It’s no secret that hosting events are a good way to bring people together.

Events bring in people with similar interests and concerns and try to encourage interaction between one another. Regardless if you’re looking to host a charity event, a workshop, or even a movie night, these all have the potential to create or strengthen a community.

If you’re looking for tips on how to successfully build a community of passionate and engaged members through your events, keep reading because, in Malaysia, we can see events starting to create communities and encourage new discussions. Here's how they're leveraging events and technology to grow the events that grow their communities.

Creating Good Email Campaigns

Between 2017 to 2018, Malaysia saw a significant jump in its email open rate. It grew from 16.52% in 2017 to 23.38% in 2018.

With this data, we can see that emails are becoming increasingly important in regard to a marketing standpoint in Malaysia. With this in mind, it’s becoming increasingly important for you to create good email campaigns that people will want to open. Doing so will increase the likelihood of people both knowing and attending your event. Here are some examples of great event invite emails.

Effective email campaigns are vital to an event’s success. First and foremost, choose a simple subject line for your emails that still relays the message you want to convey. One tip is to start off with action words. This keeps your message short yet powerful. Never leave a subject line blank.

There’s no faster way for your email to end up in the trash! Keep email design in mind too. The design of your emails should look professional and eye-catching. Your audience won’t want to read a plain-looking email. The addition of photos, clean-looking fonts, and striking colors can call attention to your event’s email campaign.

You can also maximize the effectiveness of your email campaign through how you time it and the content you provide during each stage of the campaign. It doesn’t make sense to start an email campaign a few days short of your event. You want to gain interest in your event over time. Use this time to garner attention for your event in a relatively organic way. Send multiple emails that first catch people’s curiosity. Then, relay the urgency and relevancy of your event.

Even once the event is over, you want to follow up with attendees. These follow up emails can include surveys so you can learn how to improve your next event. It also shows that you care about the attendee experience and are willing to nurture the attendee-organizer relationship.

You can’t build a community without people, so make sure to get your potential attendee’s attention through your email campaigns. You can potentially lose a few valuable and loyal community members if you don’t market your events well. So keep this in mind when trying to build your communities!

Collecting Data

Many times when host events people forget or miss the opportunity to collect data that can come in handy later. Event data is essential in helping planners and organizations understand exactly what happened at your events and how you can improve.

Hosting events allows the collection of both qualitative or quantitative data that can be later used to bring to communities together to collaborate. Because events tend to attract people in similar industries or interests, it will facilitate the collection of data that specifically correlated to your event. It is also mare likely that data collected will be coming from reliable.

This can be done by implementing a forum or survey into your event. Not only will this make it easier for your attendees to provide you with information but it will also be easier for you to organize the data you have collected and look at it later.

Once you have determined an issue or a goal you believe is important to your audience, the next step is to critically examine the data you have identified. Whether it is data as simple as, were the guest speakers informative, to was the food provided well served.

Upon finding the information you were looking for you will be able to either target those issues that are urgent and clear to the community or find common goals. This newfound information can then be implemented into your next event or shared with those in the community.

Collecting data on things such as sessions, speakers, meals, accommodations, activities, and other topics can throughout the event, can be sorted and used to improve the design for your future events.

Improvement of Attendee Experiences

It is currently estimated that the number of smartphone users in Malaysia is 18.4 million. This number is projected to grow up to 20.9 million in 2023. Our world is becoming increasingly intertwined with technology. This technology is making our lives more convenient with a plethora of life-simplifying apps and information at millions of peoples’ fingertips.

With so many people having smartphones nowadays, it would only make sense to take advantage of it. So how can you implement this type of convenience into your event? As mentioned previously, smartphones’ are known for their convenience. Use them to make your event more convenient. This can be done in a simple way: Having an app for your attendees to manage their events.

Event apps can help simplify event registration, payment, ticketing, and much more. With an event app, registration becomes much easier and faster. This makes it more appealing to potential attendees, who won’t have to go through the usual hassle of registration.

Apps also have the capacity to accept payments, once again making the user experience rather convenient. Users would have your event app as a quick option instead of having to go onto the internet, search up your event’s ticketing website, and input their payment information and email, etc.

One aspect of event attendance that can still be quite a hassle as well as event ticketing. Typically, an attendee would pay for their ticket a few days or even a few months in advance. This ticket then goes to their email which usually gets buried under piles of other emails.

When the time for the event comes, their tickets suddenly become elusive, requiring either long hours spent scrolling or racking one’s brain for keywords to search in their inbox’s search bar. An event app takes that hassle away, putting tickets and QR codes all in one easily accessible place.

By eliminating the hassles of event participation, you can attract more attendees to your event. Continually offering these hassle-free services can help you create a group of regular event attendees, who, with your help, can get to know one another and form a strong community.

Create an Online Forums & Discussions

While having good attendance numbers at your events are always good, how will your attendees be able to stay in contact with each other or discuss the event. With Malaysia‘s current 24.1 million social network users, online forums can be widely shared through social platforms.

Malaysia’s 23 million users on Facebook alone make up about 95% of their overall social network users. Making it fairly easy for you attendees to quickly and easily access your online forum but posting them on popular social platforms.

Having an online forum can be used to gather a wide range of data for multiple purposes. One purpose could be as simple as exchanging contact information with each other. This will facilitate the possibility of collaborating between companies and other future events.

Not only will others be able to communicate, but you will also be able to receive feedback on your event. The feedback you receive will allow you to capture the data that you require or want. Collecting data such as was the space your event hosted at easy to find or if they found the event overall helpful.

With 49% of Malaysia’s population using smartphones, online forms can easily be accessed across mobile devices. Therefore widening the reach of how many people can access your form to fill it in. An online forum can reduce costs and increase efficiency, standardization, and accuracy.

By linking or building in surveys to your forums will save you both time and money. Utilizing free websites such as Survey Monkey can easily be made with pre-made templates. These surveys will guarantee the questions you are asking are consistent and distributed to everyone at your event.

By using the forum in a face to face environment, you can ensure that your attendees and teams are engaged and allowed to make suggestions. It will also make dealing with customer complaints, gathering personal details or even when taking an order faster.

How are you building up?

If you’re organizing an event, give these tips a try! The addition of these features to your event can make a world of difference when trying to build communities. Eliminating the hassle, learning what attendees want from you, and marketing your event well can impact the amount of engaged and regular attendees your event has. It is these engages and regular attendees that help create your community.

Glue Up's platform offers event management and email campaign software that can make the planning of your event a breeze, and help grow that community by actively and automatically engaging them with the content they love. Book a demo today and we'll show you how it works.