Results of Omyconf! surveys 2012

Moscow, 2013 omyconf.com +7 (495) 565-30-54 support@omyconf.ru
Results of the surveys for organizers
and participants of business events
Main aspects of organizing business
events
2012, Omyconf!

CONTENTS page
1. INTRODUCTION 3
2. ENTRY 3
3. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “MAIN ASPECTS OF ORGANIZING
BUSINESS EVENTS” 4
4. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “EVALUATION OF OMYCONF! BY EVENT ORGANIZERS” 10
5. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “EVALUATION OF OMYCONF! BY PARTICIPANTS” 12
6. CONTACTS 14
7. ABOUT THE COMPANY OMYCONF! 14
Содержание

Omyconf! is the service for managing the whole life cycle of business events,
from event planning to its realization and communication with participants.
INTRODUCTION
In 2012 Omyconf! interrogated organizers and participants of business events in order to
understand their main requirements at the stages of planning, executing, managing and
attending events and in order to understand how we can meet these requirements with the
help of our service.
Observing development of the global event industry we are interested in evaluating the
current situation and trends of the event industry in Russia and the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), interested if Russian organizers and participants are ready to use
high technologies and innovations to hold events on a whole new - digital and mobile – level,
which is the standard of the nearest future.
We hope this report will be useful and help you better understand your own processes, show
new ideas, inspire to changes in order to comply the market standards.
ENTRY
We conducted several surveys in 2012:
1) “Main aspects of organizing business events”, respondents are event organizers in Russia,
CIS, and abroad;
2) “Evaluation of Omyconf! by organizers”, respondents are Omyconf! clients
3) “Evaluation of Omyconf! by participants”, respondents are participants who used the
service at the events where it was launched
Results of those surveys were gathered into the single report to get the full picture.
Respondents of the surveys:
Professional conference organizers (PCO) – 59%
Internal organizers (non-professional organizers, who organize events for marketing,
educational, other purpose), 2-4 events per year – 24%
Internal organizers, 1-2 events per year– 18%
3
Organizers in
Russia and CIS
>5 events per year
> 100 event
organizers
> 700 participants
Event organizers

Why do professionals attend your events?
The main goals of business events are getting new knowledge, sharing experience, and
search of new business opportunities.
Lately it becomes more and more important for participants to build effective business
communication, find new contacts and business opportunities at events (business aspect) or
people attend events for just meeting colleagues and sharing ones’ experience (social
aspect).
Our respondents have confirmed importance of business and social aspects:
It is quite difficult to build effective communication at the event.
In the first place, there are multiple layers: audience (offline participants and online
participants of hybrid events), speakers, exponents of exhibition, sponsors and partners,
organizers. Building communication between all these groups is a complicated task.
In the second place, infrastructure of the venue does not always allow using modern
technologies.
In the third place, organizers need to firstly solve the issues of event promotion and logistics
and only after that they think about satisfying participants’ requirements.
That was why we wanted to understand the main difficulties of organizers.
QUESTION:
I. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “MAIN ASPECTS OF ORGANIZING
BUSINESS EVENTS”
4

What are the main difficulties you face when organizing events?
We offered the following options:
 high competition
 high demands of participants for ROI (return of investments)
 participants’ engagement into event activities
 promotion
 working with the content
53% of organizers mentioned engagement as the most difficult process.
The main reason for it, as we see it, is the old-fashioned event format (speakers-listeners),
absence or lack of interactivity and edutainment, distraction like mobile devices which never
go dark, and sometimes just lack of knowledge of the audience.
But what is even more difficult for event organizers is engagement before and after the
event, as the period of a business event is limited by couple of days (in average 1-2 days),
though work with the audience starts long before the event and must continue after it ends.
In average:
 70% of event organizers use social networking
 40% event organizers use their own social-professional networking (usually internal event
organizers or PCOs which organize events in certain business domains like marketing, bio-
medical events).
QUESTIONS:
5
How do you engage participants before and after the event?QUESTIONS:
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Engagement participants'
ROI
High
competition
Leads
generation
Agenda Other

 More and more event organizers (47%) start showing participants list on the conference
website, as they understand that it may influence still hesitating professionals to make a
decision to buy the event ticket.
 Some organizers mentioned usage of special offers, invitation of famous guests,
preliminary and post surveys.
Unfortunately there is no much to do on the conference website after the event is over,
except for downloading presentations (if organizers post presentations there).
Communication is moving to social network and the event is left in the past, limited by just
couple of days.
We offered event organizers to evaluate the idea of “event prolongation” after the
event is over and thus the idea of getting additional revenue.
6
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Before
After

