A Smarter Way to Increase Meeting and Event Participation

Looking to ramp up event or meeting attendance and engagement? Hear first-hand how a one-man team was able to successfully launch a text messaging campaign and a new mobile web app for his annual event! Learn how you can leverage this technology before, during, and after events for simpler communication and resource accessibility.

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[Brittany Lawson] (0:04)
Thanks for joining everybody. My name is Brittany Lawson. I'm with Engage by Cell. I have been with the company for a couple of years now, but previously I was working in adult education. I don't know if I told you that, Larry. Yeah, I did that for, oh, I don't know, five years or so. Loved it. I was on the recruiting and admissions side of things for a trade school. So I know a lot of what all the adult education folks deal with and the challenges that they face and also how rewarding it can be. And engagement and communication is so, so key when it comes to that audience. So I'm excited to dive in and talk with you further about how the conference went and prepping those teachers and folks that work with the audience.

[Larry Covino] (0:53)
Definitely.

[Brittany Lawson] (0:56)
And, Larry, can you give a little quick introduction about where you're from and who you're with?

[Larry Covino] (1:02)
Sure. Hi, Larry Camino. I am the executive director for the Connecticut Association for Adult and Continuing Education, and we are a nonprofit that supports adult ed programs throughout the state, including literacy volunteer programs. We also work collaboratively with our community colleges and with our workforce development boards. And basically, we are the experts in serving and educating adults within our community. I could go on and on, Brittany, so.

[Brittany Lawson] (1:39)
I know there's a lot that you do. So a little bit of background about Engage by Cell and how we got connected with Larry. Engage Bicell has been in business for 17 plus years or so. We work in a variety of different industries. You'd be surprised. Started in the cultural space, but now we have a really heavy hand in workforce development and adult education, youth education.
Really, the sky's the limit on how we can help people. Just as long as you're looking to engage with folks, we're there to help with the mobile side of things. So we met Larry.
Oh, not last year. Maybe it was the year before at COAB in Nashville. It's a really cool conference that travels to a different city every year. It's adult education focused. It's a nationwide conference.
And we had the pleasure of meeting Larry and hit it off. He was looking for some mobile tools for his conferences. And that's how things got started. So, yeah. The two tools that I believe intrigued Larry the most and are just the most popular in general with workforce development and education are text messaging and our mobile web apps. So on this slide here, you can see a little example of the web app that Larry built. And he's very proud of it, which he should be. It's really great. It's got a lot of resources in it. And it's simple. Easy to use. He used it in a variety of ways, and we'll dive into that. But the way that our text messaging works is we get you set up with your 10-digit phone number. You build your list, and you're off to the races. So you can start alerting folks.
We have found that there's a 98% open rate. People read these texts within two minutes or so of receiving them. It's super convenient.
You can have targeted lists so that you're reaching out to the specific people that requested specific information. People can self-enroll. You can upload a list, as I mentioned.
And then that mobile web app is really cool because you're sharing QR codes or URL links to get people to this information. So they don't have to download an app, which we'll dive into. That is a barrier that Larry found, and we hear that from many clients. But building this tool is really great. It's drag-and-drop, super easy. You can have all kinds of information in it and then share it in real time. So excited to show you guys what Larry built. So what we'll do here is go ahead and test out some texting. And through this, you'll also have access to an example of a mobile web app. So this would be great if you all can go ahead and pull out your phones. And I'll do this with you too. Scan this QR code with your camera app. It's going to pop up a little bubble, which populates your text message. So all you have to do is hit send. So you're sending the word demo webinar. I guess it's two words, demo webinar to 56512. You hit send, and if you did it right, you'll get an automatic reply. And I got my automatic reply here. Okay. Yeah, if any of you are having any problems, just go ahead and type in the chat. But it's super easy to use. All right. Larry, let's hear from you a little bit about CASE.

