Episode 7 | The Event Technology Had Other Plans

You know what? Your event is not bad because you didn't do gamification. It's bad if you don't make a good strategy and plan for gamification.

Right? Like, step back.

It's okay to do scaled-down versions of tech that meets your needs and what you need to do versus taking on more than you can handle.

Hey everyone, I'm Jen Santos and this is Mayhem and Method where event pros tell the real story of what happened and what it reveals about how events actually work. Hi and welcome back to another episode of Mayhem and Method. And if you're hearing some background noise, just know that that symbol for putting on headphones is apparently the international sign of let's go out and break up the sidewalk with a jackhammer. So apologize for the background noise. We will do our best to get it out, but you're probably going to hear something throughout the podcast. So, having said that, I am here today with a very special guest, Vinnu Deshetty, and she is the founder of Event ROI Coach. And Vinnu, I'm so excited to be able to sit down with you for the first time today. Welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really excited about this conversation. And I gotta say, the jackhammer reminds me of my days in New York. It kind of feels like home.

Well, I'm glad it does to you.

Honestly, being in Salvador, Brazil, it does for me too, but I was really hoping that they weren't going to do it before the podcast.

What is one of your favorite ways to use AI in your job if you use it?

Oh my gosh, I'm so dependent. I use it in so many different ways and it's constantly evolving too. One of the things that I do, so I teach a class with PCMA about data analytics, event measurement and data analytics. One of the things that I've loved to have been able to do is take some of the assignments, the homework that people have submitted in, and begin to evaluate what are people struggling with, what do they get, what can I improve this course on. Doing that analysis using different AI tools, keeping it anonymous, keeping it safe, following my guardrails. But being able to take all of these assignments, all of these students, and really getting some informative insights in how I can better improve what I'm doing for them, as well as, you know, be able to see where I'm hitting the mark, if I'm not, and what can we do to improve it.

Yeah, that is so cool. That's so really, really—

it really—

I mean, AI really has changed the game in so many ways.

And every time I ask the question, I get a different answer. I'm like, oh, that's a really good idea.

Right.

So what I love about doing this podcast is I get to learn so much from so many different, really smart people. It's just a lot of fun to do.

And there's just so many different ways, right? There's almost the only wrong way is putting personal information in or information you shouldn't be in. But otherwise, have fun with it. See what you can do. A lot of times I do a lot of independent work and I need a partner in crime.

And sometimes— Totally. Totally. I know I work alone. I've got teams like with my clients and stuff, but a lot of times like my own stuff, I'm doing it all by myself and I'm like, tell me if this is a really stupid idea, you know? And AI is hard for that because they think we're all geniuses.

But if you can, if you push it hard enough, it will actually give you the god's honest truth. You just have to be willing to kind of push it and not accept it at face value.

Yeah.

I think they figured out your jackhammer's all gone.

Yes.

Now you just cursed us.

Oh no.

See, we shall see.

So, okay, so let's kind of dig into the heart of the conversation now.

And so what I'd love to have you do is just tell me about one of your on-site mayhem stories, a disaster story where something went sideways on-site, and then just kind of spend a couple of minutes recapping that.

And then what we'll do is we'll talk about—

I like to call it, we'll say what happened before what happened happened, because we all know every time something goes sideways on site, it's not— it's generally not because we did anything wrong, right? It's because something happened 18 steps upstream that led to this condition. And then, like, these are the things that potentially I could have done differently, that the client could have done differently, that we just didn't see coming, whatever the case might be.

You know, it's no blame, no shame.

We're not throwing anybody under a bus.

But I think we can all learn so much from having these conversations.

So what would you like to share with me today, Vinnu?

Well, I learned so much out of failures.

I learned more through that. And, you know, in the technology world, tech is human too, right?

Yep, totally is.

It's fallible.

Things happen, things break, and there's a lot of dependencies. And especially in the mobile app arena, right? You go on site, you have this mobile app, you're dependent on it for the program because we don't print programs anymore. We don't do schedules, which is great for the environment. We do connections. Everything is in that mobile app. And so everyone from the attendee to the exhibitor to vendors, they're all counting on that.

So you get on site and you expect it to work, but all it takes is for the Wi-Fi to go out, a company to— a server to be attacked.

I've had different things play out in different places with different vendors, right? And it's no one's fault. It happens, right? But I think what's really important is just to kind of understand what is the contingency plan.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I don't have an app that's going to work on site.

What do I do?

How do I communicate what the schedule is?

