Event planning and running an event can seriously run your entire life, but it doesn’t have to.
The planning committee for Alpine Days has been managing a portion of Alpine city’s event for years. But in 2018 the committee adopted one critical tool that ended up saving over 15 hours of time in one week. Really. That tool?
Automated texting.
Slow and Steady Does Not Win
Up until 2018 they primarily managed all of their vendors and festival events via email. Sounds efficient enough, right? Everybody uses email.
Well, the first problem they ran into was most (they don’t have an exact number but would guess around 50%) of the vendors never checked their email. Maybe you run into similar problems when trying to connect. Or the platform marked the emails as spam and they never reached anyone. This meant vendors missed critical information regarding setup and breakdown times, booth assignments, space regulations, etc.
Texts average a 45% response rate and emails only 6%.
Imagine trying to help 150 vendors set up within a two-hour time frame and only half of them know what to do. That was reality for director Melanie Ewing and her team.
Regular texting didn’t cut it either. Though people read the vast majority of texts — 90% in the first 3 seconds — texting individual people from large groups simply isn’t practical. It’s especially hard when you have to use your own personal number.
In 2017, one member of the Alpine Days planning committee had to quickly get all 150 vendors off the field of the event space within 30 minutes. With few options for spreading the word, she resorted to manually entering 150 phone numbers into her personal phone and then texting people in groups of 10. By the time she sent all 150 messages, it was too late.
To really make Alpine Days great, they needed a better solution for their business process.
Messages With Skipio Do
The next year, they decided to try Skipio to improve their communication. The automated features made it seem like a dream come true.
One week prior to the start of Alpine Days, they created reminder campaigns to follow up with their vendors and other participants. The messages within the campaigns reminded people about anything and everything they needed to know.
Skipio’s drip campaigns as well as appointment and event reminder campaigns allow you to schedule a specific series of messages, the delivery of future messages depending on the time the last message was sent.
For example, if you schedule the first reminder message to go out 10 days before your event, you might want to schedule the second message to send 3 days after that, so a week before the event, and so forth. When you carefully plan out your messages and then schedule them, you ensure everyone stays informed while saving your future self huge amounts of time.
Through the use of campaigns, the communication that previously took Melanie 15+ hours ended up taking just over 1 hour. She was amazed.
No longer was she glued to her phone literally all day answering questions or worrying about her phone battery dying. This used to occur within mere hours every morning in the week leading up to Alpine Days.
Because of how much time Melanie saved and how organized the festival ran, she actually enjoyed the event with her family and friends.
But pre-festival planning wasn’t the only thing Skipio helped the Alpine Days planning committee accomplish.
Especially At the Last Minute
The very first day of the festival, they already needed to make a quick change. This meant alerting 300 mountain bike race participants to pick up their bibs within 60 minutes.
Luckily, they already had racer information saved to a group in Skipio. They crafted a single message and an hour later nearly every participant had picked up their packet. But even those who weren’t able to come at that time at least replied.
Even though they sent this message to a large group of people, they personalized each message with custom fields and still enjoyed the ability to reply individually, continuing one-on-one conversations.
And Once It’s All Over
To top it all off, Skipio also helped Melanie thank all of that year’s sponsors. She wrote a single text to send to everyone involved in Alpine Days. This helped ensure they knew exactly who made it all possible. So not only did the community consider the festival a huge success, all of the sponsors received a direct shoutout that basically everyone read.
Even if people didn’t know why, everyone enjoyed Alpine Days more because of the automations and personalization Skipio provides.
View a sample of the features to explore more ways Skipio could help you with event planning and execution.