[Larry Covino] (5:24)
Sure. So we are a nonprofit organization, again, as I said earlier, supporting adult learners throughout the state of Connecticut. Each year, we interact with approximately 30,000 students.
We have 52 programs that are members of CASE, and we have just over 1,200 teachers and staff as part of our membership. This was the 44th year of our conference. As you can see, their 44th annual conference
We were the first in the country when COVID hit to move our conference. Unfortunately, schools, you know, let out literally about two weeks before our conference was scheduled to run. We pivoted to a virtual conference in about two weeks. So we've been going nonstop for 44 years. The majority of our adult staff and teachers are approximately 70 and older. Many of them are retired teachers. Many of them are part-time folks who have retired from full-time and are working part-time with us. And we love it. They bring with them a wealth of knowledge that they can then utilize for our adult learners. We use the app for so many different things. I mean, I can go on and talk and talk and talk with regards to it. We did text messaging. We didn't do as much as we had hoped, and I'll talk further on here, about what we learned from utilizing it all. But just the web app in and of itself was phenomenal. And with it, we reached more people than we ever have in the past for our conference. And I think if you want to go, Brittany, to the next slide. Yeah. So when we talk about primary, before this, we used printed materials. We would gather all of our pages for our conference booklet. We would put it all together, and then we would send it to a printer. It took anywhere from four to six weeks to get them printed. We never were sure how many we'd have printed, so we always overestimated, which always cost us additional money. And once it went to the printer, we were locked in with things. If we had to make changes, it was very difficult for us to do that. One of the great things about utilizing Engage by Cell was I was changing things on the fly. We don't have a lot of changes, but we had one morning, I was contacted by a presenter who wasn't able to make it. I had somebody in the wings that was going to present. I was able to get that information out right away to all of our conference participants to let them know about the changes. So one, you know, we're talking about the cost. Two, we're talking about the flexibility to reach out to people.
When folks scan the QR code. So I was getting that QR code out every week starting. Our conference this year was February 13th, 14th, I think, middle of February.

[Brittany Lawson] (8:41)
Right, March 13th or 14th, yeah.

[Larry Covino] (8:43)
Yeah, March, yep. I started sending out the QR code for people to start following in mid-February. And that got the word out. It was a marketing tool to get it out for people. Once we had all the information regarding our keynote presenter, our workshop conferences, we were able to get that out. So that acts as kind of like an enticement for folks. Now they're registering because they can see, oh, I want to do that. Oh, I want to hear this person speak. And we also were able to do some text messaging with folks prior to the conference, getting them excited. Again, I didn't utilize that as much as I could. But we'll talk later about some of the things I learned in this and some of the things we're looking forward to for next year. As far as the budget goes, I felt that it definitely was worth it for what we were doing. And the other thing that I didn't see in any of the slides, Brittany, but I want to mention is when I was – so I created pretty much everything that was in there. I am no tech guru whatsoever, but it was so easy to drag and drop. It was like working in – it is working in work.
So it was very, very easy. When I needed help, the help feature that was on there was answered within seconds. It could be Brittany. It could be one of the other folks. But their support was there from the very beginning right past the end when I reached out for this. And the analytics feature, I was just in the reporters, and I wanted to look at some of the analytics just to refresh my memory. And I didn't realize that I could see how many people actually visited each and every single page that was created, which now I'll utilize that information for next year in either modifying pages that weren't as frequently visited as we had hoped and increase those pages that were visited, even for our exhibitors. So I know who went to which exhibitor's page so that I can look at that. And if there was a particular design on that page, I can encourage folks for next year to do that same type of thing. So I can go on and on, Brittany. You've got to cut me off. We can move on to – let's see. Customization and control. Again, going back to the support that we got, it was great. Those buttons that you see on our main page, when you got there, I did not create them.
Those are our pictures. I gave them pictures. And I think in an hour or so, the Engage by Cell folks said, you know, what do you think of this design? Because I had lines like what you see in front of you here on the PowerPoint, click on that one that would take you. They created those fancy, nice-looking buttons for me. So again, there was always that support behind the scenes that I think was huge. Yes, the real-time editing I was doing. I had a couple links that were wrong. Went right in. Somebody notified me. I went right in and changed it. Yes, increased engagement. More people were using the app than what we see with the booklets in the past. Again, text messaging, I used it. I didn't use it to its full extent. We'll explore that next year. Sponsorship, selling ad space. We learned from that what's the most effective. We're looking to expand that and definitely cost-effective.