Yeah.

Where speakers are supposed to be.

And that's I think that's a hard one to solve on site when you've got 100 other things to do. You've got a coffee break about to go on, you've got a keynote about to launch, and you've got 3 concurrent sessions about to launch, whatever it may be, right? The last thing you're thinking about is, oh my gosh, how do I not print but print a schedule for people to be able to know where they're going?

Right.

Yeah, that's— no, totally. And I mean, I think the way that I've always solved that in the past is because I work on like these giant mega events, right? And so it's always kind of like, okay, we have to assume that the Wi-Fi is going to go down at some point or it's going to be a dead zone.

For example, expo floors are famous for being dead zones.

I remember one of my original clients, he was like, Jen, human bodies are water.

Wi-Fi doesn't travel well through water. And so a congested expo floor, almost no matter how hard you try, is going to have poor internet. You have international visitors and they're traveling between their hotel and the venue and they don't necessarily have a phone plan because you don't want to pay for one.

Right.

And it's gotten a lot easier, but the technology hasn't always been there. And so suddenly you have these people. So it's kind of like the vendors I work with, these are larger events and we understand that importance and we have the budget for it, probably even more importantly. So it's like, okay, I have to have an app that's going to work in offline mode.

Yeah, exactly.

Or, you know, even like the idea of a lot of times the mobile app is the last thing we purchase. It's the last thing we think about. It's because in the chronology of the timeline of what we're planning, it kind of is, right? But imagine if you had— if you know who your vendor is and ahead of time when you're doing site visits, right? Which I know is hard when you're planning 3 to 5 years out, right? But to keep some of those things in mind, adding that in your checklist of your site visits, like, okay, I'm putting my trade show in the basement, this 10 floors down. What's the Wi-Fi situation? What's our backup plan? But I think just thinking those things through is helpful. What is not helpful is just sitting around blaming the vendor and the Wi-Fi. That doesn't solve anything, right? What's the solution?

Yep. Yeah.

And I've got a lot of these clients I work with, they even run their own Wi-Fi, right? They're like, okay, we're bringing in our team weeks in advance and we're running our own fiber.

And they do that, right? I mean, it's wild to watch some of these larger shows do all that. But even then, you end up—

so it's kind of like a show I just finished up with, it's kind of like, okay, so what we're gonna have to do is we're still going to have to bring in additional hotspots for certain areas on the show floor. On peak days our problem wasn't actually the mobile app, our problem was our scanners weren't syncing and we had things reliant on those scanners staying up to date. And so it's kind of like, even again, best laid plans, right? We tried, we tried and it still did not happen.

Yeah, but I like the point that you made about having a mobile app that works offline, I think is really important. What I think is even more important is communicating it out to your attendees, right? You can have an offline app, but what good is it if they're already on site and it crashes and they didn't know to actually log in, download the app before they got on site, right? And I think sometimes we forget that some attendees aren't in practice of going to conferences every day. So educating them on this is why it's important to download your app before you get on the airplane.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I mean, you're right.

And then you also run into the classic attendees don't read problem, right? And by the way, crew are also attendees, to be super clear. Crew and staff and employees are attendees as well, and nobody reads stuff. And so it's like, how can you continually put it in front of people that you need to download this thing? Please download this thing.

I have a whole rant that I could go into about know-before-you-go communications and how I think that we're not doing them right.

Yeah, that's a whole conversation. Yes, yes. I mean, there's just so much that we need to impart to anyone before they come on site, and how do you bubble up what's most important, and every persona is different. And nowadays, what I do like about a lot of the research we're now seeing in our industry is about the way people learn. You've got people who are neurodivergent, you've got people who have accessibility issues, or even everyday people and their attention to reading content or looking at video content. There's just so many different ways. So just having the intention to step back and think about what information am I giving them? What's important?

What's the best way to give?

I think could go make huge steps as opposed to, oh, let me just update what I did last year.

Yeah, totally.

It's— if I was like, I'm a Gen Xer, I like to read stuff. Do not send me a voice note, I am not going to listen to it, right? But I was talking to a friend of mine and she's got— her daughter is in her—

I think she's in her 20s, right?

Maybe early 30s.

And like when they want to go—

her and her boyfriend were going to go learn about a topic, they went out to YouTube and started watching videos. And I'm like, oh, that is my idea of hell on earth.

Like, dude, do not send me to watch videos about stuff.

