As director of meetings and exhibits for the Institute of Food Technologists, Jean Heis is focused on providing a positive experience for both the buyers and exhibitors that attend the association’s annual conference and trade show. At the 2016 event in July in Chicago, the institute became the first group to use a new contactless data collection system known as Eventbit.
Offered by Experient, the system uses tiny battery-operated beacons that are mounted on every guest badge. As guests move around the event, the beacons automatically transmit data about each person’s locations and dwell times, making the data-capture effortless from the guest’s perspective. The “reading” of data is done either by existing lead retrieval devices, which pick up the beacon information even if the badge is not scanned, or by small boxes that can be placed anywhere at the event.
At the expo, Heis used the system to understand how more than 23,500 attendees interacted with the 1,221 exhibitors, how much time they spent in the 110 education sessions, and how much time they spent at sponsor activations. “Our booth traffic and our aisle traffic is much higher than we realized,” she said. “We had some exhibitors that had dwell-time average of 20 minutes, which is great news for us because that makes us feel like our attendees and exhibitors are having real conversations.”
Heis said the organization also learned valuable information about its education sessions, such as which speakers kept attendees in the room from start to finish. Not only will the institute use this data internally to drive decisions on future layouts and marketing, it’s also sharing it. Exhibitors can view the analytics dashboard to understand the demographics of their booth visitors and dwell time, and attendees will receive an email that includes contact information for exhibitors they visited and the amount of time they spent in sessions.
“We really want to create a data warehouse and to map this behavior back to the attendee record,” Heis said. “So then we can market the show to the individual level. For example, [telling attendees] ‘Here are similar exhibitors you saw last year that you’ll see this year’ to encourage people to register early.”
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