Checked In with Splash
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Checked In with Splash
How to Boost Event Attendance with AI
In this episode of Checked In with Splash, Splash's Perry Piep and Eric Aguirre talk about one of the biggest challenges for event organizers: predicting and boosting event attendance.
In this conversation, Perry and Eric introduce Attendance Insights, Splash's new AI solution that gives hosts insights about anticipated event outcomes.
Tune in to learn how Splash created the event industry's first predictive AI tool using years of event data and proven strategies for increasing turnout.
This is Checked In with Splash. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Checked In with Splash. If this voice doesn't sound familiar to you, that's because it's my first time on this podcast. My name is Perry Piep. I'm on the product marketing team here at Splash, where I host a webinar series called Build It and They Will Come.
Perry Piep:I've been with the company for almost seven years now, after about three years as a customer, so I used to host events all shapes and sizes, from morning mixers for recruiters to 2,000 person tech conferences with dogs and half pipes and speed networking probably a topic for a future episode all the way through to product focus webinars with thousands of marketers. And I just got to say, there has been one prevailing theme throughout my career in events, and that theme is attendance. Right, it's the one thing that, try as we might, we just cannot control. We can create the most beautiful landing pages and promotions, we can plan to perfection with our vendors, create a polished demo, bring our team timely updates, but we just can't control what happens on the big day. What is the room going to look like? When does our virtual participant count just start plateauing?
Perry Piep:If you're listening in right now, I'm going to guess this is something you think about too, right? Maybe it keeps you up at night. In fact, whether our product marketing team is talking about design or team collaboration, whatever the topic, all of the chats, comments, q&a they always come back to how do we get people to show up? And while we might never be able to control this situation completely, we can start to stack the deck in our favor. So a little bit of a teaser there, but before I steal his thunder completely, let me welcome another first timer to our Checked I n podcast, senior product manager, Eric Aguirre. Eric, how are you?
Eric Aguirre:I'm doing excellent. Thank you, Perry. What a cool little intro there. Yeah, so a little bit about myself. I am a senior product manager,
Eric Aguirre:like you said here at Splash. I've been with Splash a little less than you have. I've been here for her about seven months now, coming up on my year, and it's been a great time here. I work directly with the design tools team, so shout out to the design tools team. They are responsible essentially for a lot of the customer- facing features that Splash puts out there. So we have a lot of fun work on our hands and I'm excited to dig into one of those projects here.
Eric Aguirre:Another little fun fact here I actually started using Splash in about 2015. I actually used it in another life to host parties in New York City with a close group of friends of mine, and Splash was the platform that we provided. So it's kind of amazing to be on the other side of it and excited to dig in here.
Perry Piep:Amazing. Yes, many, many parties are thrown on our free product there. So I know I mentioned my personal experience with attendance, but can you tell us a little bit about what you, as a product manager, are hearing in the market when it comes to attendance?
Eric Aguirre:Definitely so. I love that you touched on this idea of attendance being something that we can't control. It's something that we've heard, not only internally but also externally, from a lot of our customers. Attendance is a key part of any event organizer's job. Obviously, you want to fill up the room as best as possible. And like you mentioned, it's an unpredictable variable and with this unpredictable variable there's also a lot of downstream effects that could be a cause of that variable, whether that is event planning, resource allocation and just overall success of the event is hugely dependent on attendance, so this is something that we really wanted to see how we could best serve our customers in attempting to alleviate.
Eric Aguirre:Another point that we've heard a lot about as we began digging into this problem space is that not only the quantity of attendees is important, but also the quality of attendees. You could fill up a room with 1,000 people, but if those 1,000 people aren't necessarily your core demographic, it's not going to be as successful of an event as you'd hope it would be. So quality and quantity of attendance were also very top of mind as we were developing this feature and really digging into this space. So, after dozens, hundreds of conversations with event professionals, both internally and externally, we were able to really narrow down this problem to two overarching problem sets, and one of them is that organizers don't really feel like they know what they need to know in order to create successful events.
Eric Aguirre:And number two is they often feel like they're taking a leap of faith in some of the actions that they are taking when setting up an event. So with these two problems top of mind. That's where we started and that's where we started digging into some of the fun here.