But it's so interesting, the younger generations as a general rule they would much rather go and watch a TikTok or watch a video and do some sort of short about how to learn something. And I'm like, me, let me skim an email, pretty please.

Yeah. You gotta know what works and what doesn't work. And sometimes, one of the questions, especially in the data world, people ask, well, how do you know? I'm like, well, you gotta ask.

You gotta ask.

You gotta look at behavior. If they're not downloading your app, there's either one of two reasons. Either they don't know the app is available or they don't want to use the app. Then you got to figure out something else that works for them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then when you start, when you think about the mobile app and you start, I'm gonna say gatekeeping, and that's not really the word I need— when you require authentication or logging in in order to get to the content, if they don't want to log into the mobile app, if they can't log into the mobile app, they have an older device, they can't get onto the Wi-Fi because maybe they only have a 2G device, whatever the case might be. It's like, then how do you get that essential information out to them? And I see more and more places there is no plan B for that.

Yeah, no, no. And that's one thing I really struggle with about it, is gatekeeping. I call it gatekeeping. And trying to figure out what content needs to live out for public domain and what is the value of having someone log in and create an account and really thinking through the process of is that information really valuable by having them log in? Do I need to do that? I've seen cases where apps are used for programs to see who's attending and you've got a lot of privacy issues with seeing an attendee list, which I get. But then some of the other things that we gatekeep, really thinking that through, why are we doing this? Is it because it's easier for me or is it easier for the attendee? And I think we sometimes don't stop and think about that enough to create— it doesn't have to be a formal policy, but kind of create what is it that your organization, your event is trying to accomplish and why, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, like I work on CES and I do the mobile app for CES actually. Oh, how could you not, right? I've done like hundreds of mobile app implementations at this point in my career.

And a couple of field trade shows will do that to you, right?

A couple of field marketing series and suddenly you're at hundreds without even really realizing it. But one of the things I really like about what CES does is that they make the schedule available to anybody.

Right?

And you only have to log in if you actually want to add something to your agenda. But we have no capacity-controlled sessions. It's all first come, first serve for everything. So you technically don't have to. And then the other reason we make you log in is if you want to do attendee networking, which that kind of goes without saying, right? But everything else you can do— you can favorite things, you can use the wayfinding, you can use the maps, you can read the FAQs— all that stuff is just freely available.

Because their goal is they want people on the trade show floors, obviously, right?

Building those relationships, checking out those booths. And there are so many international visitors at that event that we don't want to force them to have to log into an app when they were suffering already.

Like, whenever I go on site, I'm like, I don't—

there's so few people speaking English relative to other events. You can't put an English-only app in front of people and expect that to work for them. Even to have them log in can be really, really difficult, particularly with group registration and all these other things happening.

I'm really excited where technology has come. Like 20 years ago, we didn't have apps. But now not only do we have apps, but we have apps that can automatically translate, that can transcribe. There's just so many possibilities. Which is great. But I will play devil's advocate on the logging in because I don't think there's a steadfast rule that everybody should do everything. If you've got an event that is high security and you don't want people to know certain things like where your— mapping could be one thing. You don't want them to know where certain sessions are and it should be gated and it's invite only. Those kind of things I get. It's just, again, it goes back to it needs to be part of a plan as opposed to an afterthought of, oh, the event is in 2 weeks, we need to program the mobile app.

I can't even—

I have honestly never worked on a show where that has happened. So I'm like, you said that a couple of times, and I'm like, does that really happen?

Oh yeah, I think it does. And I don't think it's out of malintent. I think sometimes there are other things that take priority, which is also why I'm a big advocate for any organization that does meetings at any level is if you can't afford to dedicate someone to event technology, have someone that's responsible for it, that is what they're advocating for. They're looking at not only to make sure that you've picked a good provider, but it's working in the way that is in best use for your stakeholders internally and externally.

Right.

Because those are 2 different stories. But having someone to advocate for that is really important. It is hard to be an advocate for technology when you are the planner that does 100 things. Yeah. Because I do think it is a different part of the brain too. It taps into a bit of that technical brain. And I find planners really great at details, really great at the creative side of things. But technology, not that they can't handle it, it's nothing about that. It's about if you want technology to work well, you've got to invest the time and the resources into it.

Yeah. Yep. Being an event tech in the event space is kind of this weird place to be, right?

