'The World's Leading Financial Supplier'
'The World's Leading Financial Supplier' are one of the world's largest professional services firms. Each year they hold a number of events and conferences for their employees and clients.
With over 3,000 attending some of the events, organisation is a significant task. To help reduce this task, they allow attendees to pre‑register and manage their events online.
Getme were approached by 'The World's Leading Financial Supplier' and one of their media agencies Cypher Media to provide an event management system for a set of particularly complex events taking place over the summer.
Managing complex events
Events are organized at different venues and take place over several days. Each day's timetable is tailored to each individual attendee based on their position, expertise and the choices they make when registering.
Events and the complex matrix of choices that determine an attendee's timetables are created online by administrators using a simple web interface. Several time saving features such as the ability to duplicate events, days and timetables help to speed up the process.
Each venue has limited capacity, as attendees register and manage their timetables, administrators are kept informed of changes via a rich set of reports, allowing them to quickly identify problems such as sessions that are close to maximum capacity. This allows popular sessions to be moved to new locations that have greater capacities. Attendee schedules and timetables are instantly updated when changes are made to an event.
Intelligent timetables
When attendees register for an event they provide information about their event role, company position, and expertise. Based on this information the attendee's choices when managing their events are tailored to their needs.
Attendee registration details can affect their event(s) in several ways, including:
- The number of, and the particular events an attendee may attend.
- The number of days an attendee should attend an event, (this is also factored into accommodation).
- The timetables for each day.
- The sessions an attendee should or may attend in their timetables.
Though the number of possibilities for an attendee is very large, everything during the registration process is automated to provide an intelligent and clear interface that presents the attendee with only relevant choices.
If an attendee needs to switch events, their existing information and choices are automatically transferred for them.
Preparing for an event
When preparing for the start of an event, administrators download and review a set of reports from the website's administration area. These reports include information about who is attending an event, the accommodation and dietary requirements of attendees, a list of attendees for each session at an event, and so on.
These reports are vital in allowing the administrators to both prepare for and run an event. Typically the reports are provided in (X)HTML on a web page, or in Excel (.xls) as a download. However, to allow administrators to provide each attendee with a printed version of their unique timetable, the Air system is required to output a single PDF file containing a bookmarked list of attendees.
With a single PDF file all the timetables for an event can be printed in one go.
Using the PDF format saves the administrators time when printing the attendee timetables which had previously been done using individual files. Extensive print control (including DPI settings) is also available through the PDF format.
Conclusion
'The World's Leading Financial Supplier' have used the Air system to successfully run several events now, and the feedback about the system from both administrators and attendees is very positive.
In particular, support for outputting attendee timetables in PDF format has greatly reduced the workload for administrators and has allowed them to take registrations for an event right up until the last day (previously this was seven days).
'The World's Leading Financial Supplier' summer school conference
