Every eye-popping event is backed by a superb AV team, without exception. That’s why this time around, we’re sharing a few tech and AV design tips as well as a few other event industry tricks.

We also dive into different event types events and how to manage them. There are tips for B2B events, conferences and campus events.

PS: If you need some help planning your next event, here’s our event planning checklist, yours for free!

InfoComm Releases This Year’s Center Stage Lineup

Audience engagement techniques meet AR and VR technology in this year’s InfoComm, and the Center Stage sessions are set to explore their interrelationships. Industry experts and thought leaders will be taking the floor in these free 20-minute sessions, including Endless Event’s Will Curran, Salk Institute’s Sergei Gepshtein, Marriott International’s David Kepron, and many more. Aside from AR and VR, other topics include wearables, man-machine interfaces, and online video. InfoComm 2018 aims to use this conversation as a way to merge disciplines to craft a better and more immersive experience for event attendees.

Steal These AV Tricks for Your Next Event

Audio and video is still the technological linchpin of many events, so we need to ensure we do it right. On top of that, you need to innovate an elevate. Why not consider expanding your canvas from standard projectors to something larger? Or implementing audio technology like array processing in order to secure high-quality sound? Of course, it’s important to make sure you don’t just have good delivery, but awesome content too. Getting your supplier involved from the get-go will also increase your chances of getting everything right come show time.

Make Magic with Event Technology

Deep in an attendee’s heart, there is always that expectation that something magical will happen once they enter a venue. It doesn’t necessarily have to be life-changing, of course. But those little moments of delight can make all the difference to them. The good news is that you can deliver that dream through the proper use of event technology. By getting everything planned and organized well from the pre-event all the way to the post-event, you can remove the invisible barriers that could make everything “magically” work for your attendees.

There's always that expectation that something magical will happen once the attendee enters a venue.
Click To Tweet

Consumer Trends to Watch for This Year

The event industry can be swayed by almost any event, from politics to fads. As professionals, we should always be aware of the ongoing trends and how they can impact our business. Aside from an upsurge in AI interest, the lightning-fast pace of technology would mean that people would need more and more guidance just so they can keep up. Integrated environments are also a hit, responding to the call for efficiency and effectiveness. There’s also a call for transparency, as people want to know more about what is really going on behind the scenes of the events they are attending.

Trade Shows Are Looking Forward to a Tempered Boom

According to the year’s Center for Exhibition Industry Research Index Report, the number of people attending trade shows is increasing, particularly in the B2B sector. Overall, the industry grew by 2%. Other metrics forecast a good year for this slice of the events industry. However, industry professionals need to temper their optimism a bit with an attitude of caution. While growth is on the horizon, there are also rampant changes in all the facets of the events field which could take out those who fail to keep up.

Engagement Goes Mobile

This article rounded up the best mobile engagement tools, to help create a positive interactive attendee experience. There’s Sli.Do for live polls, Loquiz for location-based activities, and Tap To Speak for Q&A. These solutions each address a different part of the engagement equation. They allow you to follow audiences, while also immersing them into the event’s activities wherever they are. Check out the list, which also contains all the most important features of each entry.

Craft the Perfect User Conference Experience

There’s no better way to learn than to ask the experts, and this is what Bizzabo did in order to know the tips and tricks to creating a user conference. Pooling the knowledge and experience of various industry leaders, the guide lists tactics you can use before, during, and after an event to ensure the event goes smoothly. Otherwise complicated ideas like data gathering and ROI are also discussed in detail, allowing you to build a strategy from the ground up. Overall, it’s important for the various processes to move out of the way as much as possible. It is also vital that engagement begins well before the event begins, to allow time to build momentum.

One of the most wasteful parts of an event turns out to be meal time!
Click To Tweet

Events for Higher Education: Time to Step Up

College and university planners often take care of routine stuff like commencement exercises, reunions, open houses, and other school-related events. Despite their unique clientele, they also often have the same set of issues as other types of event planners. The best solution? To invest in event technology, which can also open up a whole new set of possibilities that can up their game. From adding services to being able to gather more data, cutting-edge yet affordable event technology perfectly fits with the concept of colleges and universities being nesting grounds for the next generation of brilliant minds.

Prevent Food Waste in Events

The green trend is still going strong, as it has a lot of benefits attached to it. And often, one of the most wasteful parts of an event turns out to be meal time! To counter this, experiments from the big hotel groups such as Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton in cooperation with the WWF and the Rockefeller Foundation have joined forces to create innovative food-saving techniques. This resulted in an average savings of 10%, which are soon going to be rolled out to the rest of the industry. This guide contains some important action items to reduce expenditure due to excess food, and to reduce the waste that burdens the planet.

Learning from a Sales-Based Content Strategist

For most marketers, being relegated to sales positions may seem like a step-down. But as Liz Murphy noted during her half-year stay with sales, the experience can rake in many lessons learned. Foremost among these is striking the delicate balance between informing and selling, which those without sales exposures quite often forget. It’s also a good way to learn how to tap into the real potential of the sales team, who are quite often as ready to churn out content as marketers are.

It’s often refreshing to get a different perspective to energize your thinking and planning. While the above story is about a marketer getting into sales, there are many instances where someone dove head first into another often unrelated industry and reaped the rewards of new insights.

Have you worked in another industry prior to becoming an event professional? What lessons have you carried over into your new job? What tech and AV design are you using in your next events?