Because my background is actually just in technology. I kind of grew up as a programmer and then I became a business analyst and then I became a technical project manager. I have this whole decades of IT consulting before I even came into the event side of the world. And here we are as like these little geeks, inside of this whole creative marketing world. And we just speak different languages sometimes. And it's not that we can't learn marketing, and it's not that these creative marketers can't learn the tech, but a lot of times what I see, I think, is what your point is, that you have these amazingly creative people with this attention to detail that understand exactly what the traffic flow needs to be and how the room setup needs to be. And then you're asking them, you're right, but is your registration system hooked up to Marketo? And they're like, what? Yeah, because that's not how their brains work by default. And that's where having an event tech person partnering with you from the moment registration opens all the way through to the event is how you're going to get that data that you need to allow an event ROI coach to help prove the ROI for the event.

Right, right. And, I think I'm going to say the P word.

The pandemic was really brought light to this, right?

Like we were already doing event technology, but when the pandemic happened, we all had to figure out virtual and we had to do it overnight. And we were already tasked with like, how do we get rid of our in-person?

How do we substitute it? How do we do that?

Oh, and I've got to learn a whole new tech stack on virtual like that. It's not a fair ask. And I know sometimes we don't have the choices, but I think organizational leaders really need to think about if they want to be successful. It is not only about getting the right tech, it's about getting the right capacity for that tech.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And finding the right tech for your organization.

If you're not going to have true dedicated event tech people, there are so many event tech tools out there, right? Julia Soler has just put out a whole new graph, like in the past couple of days I saw it on LinkedIn, and those bubbles were massive of the different types of tools. And some of them are unbelievably complex and you need to have lived in them for years to understand them. And others I go into and I'm like, oh, I can have a complete reg system up in 20 minutes. That's great, right? And it's having somebody that can help you do that event tech selection so that if you can't bring in those event tech people, your non-technical marketers can still successfully run that.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that in tech, self-service, the SaaS platforms was a blessing, but not a blessing, right? It's great that we can do all these things on our own. But I think if you're an organization that has, you're limited on resources, person power, financial, whatever it may be, is to actually think, well, should I be doing this? And to capacity. I know when on the tech side, when I had my tech company, we had everything, all the bells and whistles, and you could do all sorts of things. And we'd have clients come on. Well, we want to do all of it. We want gamification, we want networking, we want this, we want that. And they'd buy it all. But there was no plan to execute because they were so busy actually executing the live event, or I did the program for the event and I said, you know what, it's not— your event is not bad because you didn't do gamification. It's bad if you don't make a good strategy and plan for gamification.

Right?

Right. Like, step back.

It's okay to do scaled-down versions of tech that meets your needs and what you need to do versus taking on more than you can handle.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Do simpler, do fewer things better.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I know not all organizations have the luxury of bringing someone on that can focus on tech.

So with that said, scale it back, do what you can handle.

What's the most important? You need registration. That's hands down. I remember one time I was talking to my sister and, when we in our single days, we used to just joke like, where can you find— where can you go find bachelors?

Where would be a good place?

And we came across this cowboy conference and I was like, oh, we should go to this conference.

Let's take a look.

I'm Googling it and up comes their registration form. And this was probably about 15 years ago. And it was a PDF form that you would have to fill out and mail back in. And I was like, huh, well, that's interesting. Who does that these days? And I was curious. So I called up the organizer and I said, out of curiosity, do you want to go digital? And she goes, no, why would we? I'm like, because everybody else is going digital. And she tells me, she goes, well, think about who our constituency is, our attendees. They're cowboys on the ranch. They are not on their phones. They are out all day. So we actually mail them a registration form. They fill it out and they send it back. That's what works for us. And that was like a light bulb moment for me. I was like, wow, for them to actually think about it and go through the process saying that technology doesn't work for us, I thought that was amazing. I still want to go to this cowboy conference, but I don't know.

I totally want to go to—

I didn't even realize there were cowboy conferences.

I'm like, sign me up now.

Yeah.

Like you think about, when I do like small CEO events, right?

And you want to get them to do surveys. Guess what? They're not going to log into the mobile app and fill out a survey. So what do we do? We literally put a piece of paper, somebody goes through them and they put a piece of paper on every single desk, on every single chair, and we ask them to fill out the piece of paper and then hand it back on the way. And that actually works. It's the wildest thing. Do we get great attribution? No.

But do we get information? Yes.

Which is way better than where we were at.

Sometimes data, it doesn't matter where it comes from. The fact that you have it, but a plan to do something with it is what's important.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, and I give credit to this client, they'd always done a really good job of making sure that these questions were appropriate to their audience. But they had, like I said, they had to collect the data somewhere.

And we know that C-level people are generally not going to take the time.

They didn't register themselves. They have no idea what their credentials were. They're not going to go and figure it out to log into the app.

Oh no. And no, they're not even registering right. Usually there's an assistant that registers them and tells them— doesn't even tell them where they're going. Like, get in the car, the car will take you to your destination, and you will participate, right?

Exactly. Yes. You've got to—

you have a meeting at 5 at the Marriott.

Oh, okay, cool. So I'm really curious.

That's a great example because I think a lot of people do struggle with the C-suite, collecting that information, how to get them to register, how to collect that data. And I love the fact that there was a written survey that they did. Can you share what were the steps that you took after that? Did somebody actually enter those data points in? What kind of questions were asked?

Yeah, so they were—

I mean, there was a lot of like—

this client uses a lot of 4-point scales, so you can't be truly neutral. That's the whole game there.

So, yeah, exactly.

So they had— it was as simple as like 5 questions.

I think it was kind of like, how useful was the session?

How valuable was the speaker?

Does this change how you do whatever, think about whatever in the future?

And I can't remember what the last one was, but the part that, to your point, yes, we picked them all up and then they all got— I think we scanned them in. I can't remember honestly if they got scanned in or somebody literally went and entered them into the system.

But we did actually collect them and they went into our big BI reporting databases and then they use that information to figure out what to do with this event series going forward.

Oh, love that.

Love that.

You know, a lot of times I think with surveys, I see a lot of events, they do surveys, they look at it, they do their report, they do the download of the reports, they save that Excel document on SharePoint, whatever shared folder. And that's where it goes to die.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, but there's probably something valuable there. And yes. And I also think if you're able to not anonymize your surveys, these are data points that help with that personalization, right?

Totally. Here, if you asked a CEO like, was this information helpful?

And he said no. Well, maybe I never send him marketing information about pipe, that type of content. Oh, but his behavior changed because he did some action afterwards— or because he attended the session. How impactful is that? You can take that. And so the next time a salesperson calls that person, they've got this view of, oh my gosh, this person really liked this content. This resonated.

We have these other services or products that make sense to them.

And I think now is the time where all of this data is all coming together nicely and being handed— AI is actually making it a lot easier for us to pass that information on to different internal stakeholders, right? Even the person that's doing cold calling or to an account owner or client services.

It's just great to see the data being able to be used.

But again, you got to, as an organization, stop and think, what do I want this data to do for me and how is it going to work out?

Yeah, yeah. I am—

one of my favorite things when I can, I like to get my hands on the survey results to read the verbatims, right?

Like, I will go through—

I don't care about like the 1 to 5 sort of stuff. I mean, generally in a hypothetical sense, I kind of do. Conceptually I do.

But like, I want to get the verbatim.

So I export the survey data, I throw away all the 1 to 5s, whatever. And then I go through and I read the verbatims, and of course it's the room was too cold, right?

It's gonna—

the room was too cold, the food is terrible.

So I throw out all those.

Let's not talk about the food, please.

But honestly, I go through and I read stuff about the mobile app or the tech or whatever, and I'm like, that is a fabulous idea.

And I will go through and I will actually implement with my team suggestions that came through, because I'm like, oh, I didn't realize people were using it that way, right? Because I work with these giant teams, but how we approach it isn't necessarily what the attendees do.

And I'm like, oh geez, in 10 minutes I could fix that.

Yeah, right?

I could do this and it would make life so much better.

And so I love the verbatims for that because you can really get that information that I can action on. And people think I'm weird because I love verbatims, but I love verbatims.

You know what I've been doing lately, especially when there's a lot? I will just take that portion of it, feed it into Claude, and give a framework to Claude. This is what I'm looking for, and have it analyze it for me. Now, do I take it for what it's worth? No. It's a starting point. And it's like, okay, let me dig into this deeper.

Is this true?

Validate the information. But we've gone from— and there are survey tools that do this for us, right? But I think the key is there is that you have this great tool, this AI tool that can summarize, give you some insights. But there's also the validation that you have to do for that as well.

Yes. Yeah, you can't believe it verbatim because AI can just be flat out wrong.

The first time I tried doing that, AI tried to give me recommendations and I was like, I was typing back, who are you to tell me what to do?

Do you not know who I am?

I just asked you to summarize the comments. Don't tell me how to fix it.

It.

