Archive for the ‘events’ Category
Jun
18
TUESDAY, JUNE 23RD, DOORS AT 7PM, SCREENING AT 8PM
Downtown Reno: Nevadan Hotel, 3rd Floor Club Cal Neva (West side of Virginia Street)
Proceeds benefit Reno Bike Project and The Holland Project
Register Now
On the heels of National Bike Month, the Tour De Nez and the Reno Film Festival, Reno’s cycling culture gets a special pre-release screening of Veer. This award-winning, feature length documentary film explores America’s fast-growing bicycling culture by profiling five people whose lives are inextricably tied to bicycling and the bike-centric social groups they belong to. The film follows these characters over the course of a year, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their personal struggles and triumphs.
Described as a “breakthrough documentary,” the film made its world premiere at the Victoria Film Festival earlier this summer and has won a Jury Award for Best Doc at the Calgary Film Festival, won Best Documentary at the Calgary Underground Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the San Joaquin International Film Festival. Veer examines what it means to be part of a community, and how social movements are formed.
REGISTER NOW AND GET YOUR TICKETS
CHECK OUT THE FACEBOOK EVENT
FLICKR PICS AND GOODS
OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE
TRAILER
Come out and support your local community cycling and arts organizations!
The event is a benefit fundraiser for the Reno Bike Project, a community bicycle shop and cycling advocacy organization, and the Holland Project, Reno’s non-profit youth-run arts, music and culture organization. Sponsors include Twelve Horses, Club Cal Neva, Chrome Bags, Jet Lites, and Silver Peak (“It’s only beer, and it’s only at Silver Peak Reno.”).
See you there!
Technorati Tags:
veer,
cycling,
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reno,
nevada,
bicycling documentary,
club cal neva,
silver peak,
chrome bags,
jet lites,
reno bike project,
the holland project,
social activism
Posted in Reno-Tahoe, Social, Travel & Tourism, events
Apr
20
We’re happy to sponsor the upcoming Reno-Tahoe WordCamp, taking place on April 25th at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. A great lineup of speakers will present on topics for anyone interested in WordPress at all experience levels including blogging for a living, creating a WordPress theme or plugin, blogging for journalists, and more. A few of the speakers include Twelve Horses’ own David LaPlante, Colin Loretz, and Chelsea Otakan.
Reno-Tahoe Wordcamp
When: April 25th, 10am – 6pm
Price: $20 Registration (includes lunch)
Where: Reynold’s School of Journalism (UNR)
What is WordCamp?
Wordcamp is a community driven event that brings together casual users and core developers of Wordpress all around the world. Together, passionate bloggers and web developers discuss, share, and learn all that Wordpress has to offer to become even better communicators, designers, developers, journalists and marketers.
If you’re interested in attending, you can register for $20 at http://renotahoewordcamp.com. Check out the website for more information or you can follow @renowordcamp on Twitter!
Posted in events
Feb
3
The International Ticketing Association is holding it’s annual conference in Salt Lake City this year at the Salt Palace (Man that place is big). I attended both the morning and afternoon sessions.
In the A.M. it was with Pro Sports/College Athletics Mini Conference. The group was mostly ticketing directors and box office managers from the MLB, NFL, NBA and colleges, but had vendors like Tickets.com, Ticketmaster, Veritix and of course Twelve Horses. The “Sports Guys” are relatively new for INTIX (last few years) but absolutely came out in significant, if not the majority numbers. Topics ranged from ticket printing, to print@home, box office logistics etc. There definitely was an underlying consensus around the down economy and how to continue to maintain attendance levels. The tactics that put butts in seats and performed were, deferred payment plans, payment installments and franchises using financing vendors that extended credit to purchasers who in turn paid over time. Groups that adopted these practices (US & Foreign) were reporting anywhere from 15% to 25% bumps in their ticket sales. I would say when your spending $1,500 to $10,000 on season tickets payment plans definitely would help. Great session with LOTS of open collaboration.
Later in the day I went to the “Breakout Sessions for Non-Sports Topics – College & University PACs” (Performing Arts Centers), The “Artsy” side to see what they were spending time and energies on. Because most of these organizations are non-profit or extensions of state agencies, “Doing more with less” was a significant topic. Also how to incentivize students to use these amenities and facilities. While there were not any commonalities in the tactics these groups were using, like with the Sports guys, there were lots of small ways that add up. Bundling of the entertainment and then food was a big one. We all like to eat right! I think the one I found the most profound was around the perception of value for these tickets. Basically if tickets are given away to students, the perception is they don’t have any value. But! If tickets were packaged as a student wide activity fees (everyone pays) or charged for, even if only a few dollars, then attendance went up. Perception of value, just like perception of brand, was a huge factor. Again LOTS of open collaboration and sharing of ideas.
Posted in Salt Lake City, Technology, Uncategorized, Utah, events
Dec
10
I’d be remiss not to mention the trumpeting elephant in the room – the economic recession – - the economic recession – the economic recession. But despite the unfortunate turn of events life and business goes on, and professionals are still meeting and attending conferences if not for the sole purpose of formulating stronger relationships for continuing business and new opportunities.