Perry Piep:Amazing. Yeah, those problems definitely resonate with me. We can try and experiment as much as we can, but do we often look back and see did that one experiment work? Do are we going to use that again? And I love your point about the quality of attendees too. I know we're talking a lot about event-led growth over here at Splash and that's really dependent on knowing who are you throwing these events for. Where is that buyer or customer ad in their life cycle? So, spoiler to some more content that's coming out from the Splash team on how to best set up your event programs for event-led growth. So, eric, my first question to you about this topic is how did we come to the decision to approach the challenge of attendance with AI and machine learning? We've seen countless AI tools emerging in the space chat, gbt, video editing tools, whatnot. Why take this approach with AI?
Eric Aguirre:Yeah, it's a great question and I'm glad you asked because it's obviously a topic that's very popular right now.
Eric Aguirre:It's trending in every time you pop into LinkedIn or Twitter, you're probably hearing something about AI and all of the amazing possibilities that it unlocks. So I'll start by saying something really obvious. But Splash is an event marketing company with over a decade of experience. That means that we've had over a decade of experience serving the world's biggest and most recognizable brands. Every time I look through our customer profile, it's amazing to see that over half of the world's Fortune 500 companies are powered by Splash and using Splash. Some everyday brands that I run into every day are using our platform to host and manage their events.
Eric Aguirre:So all that, what that means for the purpose of this conversation, means that there are few companies that are in a better position to tackle some of these problems and uncertainties than Splash is. We have a treasure trove of knowledge from over a decade of experience supporting tens of thousands of events. With that treasure trove of knowledge, we want to help empower our customers based on what has worked well and what hasn't in the past. So you couple this knowledge that we have had over the past decade working in this event space and you power that with the efficiency gains, the data analysis, the personalization that machine learning unlocks, it became a clear choice for why we wanted to work within this problem space and use machine learning to help solve this problem. Ultimately, we were really well positioned in our standing in the event space and we were able to train our machine learning model in a way that no other event company would really be able to match.
Eric Aguirre:So we're excited for what we're about to ship. There's a lot of information and data and learnings that went into powering the model and ultimately what our customers are going to be able to use to power their events moving forward.
Perry Piep:Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I know from my experience talking to event marketers they want to know what every other event marketer is doing at every other big company, and this product is just set up in such a way to aggregate all of those insights together and serve them up. So I'm extremely stoked for this and we're going to get closer and closer to telling you more about this product, but just a little bit of a teaser, so let's take our time getting there. I want to know, as a product manager, what was the planning and the build process like to create as powerful of a product as the one you're describing?
Eric Aguirre:Another great question. I think the first thing that comes to mind when we think about AI and machine learning models is, especially when we're talking about customer data and historical information is ensuring that everything is secure and private. Customers, as much as they want insights into other areas that are being successful, we need to make sure that their data, their events, their proprietary information remains secure and private.
Eric Aguirre:So all data remains anonymized, encrypted and private. There's no PII or email addresses that are stored or even used by the model. We are only looking at the data, so that allows us to really empower our customers in the best possible way. Moving forward.
Eric Aguirre:Another area that we were able to really consider as we were building and planning this out is well, this is just kind of product management 101, but we had to look into the impact and the effort that this would have for our customers. So what is something that we can create that would have the biggest impact for our customers in an amount of effort that is ultimately reasonable for us as a company to continue to invest in? So there were many different paths that we could have taken. There were many different solutions that we could have experimented with in order to solve some of these known problems, but the feature that we are going to announce here shortly- we feel very confident that it is going to allow us to address some of these known problems, allow us to accentuate our competitive advantage and ultimately unlock the power of this emerging technology.
Eric Aguirre:So we're a small but scrappy team and we're serving some of the biggest brands in the world. So with this feature, we feel that we were able to really hit that nice balance between that effort and impact equation.
Perry Piep:Amazing. Sounds like some good prep work there on the PM side. So while we're here, we're going to start to go into under the hood a little bit and understand how this product works. But let me let you do the honors of telling us what all of this prep work, all this data, all this user research has accumulated to become product other than Eric. Take it away.
Eric Aguirre:We are launching attendance insights for our splash customers, very excited to dig into this one A little peek under the hood at a high level. So, tying it back to the problem that you mentioned, attendance, it has been something that customers it's always been this unknown variable. So how can we know whether or not we're going to fill the room? How can we know whether there are going to be the quantity and the quality of attendees that we actually want in this place for our events? So, at a high level, we believe that by incorporating predictive analytics, empowering our customer with a little bit more information around whether or not they will hit their attendance goals, and data driven marketing techniques, event organizers will be able to more confidently plan and ultimately obtain that event success that they're looking for.
Eric Aguirre:So attendance insights that is what we're calling this feature, and getting a little bit more specific about what is under the hood of this feature. We've trained this feature on thousands of past events over the course of almost five years. The data points that we use to train this are, obviously, attendance from previous events, but also time up until the event paid views, email send and much, much more. So, again, we're coupling this in a couple of ways in order to give it to our customers in a way that allows them to have better insights on how they can best solve this unknown variable and provide them predictive analytics and data driven insights for making good event decisions, moving forward.
Perry Piep:I love that, eric, and what I love most about this product is that we're not only just serving you up a number of how many people you can expect, but we're telling you how to get that number to be closer to what your event goal is. How are you going to get there? And the how is really through the rest of the power of Splash right? It's through marketing strategy, your social sharing strategy, how you collaborate with teammates to get the word out. I mean, they're just countless, countless ways to increase attendance, but we boiled it down to some tried and true tips, and those are supported by our own internal event experts as well, who run events almost on the daily around here. So I love that we not only predict, but we also inspire.
Eric Aguirre:That's a great point. It's actually something that was really important in the build process because, like you mentioned, we are providing this prediction for our customers and, at the same time, we're giving them a next step. We're giving them what they can do after they have this information. It's one thing to know hey, you're trending in this direction, but what can I do with that? What is the actionable insight that I can take in order to improve it, or to know that I'm on track and understand what I'm doing that is actually working? So that's where the fun here starts to come into play, because that's where, hopefully, we're providing the most amount of value for our customers.
Perry Piep:Totally, especially because Splash is a pretty big platform. You can get a little lost in there, but with a little help from us, we'll show you the way. So, Eric, I know a few lucky marketers got the chance to give this product a spin during our beta testing period. What were some of the biggest learnings for you that came out of that?
Eric Aguirre:Yeah, so we kind of touched on this just now, but there are two core pieces to the product that we're going to be shipping here. One of them is the predictions side of it and the other one is the insights or recommendations that we're going to be providing our customers. So, again, touch on this very briefly, but recommendations, how wanting to better understand what I can do with this prediction, what I can do with the information that we are providing our customers, was a big learning and a big piece of feedback that we wanted to continue to improve from the beta stage into this new MVP that we're going to be shipping.
Eric Aguirre:Customers wanted clear, specific and actionable insights that would allow them to improve their predictions or continue to stay on the right track, if they were on track. I will say that the beta was a limited amount of customers and ultimately, we're really excited to get this out to all of our customer base and know what the feedback is and what our customers will say about the full release.
Eric Aguirre:There's a lot of potential insights that we can surface and there's a lot of directions that we can take this feature moving forward. So, yeah, we're really looking forward to seeing what comes of it.
Perry Piep:Absolutely, and, like you mentioned, this is just one of our first stabs at using all of this powerful data you described through the lens of how to improve attendance. But with all that data, sure, there are some other things that could come about right. So what do you think? And no one is holding your feet to the fire here, this is just purely discussing what could be in the future, what could be, what could happen on the AI front for Splash.
Eric Aguirre:Well, what I can say is that we're going to continue to invest in building the most impactful features for our customers. This is the first and it will not be the last iteration at doing our part to empower our customers. We are consistently seeking the best ways to empower our customers to be more efficient with their time and increase their chances of event success. Again, we're an event marketing company. We want to make sure that our customers are throwing the best events they can and are ultimately hitting their success metrics.
Eric Aguirre:We have a lot of exciting ideas in the pipeline and we can continue to work in a variety of different ways. I think what I can say for the future is that we're looking forward to hearing from our customers on what is working, what will work with this iteration and what they would like to see in the future. AI ML technology is here to stay in my humble opinion, and I also believe that Splash is here to stay in my also humble opinion.
Eric Aguirre:We will continue to grow with the technology and we will continue to build the best products possible for our customers.
Perry Piep:Amazing, Eric. Spoken like a true fearless leader in product management. I love that. As you mentioned a little bit of a teaser, of course you're just hearing our voices. You can't see the product, but you will be able to very soon. We strongly encourage you, check out our product launch event all in on AI coming up on January 23rd. Can't join us live. We'll have all of the on demand materials ready for you, maybe even a podcast version of that webinar itself, but it's a great chance to hear a little bit more about how we're thinking about AI, see actual event marketers using this product, implementing those insights with the power of Splash. It's going to be a great time, but for now, I think we'll say goodbye, Eric. Thank you so much for joining and we can't wait to see what's next for this release.
Eric Aguirre:Amazing. Thank you so much, Perry.