I was like, whoa, whoa. But I gotta tell you, as much as I love surveys, what I love more are the people we didn't hear from. And I think that is where some of the secret tells are. And people are like, well, how do you do that? And it's like, again, it's talking to people, it's being on site. And one of the reasons I love going on site for technology and sitting at an info desk is just hearing how people are using it.

What are they frustrated with.

Some of those people will fill out that survey, but that one-to-one engagement— again, I'm dedicated to doing that, so it's helpful. So to think about that might be something— it could be a volunteer, it could be actually quiz your people at an info desk and say, what were some of the things people are coming to you about, or, because I'm not going to ask them about the food. I'll know if the food is good or bad.

Right. Yeah, totally. No, I love that.

Like some of the events I work on, I get that because I work tightly. Either I have to take some shifts, right? Which I do, right?

Like peak hours, just let me go and sit there because that's when people are going to have problems logging in.

I'm totally okay with that.

Right.

But then I do work tightly enough with the registration teams and the support teams that I'll hear about these things. But then there's other events where I've never met these people and I have no way and I don't get to hear it because I'm just siloed off in my own world. And now I'm like, okay. Now I have some things to think about for some of my upcoming events and how I can get a hold of some of that information.

Jen, I love the idea that you came from the tech side first and then came into meetings and events. I was the opposite. I started off in meetings and accidentally found myself in tech. And I'm curious, there's so much new tech coming out. And I often wonder with founders, I ask them about their path and what makes them experts in meetings. I'm curious, when you started getting into meetings, what is it that you found that was very unique for the meetings world or for meeting organizers or martech? What did you find that was just kind of surprising or unique to us that didn't apply to other tech?

Yeah. So one of the things, like when I first started, this might sound a little bit weird, but I'm okay with that, that I really loved is the fact that I could do the same event multiple years in a row, and I had a chance to make it better every single year. Right. And when you do kind of like standard consulting, because I've never really been in-house, I was kind of like, finish up the project, you roll off and you never get to see what happens.

But here I could be like, oh, okay, well, I heard this.

I'm like, but now I get a chance to fix it the next year, which makes my pattern recognition and need-to-fix-it brain really, really happy. And then the other part that I really love about events, it's just, hey, there's a date and it's not going to move. So you're going to figure out how to get this done, and you get to figure out what trade-offs you need to make and don't make in order to make the event actually work. Because not everything you're going to want to do gets done. We don't have the luxury of slipping the date. Sure, maybe a day or two, like on the tech side of things, but the doors are still opening at 6. The doors are opening at 6 no matter what you do, right?

So you have to be ready at 6 in whatever way, shape, or form.

You're going to be ready.

And then the other thing that I really like is I love the kind of that bridging—

hit the microphone— bridging the gap between the IT and the marketing people and making that all work together and being able to be that human translator. Because I have a deep, deep empathy for our attendees and my ability to be like sit in their shoes and think about what is it that they would want to be able to see and what they would want to do. One of my clients was like, yeah, you can see around corners and you can see their perspective really, really well. And so trying to look at it through their perspective and walk through the attendee journey to me is something I never got to do in consulting because I never had that sort of continuity.

Yeah, that's very interesting. When I worked with my first development team, we struggled in the first couple of weeks and I stopped and I was like, have you all ever been to a conference? Have you been to an event? And when they said no, I'm like, oh, I see the disconnect. Go for one week, go to as many conferences, as many events as you can go, and go through the experience from A to Z, right? Go and register for an event, look for information, look for a room like that. And I think that made it more real. So when I come across tech companies who have not put their literal feet in whether an organizer's shoes or an attendee's shoes, then I start to question, well, I'm not sure how you built this, right?

I have loved this conversation, and thank you so much for taking time out of your day to spend a little bit with me and to kind of geek out about event tech. So can you take a few minutes and tell my audience where they can connect with you, learn a little bit more about you, what you're doing with your Event ROI coaching business? And how to connect.

I am in a new phase of my career, my journey. I love talking with organizations and individuals about data and tech. I know a lot of people, that's boring, but like you said, making that connection between a tech team and the marketing and the attendees, that's my passion. So I started Event ROI Coach. You can find me speaking at different conferences and available to come into your organization and help make data and technology more real and a little bit more fun. I like to have fun in my sessions. So you can find me on LinkedIn or at eventroicoach.com.

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here today.

Oh, thanks for having me. This was lots of fun.

Thanks for listening in to another roller coaster someone else rode so you don't have to. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a moment to rate, review, subscribe, and share so other event pros can find the show. Until next time, tame the mayhem.

Audiotocracy.

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