A New York-based digital agency turned to Iflexion for custom conference management software to automate event organization and management workflows.
Headquartered in New York City, our customer is a full-service digital agency with 20+ years of experience in branding, transmedia publishing, content marketing, and advertising. Running several offices across the United States, the company partners with world-known brands and helps them build effective marketing and advertising campaigns.
Our customer was tasked with delivering conference management software for one of their clients. The client was looking to adopt a solution for their partners — professional associations and committees in various industries, including healthcare — to organize and manage their conferences and congresses on a regular basis. The solution was to streamline and optimize event management as well as to ensure stress-free event maintenance through a straightforward digital interface. The organization also expected the system to support ongoing event performance monitoring and analytics.
The digital agency had a positive experience of engaging Iflexion in enterprise software development for their clients in the past, so choosing us for this project was a no-brainer.
We started out with only the customer’s general idea of a future solution and finalized the project requirements before getting down to designing and developing this custom conference management software.
The resulting solution allows event managers to perform the following activities:
Set up events and update their details. The solution allows event-organizing teams to upload information about an event (date, venue, attendees, program, speakers, etc.) into the system and update these details anytime.
Manage event workflows. The solution is designed to provide managers with complete visibility into step-by-step event management workflows, from early submissions and advertising activities to post-event analysis and reports. This process allows managing not only active projects but also archived ones, compare them, and make well-grounded decisions when planning for future events.
Collect attendees’ feedback. In addition to the core web portal, Iflexion’s team developed an iPad version of the solution for event managers to interview conference participants on the spot. The iOS application can operate both with and without an internet connection. In the latter case, event managers can register attendees’ answers manually during the event; then the answers get automatically uploaded to the server as soon as the device connects to the internet. Once uploaded, the survey results become available for further analysis.
Analyze event data, generate reports, and calculate ROI. The system contains an analytics module for reporting on event performance. It processes various event parameters, including the number of participants, leads and converted customers; venue hire and hospitality expenses; attendee survey results, and more.
Relying on the aggregated data, managers can measure event performance at different stages and compare their profitability with past events. It’s also possible to calculate each event’s ROI to evaluate its overall effectiveness and understand if any optimization is required to increase performance in the future. The system visualizes these analytical results in Excel-like spreadsheets with colored diagrams and charts.
During this conference management software development, Iflexion’s team utilized the PHP-based Zend Framework for the backend. The frontend technologies included JavaScript and the jQuery Accordion widget, which produced a highly- performing, scalable and intuitive user interface.
The event database storage with flexible data caching was set up using MySQL. Integration with Google Charts was chosen as an optimal way for event data visualization.
The product of our collaboration with the US digital agency, the cross-platform conference management software offers full-cycle event management automation for the end customer’s partners.
This suite of a web portal and a matching iPad application allows event managers to hit several important goals, such as: