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working smarter Barbara Palmer
On Your Radar RFID technology can help planners capture the highs and lows of attendee engagement.
N
umbers may not lie, but they can be used to tell stories. And Steve Varraso, vice president
for operations at Pri-Med, a medical education company that provides CME to approximately 250,000 primary-care physicians, wanted to go beyond stan- dard metrics — such as total number of attendees and trade-show visitors — to tell the most accurate story pos- sible about how attendees engage with content at Pri-Med West, one of the company’s largest conferences. The meeting, which is held at the
Anaheim Convention Center in Ana- heim, Calif., each spring, drew nearly 6,600 attendees in 2013. It included three educational tracks, with sessions held over three days, and an exhibit hall. Doctors and clinicians attend the trade show, not so much to make purchases but to get answers to their questions, Varraso said. To provide that, Pri-Med organizes demonstra- tion areas and presentation theaters around specific topics on the show floor — so it’s important to the com- pany, as well as to exhibitors, Varraso said, to determine what kinds of con- tent engage attendees. To help do that, in 2012, Varraso began offering attendees badges embedded with RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags. RFID readers in the exhibit hall and educational sessions detected when the tags were present and collected minute-by-minute infor- mation about where attendees were on the floor and, in broad demographic strokes, who they were. (The data is reported in aggregate, Varraso said, and not at the level of individual attendees.) The data revealed precisely how many
of the attendees visited the show floor (82 percent), how long they stayed (an
40 PCMA CONVENE AUGUST 2013
average of two hours), and whether they came back (more than three-quarters visited more than once, and a third came all three days). Just as important, Varraso said, the RFID data allowed Pri-Med to give exhibitors a clear picture of where attendees congregated in the demonstration areas and presentation theaters, and whether exhibitors were attracting their target audience. Because the 2012 data showed a significant drop-off in show attendance after 2:30 p.m., Pri-Med adjusted exhi- bition hours this year. The data also allowed the company to advise exhibi- tors about how they could best staff their booths for 2013 — based on floor-traffic patterns over the course of the confer- ence. “It’s one thing to react to anecdotal feedback about trade-show attendance,” Varraso said. “It’s another thing to be able to react to quantifiable data.”
BEYOND THE SCAN RFID data also is a useful tool for fine- tuning the conference’s educational sessions, where Pri-Med was already using scanners to record attendance and award CME credit. Unlike badge scans, RFID data can tell whether attendees
Tagged RFID tracking was fully transparent to attendees at Pri-Med West.
BREAKOUT
Tracking the Super-Hoppers
After RFID data showed attendee behavior patterns at the Pri-Med West conference that differed substantially from those showed by conference-badge scans, Pri-Med’s Steve Varraso created some attendee categories — and nicknames — to describe the behavior: › Loyalists Attendees who checked in at a particular track and stayed there (77 percent of attendees). › Hoppers Attendees who moved from one track to another (23 percent of attendees).
Hoppers were further segmented as: › Defectors Attendees who swiped their badges and then went to another track (45 percent of hoppers). › Boomerangs People who left their track for another one, only to return to their original track (30 percent of hoppers). › Super-hoppers These at- tendees were all over, showing up in different tracks and differ- ent sessions, in no discernible pattern (25 percent of hoppers).
ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP