Our industry celebrates diversity – but demands consistent quality.

GERMANY
"The key to
quality assurance"
In November 2009, the intergerma
Marketing GmbH
& Co. KG seated in Hamm/
Germany initiated a survey on
participant management at
events. The findings of this
survey are now available; a total
of 211 decision-makers in
administration, event management,
sales, and marketing
in a variety of businesses
and industries had participated.
According to intergerma, evaluation
of the survey showed
that 77.2% of those questioned
stated that participant
management in their particular
company was handled by
their own staff. Only 2.9 percent
hire an external serviceprovider
to do this. Altogether
77 percent as before use conventional
Office applications
such as Excel or Word for managing
participants at events.
5.4 percent already use Inter-
Sixteen services
are expected
net-based applications and
only two percent employ professional
event software. A
significant 42.2 percent of
those questioned see a need
for online-based participant
management systems.
The survey also shows that
professional participant man-
Intergerma survey
Intergerma, long-standing publisher of an established German guide to convention
hotels, recently conducted a study and found considerable need for
professionalization and optimization in participant management at events.
agement for event planers encompasses
a variety of organizational
services and thus
extends far beyond mere registration
of attending visitors.
In general, businesses expect
the function responsible for
participant management to
provide a total of sixteen services
including hotel search,
administration of personal data,
invoicing and account settlement,
event conception,
material mailing, and statistics.
Requirements on web-based
participant management
range from accurate definition
of target groups over Internetbased
mailing of invitations
and implementation of pa-
rameters for company identity
all the way to administration
of workshops and online payment
procedures.
In addition, survey participants
are interested in individual
filter functions, reduction of
time expenditures, automatic
error scanning, adaptable reminder
function, facility and
material administration, hotel
and flight booking functions,
cost comparison as well as
other functions to optimize
participant management.
According to intergerma,
these requirements are set
both by event-planners who
already have a web-based participant
management system
or would like to have such an
Internet-based tool on one
hand and by those who see no
need for an online solution on
the other.
"We know that efficient participant
management, a term
that has actually not really
been defined yet, is the key to
quality assurance in any
event“, said Intergerma CEO
Markus Schmidt. "The challenge
on us is to find answers
to this need and to present
competent solutions for
event-stagers’ requirements
in terms of participant management."
The entire study is
available at www.intergerma.de/Umfrage/Umfrageergebnis_intergerma.ppt.
TF
48 1/2010