There is something truly endearing about designing, printing and then handing out physical copies of your event schedule to your attendees. However, on the flipside, what is not so appealing is the fact that you have to reprint and rework these physical event schedules as the team either updates logistics or accounts for last-minute changes.
Attendees today are largely nonreciprocative. They come in with a low tolerance for friction and simply want the event to run as promised. Surely, your attendees understand and acknowledge that certain last-minute changes are unavoidable.
However, attendees today expect to be informed almost immediately. They want to know what is happening, where it is happening and whether it is worth their time and all within seconds of asking. A static schedule simply cannot do that job anymore and interactive event schedules are fast becoming the standard across conferences, trade shows, festivals and corporate summits.
The organizers who have made the switch are not looking back. If you are an event planner who is still on the fence about making the move, here are 10 reasons that should settle the matter once and for all.
1. Attendees Can Personalize Their Own Agenda with Interactive Schedules
One of the most persistent frustrations when you are still using a static event schedule is particularly pronounced when hosting a multi-track event. These are events or conferences with multiple adjacent sub-tracks and the need for meticulous managerial organization is greater than ever here.
Your employees have to physically sit down and brace themselves to cross-reference all of the sessions. The numbers do not look too pretty on paper. Following this, the team then has to connect these sessions with their corresponding speakers and time slots to figure out what the day looks like in overview.
An interactive schedule helps make this complicated affair much more linear and organized. It lets attendees filter their sessions by topic, speaker or track and then be able to build a personalized agenda in minutes. This eliminates the need to scan through sessions that do not concern them. This kind of personalization also puts less pressure on your event staff who otherwise would be on hot seats answering questions from confused and lost attendees around the venue.
2. Real-Time Updates Facilitated By Interactive Schedules Cut Confusion
As an event planner, think of everything that can go wrong in a day. Speakers cancel at the last minute and it turns out that the room is not well-equipped to support your speaker’s fancy presentation and even worse, your sessions are continually running over time and overlapping with one another. Now prepare for these hypothetical scenarios.
Once you have done this. Go over how you will communicate these important changes to your attendees. Will you station a staff member at the entrance to guide attendees you cannot identify in the first place? Or will you opt to build an interactive event schedule that will notify changes to your attendees with the click of a few buttons?
Unless you enjoy being in perpetual stress and apprehension, most event planners would opt for the latter. This alone is worth the switch because the static event schedule is a cascade of confused attendees, frustrated speakers and overwhelmed volunteers trying to redirect foot traffic manually. The ability to update on the fly gives organizers significantly more confidence going into event day, knowing that last-minute changes will not spiral into disaster on the floor.
3. You Can Collect Invaluable Data on Attendee Behavior
A printed schedule tells you nothing about what your attendees actually care about. On the other hand, an interactive schedule tells you quite a lot. Let me explain why this is so.
With modern interactive event schedules facilitated via a mobile event app, organizers can track things like which session was most added to attendees’ personal agendas or which speaker received the highest or lowest rating.
Which of the speakers generated the most clicks? In understanding this, you can potentially form longer-term associations with speakers most beloved by your audiences or choose other speakers along these lines.
Which of my time slots saw the highest dropout rate? This is a golden input to tweak your next event schedule for maximum productivity.
Data like this also makes your roundtable conversations with your sponsors a little less nerve-wracking. You can essentially put your finger on things and can show them exactly which sessions their target audience engaged with the most (and why they must continue funding you)
4. Sponsors Get Better Visibility with an Interactive Event Schedule
Speaking of sponsors, this leads us to discuss another increasingly important aspect of modern event management today: branding opportunities. To say that interactive event schedules improve your branding possibilities is an understatement. It helps revolutionize and maximize your branding efforts to its fullest capacity is the truth.
Static schedules simply cannot accommodate most of your shots at branding. But with interactive schedules, you can place your sponsors right at the top and clearly tagged. This makes sure that all of your attendees notice the sponsor as they browse through. Better visibility for your event sponsor means more stable funding and a good financial track record for your organization.
