This year, NVCA experimented with two new products at its Annual Meeting designed to provide conference attendees easy and efficient access to collateral while encouraging the use of social media to promote the meeting and foster networking between attendees.

Three Stage Media’s product, virtualTotebag, proved to be an eco-friendly way of distributing conference materials as well as to provide one central depository for materials and presentations.  Attendees were able to access conference materials prior to arriving at the conference as well as access presentations that were posted after the conference. The Association was also able to save valuable staff time (no bags to stuff) and cut costs (no materials to send out to be photocopied). Our post-conference survey showed 61% of the respondents found virtualTotebag to be “an efficient and eco-friendly way to get conference material”.

Three Stage Media’s eventSocial platform helped registrants determine who from their personal networks  were already registered for the conference and allowed them to connect directly with them via email, as well as post updates to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We were pleased that 25% of all attendees utilized the eSocial service prior to arriving at the conference.  

We hope to build on this year’s usage rates next year in order to enhance the attendee experience at NVCA’s 2011 Annual Meeting (April 6-7 in Boston, MA).  If you would like to learn more about Three Stage Media’s products, I encourage you to visit http://www.threestage.com/ or contact Chris Montanti at mailto:cmontanti@threestage.com.