[Brittany Lawson] (12:35)
Yeah. To your point on the mobile web app, the drag and drop, it is so easy. You really don't have to have any tech experience. And honestly, it's fun once you get the hang of it, which doesn't take long. It's pretty cool to build stuff in there. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And I don't know if we had the feature when you started building your mobile web app, but now we're integrated with Canva, which personally I love because I'm a big Canva girl.

[Larry Covino] (13:02)
I am as well. I am as well. That's great to know going forward. I cannot tell you how many of our programs are utilizing Canva now. So that'll be great for next year. But yeah, it was so easy to build out those things. And you're right about once I started doing it, I lost track of time because it is it was fun for me. And it was just pulling everything in there, just watching it grow. I love the fact that the pages I was working on, I could turn off so that other people couldn't see them. But the pages that were ready to go were turned on so folks could start visiting.

[Brittany Lawson] (13:40)
I love that on off feature. I mean, especially if you maybe have a slot where you're kind of in between on speakers or you're in between on an activity for like a meeting that you're running, or you're in a big annual meeting, you can just turn that whole page off or maybe even a section of that page. Keep working it. And when you're ready and you've made your final decision, go live. And then yeah, and then use that text message to share it out. Hey, big announcement. We've got a new speaker or we're going to have a really cool event. Here's the link. Check it out so you can be prepared. So, yeah, that feature is cool.

[Larry Covino] (14:17)
Yep. Yep. Yeah, we did. We didn't do early bird marketing, but we did marketing and promotions for folks getting the information out.

We honor adult learners and adult ed professionals every year and getting that information out. And then watching on the other side of things, watching our registrations grow after we put out things like that, because now people are saying, oh, my colleague. Oh, I know that person that's getting honored. I want to make sure I'm there on that particular day. And so that that also was a key piece. And again, this was our first year utilizing.

So we're learning about additional promotion and marketing efforts for next year of sending detailed instructions. Oh, my God. It was so easy. You know, click on this QR code. You're good. You're going to you're going to get a text message or you're going to get linked automatically. Some folks didn't want to use their phones, though. The majority of people that access our app did it on a cell phone, but there were some utilizing the URL. And folks, it was just so easy. It was so easy to get in. I think in another slide, there's an example of what I sent out to people. You know, we had a video.

Thank you. Yep. So you can see this was one of the flyers that we got that I got.

And I put that together. The one on the left was put together by Engage by Cell. So they did that for us. The one on the right was mine. You see a little less creative design, but it's fine. It got the point. Then what we did is add our registration table. We had we had this design on the right. We had both of them there for folks and they were encouraged right then. Did you get our app? No. Oh, scan right now. Get the app. That way you'll know everything that's going on. And we had, I believe, somewhere in the neighborhood of between 70 and 80 percent of our folks who attended were on the app. And we had thousands of folks that were interacting with our app over the time period. And again, it was just it was so easy to build. It was so easy to utilize. And for me, I'm a big no paper guy. So every year at the end of the conference, we had all these programs that we spent all this money on that were left over. And we throw them all out here. I've got all this. I have access now to all the folks. We never got as many photos uploaded from our conference as we did utilizing this. So when you get a chance to look at our page, you scroll down and there's a spot, you know, share your photos. And so we had people we had. I don't I don't know how many because I lost track going through them all. But we had so many people utilizing and sharing photos. We had so many people be evaluation. We we asked for an overall conference evaluation. We asked for individual workshop evaluations. Folks were able to do it right then and there at the end of their workshop. They were able to go in and provide evaluations because I take those evaluations. I craft them. I send them all to our presenters because they love that feedback. But it was right here. Click on that button right on the home page. And you're there. Want to learn more about our keynote speaker? That's him. Ryan Parker. I'll give him a plug. Click on that button. And all right. Ryan bio pops up.

It links to his website's pop up. It's all right there. It was so easy. The schedule was one of the biggest things that we was utilized as well as a map of where the workshop rooms were. We had a floor layout of the hotel for folks to utilize. And that was one of the highest pages that was visited by folks. But I looked through it and find one page that was not visited by people. So, you know, again, the analytics behind it are incredible.

