerts and community functions we attend to industry conferences and work meetings. In the corporate space, whether B2C or B2B, events are used by companies and marketers as a tactic to engage with potential and current customers and to harvest additional data that drives personalization for future touchpoints.
While the value of events for driving new leads and engaging customers is indisputable, there are a lot of details that go into ensuring a successful event, including making sure it’s an equitable experience for all attendees. One area of corporate event planning that is often overlooked is accessibility. Marketers and corporate event planners often struggle with this due to the lack of accommodations that are readily available through venues and event tech resources.
Anyone struggling with language barriers, hearing or visual impairments, or wanting to be a silent participant at large events is faced with an additional layer of challenges, and event marketers have been experimenting with innovative techniques for decades on how to increase engagement and ensure that every attendee at corporate events feels seen, heard, and valued. As we continue to witness advancements in technology, accessibility is increasing, and event marketers can lean on AI to increase and enhance their accessibility options.
Voice-to-text is useful for a variety of purposes and can exponentially increase accessibility at events of all sizes. Most notably, the technology can increase event efficiency for anyone who struggles with hearing impairments, wants to type faster, or lives with other learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Attending events with a technology that can assist with transcribing notes, reports, conversations, or highlights from an event is a great way for attendees to remember and use what they’ve learned, and these options make that easier to do and increase the speed and efficiency of which that can be done.
For the most part, people can speak faster than they type. This makes hands-free options for attendees a great option to boost engagement and participation in panels, breakout sessions, surveys, and help with registration, all of which garner deeper insights and data for marketers to use at future events. Working to increase personalization, efficiency, speed, and engagement at events is a primary goal for event marketers, and integrating voice-to-text options allows for more accurate data for them to utilize in the future.
The return and rise of in-person events continue to introduce event marketers to new hurdles they didn’t encounter during the hybrid and virtual days. Because of the increasing demand for in-person events, many attendees will be traveling far and wide to secure their spot and with this brings in a variety of preferred languages. Larger events especially draw in worldwide crowds, which is excellent for networking and diversity of thought, but creates a need for real-time language translations for attendees.
This expands beyond just paper translations as well. If sessions are held in one language, through AI capabilities, attendees are able to listen in their preferred language, increasing the return they get from participation. Another option for language translation is for surveys, both on-site and post-event. When attendees can provide detailed feedback and participate in discussion boards, sessions, activities, etc., event marketers can garner deeper insights and learn more about what attendees are looking for at corporate events – including when they did well, and where they missed the mark.
Whether it’s an intimate and exclusive event or one with thousands of attendees, event audiences crave an experience that is catered to their preferences. This can seem challenging to do at scale, but that’s where AI can have a big impact. An AI co-pilot can know or inquire about the attendee’s interests, role, and industry, and automatically generate a schedule catered to the attendee. Event attendees want to streamline the panels, sessions, breakouts, and workshops they join. With a plethora of options at every event, an AI co-pilot comes in handy to ensure that everyone’s schedule aligns with their personal interests and development, while also keeping their preferences private. For event marketers, this benefit is essential for planning future events to have the most accurate picture of where people plan to be during a certain point at the event and when to schedule certain sessions to generate the greatest turnouts. This will not only help event marketers plan an event that sticks with and delivers what attendees want but also help them level set with their executive team and ensure they meet their event KPIs.
Events provide unparalleled data and touchpoints that are essential to marketers and companies, but there’s still room for improvement especially when it comes to accessibility. Ensuring that every attendee can participate to their fullest capabilities, coupled with a seamless, personalized experience will undoubtedly create a successful event. Event marketers need to anticipate the needs of all attendees and setting up AI to enhance accessibility features for attendees is one way to foster a more welcoming environment.
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