Once upon an engaged experience.
What would it take for you to add an app to your phone, take selfies with strangers, and post hashtags on social media? What if you won a prize? Saw your name on a leader board? Played alongside your coworkers?
I ask because we recently wrapped our second annual RQUG Connection Challenge where we encouraged our customers to do all these things!
You may recall a recent post covering how we use Design Thinking to plan each year’s conference, which is undoubtedly the biggest thing we do each year as a marketing team. Now it's finished for another year and we’ve entered the blessed month in which we do not mutter the acronym, but I wanted to share about the RQUG Connection Challenge for two reasons.
It’s my project and I like it.
I find it to be a great tool that delivers an engaged event experience while also creating unique sponsorship opportunities...making it a win-win.
First, let me give you some basics. We use Scavify (not an ad, just a lovely tool) to manage our experience. It’s an inexpensive, web-based software that allows you to develop a variety of tasks (We call them challenges because branding is important!), assign points, and track activity on a leaderboard. You can enable social sharing, public photo galleries, and even participant-uploaded videos. It is integrated with all the major social channels and will add a hashtag by default, which makes it ripe for sponsorships.
However, despite being a software our audience is not always “techy.” In fact, if you were to poll them, I think you’d find a number of our customers who really miss typewriters or long for the days of DOS-based systems (RIP AS400). So, imagine asking these friends to add an app to their phone, create credentials, and engage with an interface that has them do things like scan a QR code or post a groupie with hashtags on Instagram. Yeah...it’s not always going to be an easy win.
This is why it’s important to develop a strategy for event experiences that include outliers. Do I manage the whole project to them? No. Do I make sure I have a route for inclusion? You betcha.
For this particular example, we planned a series of non-app-related activities that highlighted features of our sponsor’s mission. We created a game, ordered give-aways, and developed signage – all in the name of connecting our members and challenging them to engage!
At the end of the conference, we awarded prizes to top-participants and tracked the results for our own reporting. Over one-third of the conference attendees downloaded the app and completed at least one task. Over 12,000 tasks were completed by the entire group, and we received over 50 photos to use in social media and marketing. Plus, we are still seeing results in our social channels from the use of our app and sponsor hashtags. That feels like a win, for sure!
Here are some photos of the app and non-app challenge elements: