Evonli

The problem

Every event has a program. The cover, the welcome letter, the speaker biographies, the agenda for each day, the sponsors, the vendor list, the thank-yous at the back. Somebody builds it by hand in desktop publishing software, every year, starting from nothing.

Then it gets printed — about a thousand dollars' worth, for this association — handed out at the door, and dropped in a bin on the way to the parking lot. Two days of useful life for a month of work.

But the layout was never the hard part.

The hard part is what arrives. A biography pasted into the body of an email. A vendor spreadsheet where one cell holds four people, another shouts in capitals, and a contact's name doesn't match the address sitting beside it. Headshots in a folder, named IMG_4471. An agenda in a format nobody used last time. All of it has to end up as clean entries in a finished program, and every year somebody retypes the lot.

Event platforms exist. They ask for a spreadsheet in their format, or for somebody to type everything into their forms. Which is precisely why so many organizations are still in desktop publishing software — the tools solved the easy half and handed back the hard one.

The language of running an event

Every term below had to be understood before a single page could be put together properly. The first six belong to running an event; the rest belong to this association's own world:

Our approach

Start with what you already have. Not what a system wishes you had.

Drop it all in at once — the Word document, the spreadsheet, the folder of headshots, the PDF from last time. An assistant named Iris reads it and hands the program back to you in pieces: this is a speaker, here is her name and her title, this is her biography, and this photograph belongs with her.

You look at each one and say yes, fix it, or no. Nothing reaches the program until you have. Iris does the reading and the typing; the judgment stays yours.

Built for anyone who runs an event

A convention is one of twenty-one kinds of event the platform knows. Weddings and bridal showers. Festivals, concerts, theater and dance. Reunions and school nights. Black-tie galas. Benefit fundraisers. Trade shows, summits, workshops.

And each one speaks its own language. A wedding organizer is asked about the wedding party and the honored families, never about speakers and sponsors. That sounds like a nicety and it isn't — it is the whole difference between software that was clearly built for somebody else and software that feels like it was waiting for you. Seventeen designs span the same range, and changing one restyles the entire program without touching a word inside it.

Once it's published, an assistant called Mae travels with it, answering the questions attendees actually ask. Where is this session. What time does dinner start. Which booth was that.

The messy parts it was built for

• A company is rarely just one thing. In the files for this convention, one truck dealer turned up three times over — sponsor of the whole event, exhibitor with a booth number, and a square on the bingo card. An attorney appeared as a sponsor's contact, then again as a speaker, then once more beside a vendor. File sponsors and vendors in separate drawers and that dealer becomes three strangers, forgotten by next year. Here they stay one company, with a note about everything they did this time.
• The bingo card pays for the trade show floor. It looks like a party game — a grid of vendor names, collect the initials, win a prize. But vendors buy their square because it walks people to their booth, and nobody could ever tell them whether it worked. Now every square collected is counted. When a vendor asks what they got for their money, there's an answer, and the booth gets renewed.
• The spreadsheet is always wrong, so we planned on it. A contact name that doesn't match the email beside it — a colleague's, obviously. A row in capitals. Four people in one cell. None of it gets rejected, because rejecting a row just hands the retyping back to the person you were trying to help.
• When the files disagree, a person decides. Several companies were on the bingo card and missing from the vendor directory — late sign-ups, or sponsors of a square, or somebody forgot. Software that quietly picks a winner is software you can't trust with next year's program. So the disagreement goes to somebody who knows the answer.

The outcome

A month became two hours.

The booklet is gone, and the thousand dollars with it — and so is the thing nobody mentions about print, which is that a wrong room number stays wrong until the event is over. The program lives on a phone now, and it can be fixed at ten o'clock the night before.

Seventy-nine of the 102 people invited opened it. For an organization whose relationship with attendees used to end the moment a booklet changed hands, that's the number worth having — not for what people did next, but because four out of five of them stepped onto something new on the first ask. In a field that has done this on paper for a very long time, that's a beachhead.

Sponsors and vendors became visible for the first time. Views and clicks, and a survey that asks attendees which sponsors they remember without being prompted. At renewal the association now has something to show, where before it had a logo on a page and a good relationship.

Leadership and vendors alike were enthusiastic. And the program is only the first piece — the wider move off paper is already under way.

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