5. Networking Becomes Easier to Facilitate When the Schedule is Interactive
Most attendees will tell you that networking is key at any event. In fact, many vouch for the importance of networking just as much as showing up for the event itself. Therefore, to help your attendees prioritize networking, interactive schedules are an incredible tool to help integrate attendee profiles and find potential connections in advance. People browsing the agenda can also see who else has added a particular session to their agenda.
Some event platforms can even take this one step further by enabling in-app messaging or meeting requests directly from the schedule interface. When the interactive schedule itself doubles down as a networking facilitator, the event delivers much more value with less manual work.
6. Session Feedback Becomes Timely and Actionable
Most post-event surveys are plagued by this common issue: by the time your attendees fill them out, the details are fuzzy and the motivation is down the drain.
Interactive schedules can help fix this in simple yet impactful ways. It is capable of prompting attendees for session feedback immediately or shortly after a session ends. This is when the experience is fresh and the opinions are truly coming from attendees’ hearts and minds. For institutions running a university event management system, this kind of timely in-session feedback is particularly valuable because academic conferences often run multiple tracks simultaneously. The programming decisions for the next edition depend heavily on your knowing if a particular session worked well with your target audience.
7. Accessibility Improves Across the Board
A PDF uploaded to your event website is technically accessible but practically inconvenient for a large portion of your audience. Interactive schedules that are mobile-optimized and screen-reader friendly bring the program to attendees in a format that works for them, regardless of how they access technology.
For attendees with visual impairments, cognitive differences or language barriers, a well-designed interactive schedule can include translations, adjustable text sizes and audio compatibility. A university event management system in particular, needs to meet accessibility requirements that are often mandated at the institutional level. A purpose-built interactive schedule is far more likely to satisfy those requirements than a static PDF ever can.
8. You Reduce Printing Costs and Waste Significantly
The environmental and financial case for going digital with your schedule is straightforward. Large conferences spend thousands on printed programs that become outdated the moment a single session changes and end up in the recycling bin by the end of day one. For events with sustainability goals or corporate responsibility commitments, this is also a talking point worth including in your marketing. The best conference management software platforms are designed to replace paper-heavy workflows entirely.
9. The Interactive Schedule Stays Useful After the Event Ends
A printed program has a lifespan of probably 2 days. Maybe an additional day after the event. Then it lands in the bin.
An interactive schedule, if you optimize it right, will continue working for you even after your event or conference officially ends. Attendees who miss a session can catch up through the same interface they used during the event. For organizations running a university event management system, this is especially helpful because faculty, researchers and students often seek access to session recordings and papers after the conference.
10. An Interactive Event Schedule Signals That Your Organization Takes Events Seriously
When attendees open a well-designed interactive schedule that is fast, intuitive and keeps current throughout the event, it tells them something about the organization behind it. It says that the team running this event has invested in the attendee experience and considered what participants need.
Conversely, a confusing or outdated schedule, printed or digital, sends a different message entirely. An interactive schedule is often one of the first things attendees interact with, and first impressions at scale matter more than most organizers realize.
Make the Interactive Switch With the Right Platform
All of the above-mentioned benefits of embracing interactive event schedules are now easily accessible for event professionals. The good news is that, with the advent of sophisticated automation and human-powered semi-automation, event planners can gain access to all these features in a single platform.
With Dryfta’s event scheduling software, we’ve helped prestigious institutions and organizations like the British Society for Immunology and the University of Amsterdam host events with interactive schedules. Our end-to-end online event management platform gives organizers everything they need to build and manage interactive schedules.
Dryfta is complete with real-time updates, attendee agenda building, session feedback, speaker management and sponsor branding features all in one place. It functions equally well as a university event management system for academic conferences as well as a full-featured solution for large commercial summits. If you have been searching for the best conference management software to create interactive event schedules for your next event, Dryfta is worth taking a serious look at. Visit our website to see how it works and request a free demo today.