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It’s 2017 – Do You Really Need a Third
Party Vendor for
Your Onsite Technology?
To better service their participants and
stakeholders, meeting planners are constantly challenged by
the need to implement new technology for their meetings and
events.
Previously, whether it was onsite check in,
self-service check in, attendance tracking, exhibitor lead
retrieval and mobile apps, the only real option for most
meeting planners was to bring in an outside, third party
vendor.
Technology was too new, or too equipment intensive,
or too specialized to deal with. Who had the time and the
staff to deal with all of it? It was a bargain to spend five
or ten thousand dollars to get the job done and make your
clients happy.
- But, there was a downside to
all this, a dirty little secret no one really wanted to deal
with.
- It wasn’t the cost, even though
it was quite costly to bring in a third party vendor. After
all, your client or your attendees paid the bill, what did
you care?
It wasn’t the performance, since everything,
mostly, worked as advertised.
The REAL issue was your data integrity and
accuracy!
With few exceptions, whenever a third party vendor
came on board to manage a specific aspect of your onsite
technology, it usually meant exporting your database at some
point before your event and handing it over to your vendor and
they did their thing.
It could have been live audience polling, or
exhibitor lead retrieval. It could have been a useful mobile
attendee app or an onsite check in technology.
Whatever it was, they needed your database. Of
course, the result was data drift.
Data drift is what happens when
you have two or three versions of your database in use. No
matter how good your intentions were, no matter what your
update process was, it invariably happened – data in one
version of the database drifted from the data in different
database.
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