 43% of event organizers would sell it
 price of the access would average 20-40% from the ticket price
 53% of event organizers would provide it for free
It is interesting that all foreign respondents would sell the access, while in Russia event
organizers are not ready to use such channels for additional revenue yet. That might be due
to certain cultural and economical peculiarities of the Russian market.
As to hybrid events (an event which combines a "live" in-person event with a "virtual"
online component), notwithstanding the fact that they reveal new possibilities for every
party involved into the event, they are still not so popular – just 30% of respondents
organize hybrid events now.
Besides engagement of remote participants is a greater challenge than engagement of “live”
attendees.
Usually organizers provide remote participants with possibilities to communicate in Twitter
and access presentations:
7
Imagine you could give an access to the event content created during the
event (presentations, attendees list and network, polls results, companies
profiles, etc) to those professionals who could not attend your conference.
How would you provide this “delayed participation”?
QUESTION:
What opportunities do you offer to your remote participants?QUESTION:
34%
33%
33%
Engagement at hybrid events
Access to
presentations
Twitter
Live stream

At the end we asked organizers to evaluate importance of the following processes of event
preparation and execution (from 1 to 5 where 5 is very important).
8
Evaluate importance of the below components of event organization processQUESTION:
Evidently the most important issue is event promotion, logistics (registration,
ticketing) and content management - 70-75% respondents mentioned it as very
important.
We were surprised to see that event activity statistics (before, during, after the event)
has been marked 4.
With that organizers pay extra attention to (though not always use it):
 networking for participants - 61%
 mobile access – 48%
 social media – 41%
These figures correspond to participants requirements :
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
1
2
3
4
5

Do you use conference mobile applications?
47% of event organizers has already used some mobile apps for conferences.
• high price – 53%
• “non-savvy” audience – 23%
• poor infrastructure – 17%
• non-usability/ complexity of the service - 7%
 Number of participants
 Budget performance
 Profitability
 Awareness, media coverage
 Participants feedback
 Participants satisfaction (their success stories)
 Number of partners
 Trend analysis in comparison to previous years
 Number of returned and new clients
 Quality of presentations
QUESTION:
9
What can stop you from using a mobile app?QUESTION:
What KPIs define a successful event?QUESTION:

What service did you use at the event?
Business networking – 100%
System of registration and printing badges at the venue – 30%
As it turned out not all event organizers are ready for automatization and optimization of
registration and content management processes: only few uses professional registration
systems, while the majority uses standard programs like excel and register attendees
manually.
Still interesting that content management and communication with participants (in the below
diagram it is Mailing system) were marked as the most useful features.
QUESTION:
10
Which Omyconf! features were the most useful?QUESTION:
II. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “EVALUATION OF OMYCONF! BY
EVENT ORGANIZERS”
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Content
management
Mailingsystem Statistics Interactivity
tools
Feedback All

Which factors influenced your decision to use Omyconf?
All respondents estimated the service as an innovative technology (business networking
system and engagement).
Importance of having a full-featured platform was mentioned by 60% of our clients. Most of
organizers (70%) use disparate systems for every particular task at the stages of planning,
execution and management of events. So it’s quite obvious that centralized management is
important as opens new unique possibilities.
QUESTION:
11
In general how are you satisfied with the service?QUESTION:
60%
40%
Satisfactionby Omyconf!
5
4
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
Innovative gimmick Full-featured
platform
Networking&
interactivityfor
participants
Price

Which Omyconf! features were the most useful?QUESTION:
12
III. RESULTS OF THE SURVEY “EVALUATION OF OMYCONF! BY
PARTICIPANTS”
Participants got the most from:
 business match-making and networking system – 62%,
 correspondence and sharing vCards - 44%;
 working with the agenda – 70%
 mobile access – 58%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
Agenda
Filters of participants and their profiles
Messages and vCard exchange
Interactivity:questions, polls
Feedback
Map of the event
Mobile access
Remindersand notifications
Media materials
75% of participants start networking
BEFORE the event
89,5% creates their own agenda BEFORE
the event

How well do you feel each of the following attributes describes the product?
More than 50% of participants marked the service as accessible, easy to use, interesting
gimmick.
Full-featured and Essential were marked as neutral.
QUESTION:
13
How easy is Omyconf! in usage?QUESTION:
Friendliness of the service was marked as 4.
Participants gave us great feedback, many interesting ideas, some of which have been
already realized up till now and some are in plans.
80% of respondents noticed that they would like to use a similar service at all events they
attend, as it helps them plan and manage their time, maximize their networking efforts and
reach their business goals.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Agree
Neutral
Don't agree

Moscow, 2013 omyconf.com +7 (495) 565-30-54 support@omyconf.ru 14
IV. ABOUT THE COMPANY OMYCONF!
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!
We hope that this report was useful and interesting to you.
Should you have questions or comments, we will be glad to hear them.
CONTACT
Anna Barysheva
Partnership manager
office: +7 495 565 30 54 ext. 104
abarysheva@omyconf.com
Omyconf!
Omyconf is the first Russian service for managing the whole life cycle of business events –
from planning to execution and communication with participants. We use only the most
popular event-technologies.
We already helped more than 70 conferences in Russia, CIS and Europe, in different
business domains: marketing, IT, finances, innovations, HR, transport & logistics,
investment, others.
Learn more about the service: http://omyconf.com
The highest index ААА in the rating of
Russian young innovative tech companies
“Russian Startup Rating 2012”
TOP 50 Russian startups
* by RBTH , PWC and Digital October Moscow

Results of Omyconf! surveys 2012

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Results of Omyconf! surveys 2012