The Creative Cycle

For the past three years, EventMobi has built itself around the needs and requirements of seasoned event professionals from across the industry. Corporate, association, and trade show planners among various others have been vital to the direction of the product and the success of the company providing valuable input to EventMobi every step of the way. Integrating our community into the development process not only creates a better conference app, it inspires new ideas and sets in motion the creative cycle.

It was exactly one year ago today that our team was truly inspired by an innovative client working in the incentive travel space. Though we are unable to name names, we’ll call her Karen. Tasked with creating an app for her client’s incentive trip, Karen approached EventMobi and various other mobile app companies to determine the best fit. Though incentive trips were not yet something we had much experience with, we were curious and wanted to learn more. Providing Karen with a quick training session and a free trial account, Karen created something truly amazing.

Using the features and functions already available in our Content Manager, Karen repurposed, reorganized, and customized her trial conference app to her needs. Karen didn’t have any programming background nor did she need any thanks to the easy-to-use platform. It was this curiosity and creativity that truly pushed our team to the next level.

Inspired by Karen’s creation, EventMobi CEO Bob Vaez organized EventMobi’s very own incentive trip up into Canadian cottage country, EventMobi Cottage-Palooza. For those who have not yet visited, we highly recommend Canada’s cottage country. National Geographic recently named it the #1 summer vacation destination in the world. Not that we’re biased or anything like that.

Creating pre-event challenges, surveys, and personalized activity calendars, Cottage-Palooza offered a chance for the EventMobi team to get out of the office, generate new ideas, and get fresh perspectives.

The week-long Cottage-Palooza included big meetings to discuss the future of EventMobi and focused meetings to design new features and release timelines. Using our incentive app, we opened up the Content Manager during each meeting and added new details and action items to each schedule item. All of our notes were published automatically to the app so everyone had access to the results of our meeting immediately. Of course, due to the nature or our meeting, we had our app password-protected and encrypted.

It was during these meetings that we reflected on client feature requests and studied interesting use-cases like Karen’s in order to improve our platform. By the end of the week, we had our timelines organized and our action items set. Using the Audience Response System (ARS), we collected everyone’s input on closing day points of discussion. It only took a few minutes to summarize, create, and upload an agenda for the final day.

One of our big takeaways from the week came from the actions of Karen and many of our other past clients. They saw our platform and saw opportunity; that’s when they started getting creative.

With various customization options available, planners have the ability to change the entire color scheme of the event app, select different icons to use, even upload there own, along with the ability to manage various other graphics and logos throughout the app. It’s also now possible change the entire navigation of an event app simply by reorganizing pages in the Content Manager. It’s because of this customizability that Karen was able to get creative and make the app exactly how she wanted it.

Thanks to Karen’s creativity, our team has made it our goal to inspire others to get creative and push the bounds of our platform. Thanks to our trip last summer along with follow-up meetings throughout the fall and winter, new features are getting rolled out over the next few months that will generate new ideas to better the event experience.

Most recently with Custom Fields, it’s now possible to add new sections to attendee, speaker, and company profiles for very specific pieces of information. For example, incentive trip apps now have a private space for personal flight details for each individual. But that’s just one example, Custom Fields allows for even more possibilities…we just haven’t found them all yet.

Thanks to Karen’s willingness to dive in and try something new, she kicked off a cycle of creativity between EventMobi and its clients that is not going to stop anytime soon. The relationship between EventMobi and Karen demonstrates the importance of truly listening to the other party’s problem as well as constantly challenging the status quo. Only by allowing our clients to drive the direction of the product and providing them with the ability to be creative can both parties succeed in their goals.

The next time you’re working with clients or suppliers, don’t be afraid to propose the ultimate vision, the outrageous, or the impossible. You never know what crazy idea could kick off a new creative cycle.

Want to get inspired? New features are coming up so join us for one of our weekly webinars to see the latest; maybe there’s a new feature that will change the way you think about mobile conference apps.