Event stakeholders: who they are and what they need

Event stakeholders are the people and organisations whose work or interests depend on how an event goes. At a conference or trade show, the main groups are the organiser, the attendees, the sponsors and exhibitors, the speakers, and the service partners, such as caterers, booth builders, logistics companies and technology providers. This article looks at four of them in detail: the organiser, attendees, sponsors and exhibitors, and service partners.

They play a crucial role in event success. Understanding their behaviour, expectations, and demands contributes to organising fluid and glitch-free events. As an event organiser, you must know that satisfying the other stakeholders is a one-off chance, making it extremely difficult to plan circumstances that can lead to disaster or ultimate event success.

Let’s take a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities for event industry stakeholders.

Customers/Clients (Event organisers)

Professional event organisers face major problems: increased costs, overall complexity, and risks. These elements are caused by fragmentation and the incompatibility of software tools they use to run their business.

run.events internal data indicates that, on average, event organisers use six different tools and countless spreadsheets to manage just one conference. This situation leads to high licensing, maintenance, and operational costs. Since those tools need access to the same set of data, data migration between multiple tools often causes errors - leading to additional financial losses and customer dissatisfaction.

5 major setbacks for event organisers

• Too much time and money are spent on running and maintaining different tools
• More personnel needed to operate different systems
• Introduction of different software tools requires complex data migration, which carries the potential risks of data loss or even personal customer data breaches
• Data migration between multiple tools often causes errors
• Spreadsheets are used to manage areas that aren’t covered by available software tools

5 benefits of using run.events for event organisers

• Manage their entire business over multiple years and conferences
• Engage in long-term relationship management with sponsors, exhibitors, service partners, and customers
• Increase customer engagement and business network expansion in between conferences
• Manage all aspects of a single event or conference (planning, marketing, sales, management, and follow-up)
• Manage all stakeholders within a single conference (attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, service partners, and speakers)

Professional event and conference organisers try to reduce licensing and operational costs by limiting the number of tools and their complexity. These tools tackle challenges and provide solutions, such as covering sales aspects, while others tackle ticketing and invoices. In contrast, others are focused on content and agenda or digital streaming. However, these tools don’t enable conference organisers to manage their business in their entirety (e.g., the capacity to manage long-term relations with exhibitors, customers, and service partners) or to carry out budgetary planning and execution and financial and resource planning.

Attendees

Attendees comprise the largest stakeholder group addressing many challenges and opportunities. It’s not unknown that attendees often are the loudest in criticising as unsatisfactory their digital experience (i.e., web, app, digital content) at most events and especially conferences. Such digital set-ups often use different systems for conference registration and tickets and, on the other side, completely different systems for handling agendas, sessions, sponsors, and interactions. In addition, they are often impacted by mistakes during data migration between systems, reducing user satisfaction and conference loyalty.

4 major setbacks for attendees

• Difficult business network expansion and management. The business contacts established at one conference remain in the ecosystem of just that conference, making it later very challenging for them to transfer their context to other business networking tools.
• Attendees maintain many apps, logins, and identities for different conferences, so materials from one conference stay blocked within its respective app or web interface.
• Attendees suffer from a ‘zoom fatigue’ – disinterest in the ever-growing number of digital events and reduced interest in the digital events they attend. Networking opportunities at digital events in their current state are almost non-existent.

run.events improve attendees’ experience by offering an easy-to-use mobile app interface with multi-year access to event or conference materials.

3 benefits of using run.events for attendees

• One account, one experience for the conferences they attend, and one access point to conference materials across multiple years
• Easy-to-build and easy-to-manage business networks and contacts over years and conference
• Intuitive mobile app experience available on all platforms (iOS, Android)

The run.events mobile app pays special attention to seamless conference registration, data security, and an easy-to-use interface to remedy the dissatisfaction of attendees with the digital experience.

How to migrate between event platforms? Learn what are the crucial mistakes affecting user satisfaction and loyalty.

Sponsors/Exhibitors

Sponsors/Exhibitors are often considered the main stakeholders for the event organisers. It’s a common understanding that the expo area is one of the most important elements of the conference, and it defines the focus of sponsors/exhibitors in lead generation. It is sufficient to say that sponsors and exhibitors face numerous challenges and opportunities at events and conferences, but many of them can be solved by run.events platform. But let’s first identify the major challenges.

3 major setbacks for sponsors/exhibitors

• There is an inability to track leads over multiple years and conferences. With each conference, the sponsor experience has to start from the very beginning, making it difficult to track and analyse existing and new leads, along with their behaviours and interests.
• Sponsors and exhibitors suffer the most by introducing the new digital-only events, where their presence and offerings are reduced to a website with chat functionalities. These limitations exclude their main networking tools, such as casual conversations, product demos, on-booth events, and attendee giveaways.
• Disconnected lead generation at hybrid events, where digital and in-person leads don’t end up in the same database, makes it difficult for sponsors to track and analyse leads across companies, industries, and interests.

Here are the most important contributing factors to using the run.events platform as a sponsor/exhibitor.

5 benefits of using run.events for sponsors/exhibitors

• Centralised communications, which includes all deadlines and tasks, with event organisers within the sponsor area.
• A self-service area where sponsors and exhibitors can upload their visuals and booth materials.
• A lead management area, where leads are gathered together with their notes and context, regardless of whether they come face-to-face, virtually, or through the web or mobile apps.
• Lead analytics and insights providing lead behaviours and lead industries, interests, and geographies.
• Enhanced attendee engagement through various gamification features, such as giveaways and leaderboards, both in person and at virtual events.

Service partners

Service partners, such as caterers, booth builders, logistics services, and tech partners, are the stakeholders of event organisers, sponsors, and exhibitors. In general, service partners are more or less invisible to attendees, but their challenges and opportunities are acknowledged inside the event industry. Any miscommunication between conference organisers, sponsors/exhibitors, and service partners will be easily noticeable by attendees through the glitches inside the supply chain, which will result in poor service quality.

Service partners face these major challenges before and during events and conferences.

2 major setbacks for service partners

• Complicated order management manifests itself as organisers, sponsors, and exhibitors use various communication channels to provide orders or explain their wishes. Systematising orders, tracking tasks, and due dates and deadlines become the major challenges for service partners.
• All service partners, especially those that aren’t bound to venues, lack visibility. In general, they demand better presentations from the event or conference organisers.

This is where run.events offers a major advantage to service partners.

The benefit of using run.events for service partners

• Service provider marketplace (in development), represented in the form of a catalogue containing all service partners, with descriptions of service offers, capacity, and geographical territories where they can provide services. In terms of finding last-minute solutions for event and conference organisers, run.events provide easy ways to find it while increasing much-needed service partner visibility.

Service partners are thus particularly interested in optimising and improving communications and planning with organisers on the one side and sponsors and exhibitors on the other.

Conclusion

Event industry long-term experience of run.events creators became our solution’s foundation stone. Combined with our learnings and incorporated into one solution, the outcome is an event management platform that provides continuous access to the decision-making processes to solve challenges and opportunities. Therefore, event industry stakeholders will always have continued access in case of any major event change, allowing them to fix issues more efficiently and maintain healthy, long-term relationships while creating the next opportunities.