LEAP Summit: Improving attendee experience with Viber and SMS

Challenge

The LEAP Summit team needed to help attendees navigate the summit’s five stages and 90 speaking events. To do this, they needed to reach participants from 115 countries on their mobile phones, quickly and reliably. It was challenging to keep attendees informed of event schedule updates, including time or speaker changes, or give them an opportunity to explore the event program in depth. This placed strain on event staff, who were overloaded with providing basic event information.

Part of the challenge was that attendee engagement over the official app had dropped off over the years. Since no reminders were sent outside of the app, event-goers would miss invitations to workshops, parties, and awards ceremonies.

LEAP needed a communication channel that was familiar and actively used by the students and young professionals who attend the Summit so that notifications about event start times and other important details would be delivered and read.

Solution

Infobip provided LEAP Summit with a flexible and secure communications solution that helped them directly engage attendees using Viber and SMS.

LEAP Summit attendees could now receive all information about the summit ahead of time, directly on their mobile devices. To receive notifications over Viber or SMS, event attendees would simply opt-in during summit registration and choose their preferred communication channels. When Viber users weren’t connected to the internet, messages would still reach them over SMS failover.

With an out-of-the-box solution like Infobip’s, the LEAP Summit team was able to use the solution immediately with no training required. Infobip’s intuitive web-based interface enabled the team to quickly and easily build scheduled campaigns and provide crucial event information.

Attendees would receive a welcome message on the first day of the event, followed by announcements and endorsements from the summit partner, Bolt.

The LEAP Summit team can also receive actionable insights and analytics to monitor campaign engagement in real time. Thanks to detailed reporting, the LEAP Summit team could easily track campaign engagement, delivery rates, and even message seen statuses. The option to schedule campaigns in advance also helped with managing the teams, as well as attendee engagement.

Result

After implementing Infobip’s solution, LEAP Summit is now able to directly communicate with visitors.

Infobip’s solution helps LEAP automatically segment attendee data, which simplifies identifying which channels are available to use for communication. In addition to this, failover with SMS guarantees that messages get delivered to attendees without internet access. All this helps the event organizational team maintain focus on building engaging event communication.

Campaigns can be managed quickly and efficiently, producing better results and higher levels of engagement.

This year, more than a quarter of attendees (27%) opened the agendas shared over Viber and SMS, compared to previous years when agendas were shared only by email.

This resulted in nearly 50% fewer questions directed at staff during the event, freeing up volunteers and team members to focus on improving the event experience for everyone.