QuickMobile puts gamification on the conference industry’s agenda

Instead of dishing out a thick welcoming pamphlet with schedules, speaker bios, guest lists and other materials to guests as they arrive, Vancouver-based QuickMobile allows organizers to provide all the necessary information on a digital platform. It can notify guests of scheduling changes or other important announcements. But that’s just the beginning.

The platform also incorporates gamification tools, providing organizers the opportunity to reward points to attendees for things like checking in at certain workshops, sharing information through social media, connecting with other attendees, completing polls and surveys, finding clues in a scavenger hunt or answering questions correctly in a trivia game.

“We ask our clients, ‘what are the objectives that you are trying to achieve,’ and then we will create the game so that it works,” says Patrick Payne, co-founder and CEO of QuickMobile. “We’ve had some pretty remarkable results.”

Payne says that one client saw a tenfold increase in activity on their event’s photo gallery page when they began rewarding points to those who uploaded images. Other clients have seen between 100 and 200 per cent increases in social media activity when points and incentives are provided.

While the prizes for participation are at the discretion of event organizers, Payne says he’s seen giveaways ranging from free iPads to all-inclusive vacations to once in a lifetime opportunities to meet with event speakers and celebrities.

While the application makes navigating the convention floor a little simpler for attendees it also collects valuable information for organizers, such as participation at individual workshops, audience feedback about keynote speakers, and statistics about the number of new connections made and social media reach.

Established in 2006, QuickMobile has a client roster that includes 40 Fortune 100 companies, and while the initial concept was intended for major events of at least a few hundred, the company has recently provided customers an opportunity to utilize the application at smaller venues.

In October of 2013, QuickMobile took its platform beyond the convention floor when it unveiled an enterprise-wide multi-event platform, which allows organizers to create individual event applications through a master app.

“A large organization like Deloitte or KPMG or Visa or Wal-Mart, a lot of these organizations that we work with do literally thousands of meetings every year, so what they want is a platform that allows them to do the self-serve model,” says Payne. “We can create a single master app for a company, then that organization can create ‘quick events’ that can go inside that master app.”

Payne adds that the master app’s drag-and-drop feature allows organizers to build individual event apps and load them up with the features they need without requiring advanced technical skills.

Plus, by keeping the application relevant beyond the initial event date, attendees can continue to reminisce, share information, collaborate and network long after they’ve left the venue.

“The large enterprise clients, they actually want to start to use this technology to help connect all the people within their organization,” says Payne. “They’re looking for tools to help people interact with each other and share content and collaborate and create ad hoc communities and educate themselves. We could see this as a tool that could help facilitate that, and be the catalyst for some pretty interesting mobile and online communities.”