[Brittany Lawson] (18:35)
Yeah, your numbers turned out really good on how many people, you know, attendees versus actual visitors to the app. But you mentioned to earlier about QR codes and how easy it is to scan. We know it's easy and we're familiar with tech and everything. And thanks to COVID, there's not a lot of things that we can thank COVID for. But one is adapting with technology a little bit easier because we were kind of forced to. Did you find that, you know, the feedback you were getting from folks on accessing the app through QR code? Like, what was the feedback that you were getting?

[Larry Covino] (19:11)
Overwhelmingly positive. So each morning at the start of our conference. I would get up, make a little announcement in making sure everybody was able to get on and I'd be like, hey, I'm going to be in the back of the room. If you have any issues with the mobile app, come and see me. Zero. Not one person had any issues with it. So, yeah, the QR code just made it so simple. Again, we had the URL available as well. But the QR code just made it so easy. And then within the mobile app, there were other QR codes to get folks. We saw a significant increase in our social media. Followings as well during and after the conference because we were able to link all of that for folks. So, you know, again, that's part of our organization marketing that benefited us as well.

[Brittany Lawson] (20:06)
Great. So during the event, and we touched on a lot of this already, you utilized a lot. But there are some things, too, that, you know, we'll touch on that you think you might do for next year.
But we also plugged in a few other things because we work with Engaged by Cell works with, like I said, a variety of different industries. And some of these other things are used a lot, like scavenger hunt, for example. That's pretty popular. There's a big county festival that is held in California, and they used us for the first time last summer. And they had a scavenger hunt sponsored by a big health care group that just wanted to see people get their steps in. And they used text messaging to do this fun scavenger hunt. They're getting their texts. They're getting their steps in, but also having some fun. And then, in the end, it led them to the health care provider's booth to get more information on how they can stay healthy and get a little hand sanitizer and stuff. So you could use that for conferences. You can include your vendors. Say, hey, vendors, if you want to be involved in the scavenger hunt and get people to your booth, pay a little extra whatever, and you're in the scavenger hunt. But, I mean, the sky's the limit on how you can use this stuff. So I'll let you speak a little bit, Larry, on what you think were the best ways that you used it during your event.

[Larry Covino] (21:26)
So the scavenger hunt is definitely something that we're going to market to our exhibitors for next year. Because, like you said, it'll help drive folks to their booths, especially highlighting our new exhibitors. Every year we bring in new exhibitors, and this is going to be a way that we're going to try to highlight them and drive people to interact with them. We did have a message board. We did have the, we had a link to every workshop. Well, not every workshop. Every presenter who wished to share materials had their own Google site where they uploaded materials. And then there was a link in the mobile app directly to those files where folks were able to then review the PowerPoints that were being utilized, as well as download any presentation materials that they wanted. Again, you know, the sharing of the photos, I think that was huge. Because now, as I market our conference for next year, and I'm always putting things on social media throughout the year, I can just pull from those photos so I can have different things throughout the year. And I don't have to worry, I wasn't running around like a crazy person, taking pictures throughout the whole thing, or other folks. We had just people who wanted to share and some of them are silly and some of them, they're great, there's a great variety. So it just, it just made everything so easy. We are going to look to reach out to local businesses and try to get them for next year to promote their business. Folks, you know, ours is a two-day conference, so that night, it's a Thursday, Friday conference, Thursday night, people go out into the surrounding area.
We're down along the shore in Connecticut in Mystic. And so, folks go out to the restaurants, well, we're going to reach out to the restaurants next year, and we're going to say, hey, you know, give us 10% off and give us a couple hundred bucks and we'll put your ad in there for local dining opportunities. And so again, that adds to the fundraising that we have as an organization, which pays my salary, so that's nice. So there's a lot of ideas, there's a lot of ideas here, and I'm looking forward to already getting ready to start playing with it for next year.

[Brittany Lawson] (24:06)
Yeah, that actually reminds me too, my husband just got back from a huge conference in Colorado. And before his conference and during, he was getting invites to all these different events, a lot of, like, exhibitor events that they would host in the evening, and it would be at some, like, local bar or restaurant or something. Yeah, help to get people out in the community, especially if you're going to a new spot where you've never been to that city before, and you don't know what to do with your time when conference hours are done.

It's nice to be able to just alert everybody, hey, you're invited to this event, and it's going to be over here. Doing that through text or just having, you know, all that information on the web app is really great, so those people don't have to do too much crazy research. Post-event, there's a lot of different things that you can do post-event, but I know one of the huge things for you was the feedback and evaluations and stuff, right?

[Larry Covino] (25:02)
Yes, we found it much more effective. So, in the past, we had a couple of tables in the hallway, kind of where our exhibitors were, and we had a volunteer that was stationed there with four or five iPads, and we would encourage people to come up and, you know, stand with those iPads and do their evaluations. And we didn't get the participation that we always wanted.

Here, with the feature right on the mobile app, it was right there at their fingertips, and I sent out reminders in the two weeks. We left it open for two weeks following our event, and I sent out reminders encouraging folks, you know, if you didn't go in and do an evaluation, please do so, and people were doing that. And again, the evaluations, we utilized those in planning for next year, so that was great to have.

We got dozens of folks that volunteered to support next year's conference through that as well, because we always ask in the overall evaluation, you know, are you interested in participating with us as a volunteer next year? We got quite a few. So that was great as well.

And again, you know, I'll look at more messaging in the future. One of the things I definitely learned is I can't do it all by myself. I like building it, and because I had, I don't know, Brittany, I had at least two or three months to build it, and, you know, now when we start going forward for next year, I'll have even more time to build it out.

Now, that's not a big deal. That's fun. I want to keep that kind of to myself.

But as far as having admins in there who can help me with the text messaging, because another part of my role is I'm, you know, the conference runaround crazy person, the two days at a conference, so I don't always have the time to be sending out text messages. I wasn't good about pre-programming them in there, which you can do, so I'll also be doing that next year. Like some of the marketing stuff will be pre-programmed to go out to people automatically.

You know, there's always that fine line. I don't want to inundate them with stuff, but I also want to highlight certain things, and I think it'll also be a tool that we can use with our exhibitors to highlight, especially our new exhibitors for next year. So the wheel's already turning.

I'm excited about ideas for next year that'll help increase our conference.

[Brittany Lawson] (27:37)
You were running around a lot, which, you know, is part of your job, and you can, of course, you can text from your computer. You can log into our platform there, but we have a mobile-friendly version, too, so maybe next year we get that loaded up on your phone just in case there's something that you need to send out quick, especially in, like, emergency situations or something. It's nice to have that, so you can just select everybody and send out that quick text from your mobile phone because you don't have time to run back to your computer and send that.

So, yeah, that's definitely pretty nice, and everybody should have just received a text, too, with an example of, like, a quick survey. So it's just a thank you text, thanks for attending. We'd love your input.

This is kind of similar to what Larry would have sent, you know, getting some evaluations from folks. Feedback is key so that you know what to do better next year and what worked this year. So that leads us to changes.

So, yeah, I know one of the big things you mentioned was having a little bit of extra help, too, with admins, and for most of our clients, we've got unlimited admins. So you can go in and get as much help as you want, and Engage by Cell is there to help, too, of course.

[Larry Covino] (28:54)
Yes, you guys were a huge help. Again, just the help feature that was on the site as I was building the website. Anytime I got stuck, one, it's very intuitive, so I'm not afraid to click on stuff.

You really can't delete anything or lose anything that you were working on. So it was very easy for me to kind of play around with some stuff when I had questions, learning, you know, which format of an image worked best, playing around with that. But once you get the hang of it, once I got the hang of linking videos, that took a little bit.

But again, with the help feature, there was somebody always right there. And it wasn't a chatbot. It was, like I said, a lot of times it was Brittany or one of our coworkers who were right there being, hey, Larry, what can I help you with?

And if we didn't figure out, there were a couple of times when we jumped on a Zoom call or a phone call, and you all walked me through it. So the support definitely was there.

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