Planning conferences and tradeshows is big business, and there are accredited meeting planners or CMPs who specialize in architecting very complex and multi-faceted events. As attendees, we often take conferences and events for granted, but behind the scenes these meeting professionals are managing a myriad of tasks from:
- Scheduling
- Location
- Hotel & Venue
- Transportation
- Packages
- Bids & Contracts
- Audio & Visual Equipment
- Online Marketing
- Database Management
- Meetups
- Follow-up Surveys
- And the list goes on…
Needless to say, there is a lot of room for things to go wrong in a BIG way, or for something simple to get overlooked. Fortunately, a lot of this process can and is automated.
Destination Marketing
Destination marketing clients like Monterey, America’s Adventure Place, and City of Henderson really strive to provide a seamless solution for their sales teams as they service the requests of meeting planners from all over the globe. After all, these folks are competing against countless different locations to attract that next big event. They need to rely on an effective means of delivering the required information and documentation, as well as recording data.
Making use of web technology to provide front-end information for meeting planners like videos and virtual tours, location options and specifications, and exciting activities for conference attendees to do when they are not meeting is just one part of it. On the back-end there is both the routing and response of RFPs, as well as receiving and recording signed contracts and valuable feedback.
The destination’s sales team work closely with meeting planners to tailor the event and make sure they are getting the most out of it. When this particular client hopefully returns the next year, they need to remember prices, attendance, problems, successes and so on.
If a particular meeting planner decides to go with another destination the organization needs to know why so they can address problems and improve their experience – they need a process in place to request and record valuable feedback. Furthermore, what happens if one particular sales rep leaves? It is imperative that he organization have centralized, integrated access to all of this information.
Think about dealing with all of this over the course of many years and hundreds of thousands of different events, meeting planners, and sales reps. That’s a lot of data!
Now let’s look at it from the side of meeting planners.
Meeting Planners
I’ve done my fair share of event marketing and management, but I was interested in hearing what someone else had to say in regards to the challenges of meeting planning. Therefore, I reached out to Vicki Hawarden, vice president of knowledge management and events for Meeting Professionals International (MPI) to ask two questions:
- What are the biggest challenges meeting planners face when it comes to using web technology to orchestrate a successful event?
- How much of a role does social media play for meeting planners, and if it is significant, what are the benefits and problems?
She was kind enough to answer, and here is the response:
- To me, the biggest challenge is integration. So many software programs and technology vendors offer solutions to one or more pieces of the puzzle, but few of the solutions are comprehensive. And if they were comprehensive, it would be a little scary to put so many eggs into one technology basket. So for me, the challenge has always been how to balance our supplier solutions so we get the best from each partner, without excessive overlap or without creating difficulties with disparate systems talking to each other. For example, suppose we want to allow our speakers to submit content on-line, push that to our community, let attendees interact with speakers or create their own unique agendas, plus input exhibitor appointments into that schedule. We could work on this project with a content vendor, our audio visual company, our on-line exhibit software or a combination thereof. It’s hard to know what will be easiest to implement and provide the most seamless and user friendly results.
- Social media is probably not a big issue, yet, for many planners. But given how interconnected we are all becoming, and how easy it is to use the new social media on our cell phones, I’m sure it will become an issue sooner than later. I’ve grown used to staying in touch with my friends and associates through Facebook, and it would greatly enhance my meeting experience to have this same connectivity with peers, speakers, potential suppliers and so on. The trick is to provide something easy to use that’s not intrusive, and the choices are confusing at the moment. Again, there are so many features to evaluate, and without experimentation, it’s hard to know which ones will really be a hit with attendees. MPI is experimenting with different types of social media tools at our MeetDifferent conference in February, in Atlanta, and the whole point is that MPI will try out some options so meeting planners can experience the results.
I couldn’t agree more with Vicki’s response to the first question. It is important for your organization to align itself with vendors that play nicely with other platforms, or choose one company that provides a suite of systems that address your needs. My vote would be the latter because it will save you an excessive amount of (no pun intended) meetings communicating the same requirements over and over again and dealing with different individuals.
When it comes to second response, I will take the opportunity to interject some recent personal experience. Not too long ago I conducted a follow-up survey asking attendees how they heard about the event. The overwhelming response was Word-of-Mouth. Now I know that cannot be true because of the location it was held in and the other questions asked. Furthermore, when I looked back at the analytics I saw a good amount of traffic coming from places like Twitter, Facebook, and the blog. This is interesting because it shows that discussion of the event had became such a part of the online conversation that in hindsight attendees believed they simply heard about it. Combine this with some of the onsite event Twitter apps we’ve seen in use, Facebook groups, YouTube video campaigns, Flickr views, friends feeds and RSS readers, it starts to add up to an even greater event experience.
After all, don’t we want folks to come to our next event?
Posted in Member Orgs, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO, events
