Background
I recently attended the CalFest 2020 conference in Mission Bay, San Diego for the California Festival and Events Association. I was glad to have been invited to run several educational sessions for event organizers at the event. This included curating a panel discussing event technology and event tech 2020 trends.
I was able to bring in some true industry pros as panelists, which resulted in a great discussion of event tech 2020 trends. The panelists included John Russell, Co-founder of TicketSpice, Gary Gilligan, Executive Director of the Mountain Mandarin Festival in northern California, and Jen Singer, CEO of Jen Singer Events. Jen produces events year round, including the big Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) Old Town San Diego festival. The panel ran just over an hour and in that time we covered a ton of ground and debated some cutting edge topics in event tech.
Learn how Event Hub helps to increase partnership revenue and streamline sponsor / vendor management.
Event Tech 2020 Panel Preview
The format of our panel was designed to cover what I call the WHAT, WHY, and HOW of event tech trends:
- WHAT event tech is trending right now in 2020 that should be on an event organizer’s radar?
- WHY would a new piece of event tech be a good or a bad fit for an org?
- HOW should an event production team go about implementing a given piece of new event tech in order to ensure successful adoption and positive ROI?
Topics Discussed included the following:
- Going paperless with managing partnerships and vendors (see how Event Hub does this)
- Gary talks about how he set himself up to take a vacation the month BEFORE his fest!
- Ticketing tech trends and collecting attendee data in a strategic way through ticket sales
- How the 5G internet boom will be a game changer for festival production and event tech utilizing internet
- Advance ticket sale advertisement through Facebook Lookalike Audiences
- Some low-tech but forward-thinking ways to get viral word of mouth advertising for your events
