6 Ways for Academic Event Professionals to Get Started with Event Technology

What is the Social Tables Huddle?

Welcome to the Social Tables Huddle, our weekly video blog series where you’ll find us interviewing a hospitality industry leader on a breadth of topics that pertain to meeting and events professionals. Each video blog is presented as part of a three-post series.

Why are we doing this? What’s our objective? It’s quite simple: make the thoughts from the brightest minds in the hospitality world accessible to you, anytime, anywhere. Our hope is that you find one, two, forty or maybe even seventy-eight ideas that you can apply to your career in the hospitality industry, today.

In part 3 of our series with hospitality thought leader Brady Miller, CSEP, suggests 6 Ways for Academic Event Professionals to Get Started with Event Technology.

In my previous post, we dissected the possible reasons behind academia’s lag time in adapting event technology. Restrictions on resources, personal or administrative hesitation to onboard something new, or just that underlying fear of personally diving into the proverbial abyss of “techy stuff” all contribute to academia’s slow integration of modern technology into event planning and programming.

Harsh reality: If you’re stuck in one place, you’re falling further and further behind every day. No matter the longstanding traditions upheld by our schools, we live in a fast-moving, technology-driven world, so if you – or your university – are only comfortable starting with a toe in the water, then at least do that. And so, peers, I challenge you to adopt some piece of technology and execute it to its fullest capability at one of your upcoming events.

6 Ways for Academic Event Professionals to Get Started with Event Technology

Use a cloud-based storage program like Box – software that makes your files accessible from your desktop, phone, tablet, and anything else – instead of creating a clumsy, tabbed three-ring binder to organize your onsite management material. Your back, your staff, and the environment will thank you.
Sample a free or trial version of a program like Social Tables. Programs like this are great for giving you a taste of the capabilities that event software can do for you or your department. Digital room layouts and seating, online registration, and more are all becoming standard process for conducting business professionally, and the collateral that they produce will be more impressive to your internal clients and your event partners.
Take one event, dedicate some time, and develop – then execute! – a full social media marketing and engagement plan. Remember who your target audience is. Facebook and Twitter may appear to be the most ubiquitous tools, but Instagram is perfect for some events (especially when you pair it with a hashtag “finder” like Tag O’Matic and extend your reach). Also, features such as Snapchat’s “My Story” are assets that shouldn’t be ignored, particularly when you’re working on large events with student audiences. Then get uber-fancy and break out Hootsuite or Buffer, some IFTTT recipes, and social media analytics tools – but refrain from referring yourself as a social media guru. No one likes those people.
Purchase a (quality) laser tape measure. I promise you will love it. No longer will you have to rely on the approximate measurements or seemingly-everything-is-an-even-number (how does that always tend to happen?) floor plans you receive from potential event venues; you can DIY in seconds with amazing accuracy. What’s more, you can point it at the ceiling and immediately know the ceiling height – because for some reason, 94.3%* of people who manage event venues have no idea what the heights of the ceilings are (sorry, venue managers – it’s true).
Trick out your phone or tablet with helpful apps. There are entire websites and conference sessions dedicated to this subject with exhaustive (but helpful) lists, so I won’t belabor this point. I will say the ones I find I use the most are Sunrise & Set, iHandy Carpenter (or specifically, the iHandy Level), Flowerwheel, Decibel 10^th, Signal Gen, easyTimer or GiantTimer, and lately, the Convention Industry Council’s new “Pocket Planner.” I’m cheap – and so are most of these apps.
Capitalize on the existing resources of your university. I bet you’d be surprised what technology is hiding in and around those (scary) academic buildings. I once did a reunion for the nuclear engineering department and, with the help of the dean’s office, convinced a few faculty mechanical engineers to fabricate 25 centerpieces that looked like the cores of nuclear reactors that had a space built for a blue LED base. They were relatively inexpensive, and the nuclear engineers all wanted to buy them for their offices after the event. I currently have ideas brewing for a 3D printer we have on campus as well as a GoPro-ready quadcopter drone owned by our university’s Media School.

If you just can’t take the leap and try out a new piece of software or audience engagement technique, then please just figure out how to run your envelopes through your copy machine so you don’t have those horrendous and embarrassing sticker labels on them. You can count that as a win. Seriously.

The point is, just do something to take charge of a piece of technology and start bringing the professionalism of your event game into – I don’t know – something more recent than 1925 (the year intelligent lighting was invented).

I challenge you to do this one thing sometime in the next 30 days. Once you’ve mastered one thing, take on two more. Then three. Then eight. Eventually, as a group, I think we could emerge as being some of the most tech-savvy event professionals in the industry.

As representatives of institutions of higher education – the very realm where so much technology is born – I think that’s exactly what we should be.

*Admittedly, that is an unscientific number, but in my experience, it’s pretty darn accurate.

About Our Guest:

Brady Miller, CSEP, currently serves as the Director of Special and Academic Events for Indiana University, developing and executing key special events and ceremonies that take place across an eight-campus university system serving more than 115,000 students. Prior to his move to Indiana University Bloomington, Miller worked as the Special Projects Manager to the Chancellor at Indiana University Southeast and as the Assistant Director of Events for the Kansas State University Foundation.

He has won numerous awards in special events from ISES Indiana and CASE Districts V and VI, and in 2012, Miller garnered international recognition when a fundraiser and awards program for Indiana University Southeast was named the Best Event for a Nonprofit Organization with a Budget under $75,000 in ISES’ Esprit Awards program. In 2013, Event Solutions Magazine named Miller as one of five finalists for its Spotlight Award for Organizational Planner of the Year.

Connect with Brady today using @BradyKMiller on Twitter.