FreemanXP is an enabler for organisers to satisfy the needs of their audience. Now it has produced a new report to shed some light on what those needs might be.
Event experience agency FreemanXP creates content and conference programmes for events including the giant printing show Drupa in Germany; no small fry. In order to rationalise the process the agency has created what it calls an ‘experience design technique’ aimed at better motivating and engaging attendees at the events it designs.
FreemanXP is not an organiser itself, but works on client campaigns, rather than on individual events. This no doubt makes it easier to see the wood for the trees, and means the agency can offer some expert analysis on the way conference and event organisers have been engaging their audiences for several years.
An ever-expanding world of technology is pulling event attendees in countless different directions, making for complex and varied event ‘journeys’. This means attendees’ time is invaluable, their attention spread paper-thin and expectations are high.
It is no longer acceptable to be only good enough, and introducing delegates and attendees to the unexpected is now a requirement for any event programmer. Brand experiences must be more powerful, thought-provoking and engaging than ever before if your event is to keep up.
FreemanXP believes an organiser’s goals can be achieved by ensuring the audience has the right triggers in place for each level of a new framework it has created, one that coincidentally shares an ideology with the widely-used hierarchy of needs created by American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow.
The ultimate goal and pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid – which, it must be noted, relates to personal rather than professional needs – is that of reaching a self-actualising and meditative level. By contrast, in Freeman’s model and indeed the events industry, the top tier is attendee growth on a professional level, enabling delegates to share knowledge and information with peers back home, and in the wider market.
Going up
On their way up, the attendee will ascend through Freeman’s ordered list of five needs: guidance, giving them a navigated experience; value, giving them a relevant experience; connections, giving them a community experience; achievement, giving them a playful experience; and finally: growth, that memorable experience.
As to why the framework has significance now, Niru Desai, VP of strategy, international, at FreemanXP, says there is a lot of talk about ascertaining client needs through such means as observing big data, but that this may not be leading to solutions for organisers. She says there are so many tweets sent throughout an event’s lifecycle that the whole community-building experience can become rather mind-boggling.
Desai’s career includes a decade working on experiential marketing and strategy at George P Johnson, with previous stints on the corporate side and in strategy and planning roles with Prudential and accountancy firms.
Desai believes organisers need to listen to the few and start to react to them. “It helps them manage that big data in a small portion so that they have an actionable plan,” she says. And this is what she is trying to do with the new framework.
Listening to the chatter
“With the increase in social media being used as part of the communication platform, a lot of the work my team used to do was social media monitoring,” says Desai. “We would listen, engage and monitor, and over time at these events I started to trace a pattern. At the beginning of an event I noticed the tweets created by the audience had a certain tone; the same type of questions, were coming up.
“As the event went on, those needs began to change. I started mapping the social engagement journey from start to end. There seemed to be five clusters of conversations taking place. Where there was social media engagement and people were quite active in the conversation, it was also clear the needs of the attendees were changing as they got more involved in the event,” she says.
With this in mind, FreemanXP began tracking and depicting the audience’s requirements as they escalate throughout an event. If, however, you address valid needs, but at the wrong time, you could be throwing effort at event management without reward.
“Sometimes people would set up a competition, and later ask us how many people were tweeting about it. We told them nobody was – because the audience is still asking questions about where to catch the bus to the conference centre,”says Desai.
Every journey, even with events, must begin with the first footstep.
