The experienced event organizer knows that trash is not free. If your event is indoors (hotels, conference centers, expo halls, etc.), then you are paying directly for refuse collection or indirectly through facility fees. If your event is outdoors, you have the same issue, but now collection is an even bigger issue.
Intelligent event design can help mitigate this necessary evil. One of the first places to look is the traditional “registration” or “swag bag,” which is often *loaded* with paper flyers, brochures, magazines and other landfill-bound marketing materials. This bag is actually encouraging the generation of trash/recycle material!
So why do we do this?
So why do we, as event organizers, offer a bag in the first place? What is its objective? There are two primary reasons. 1) to help your event sponsors reach attendees with their specific promotional message, and 2) to bring added value to attendees through “swag” (free stuff) and information.
So in this digital age, why resort to paper in a bag? Because for a *long* time, there was no other option and … old habits die hard.
The other dirty little secret (trash-related pun intended), is that digital is HARD! Gathering images, text, URLs and other information from all of your sponsors is painful, slow and tedious work for event teams that are, by design, lean and mean.
Intelligent Design
“Waste gurus have said that landfills are not a waste problem. They’re a design problem. Meaning, if we designed things with their full life-cycle in mind, we’d be better able to keep landfills from filling up, and avoid wasting money on things like packaging.”
This quote was taken from this post on Event Manager Blog from sustainability expert Shawna McKinley. Beginning with design is exactly what we did when we developed Virtual Event Bags, a platform that keeps these digital realities in mind:
- Event organizers want/need to help their sponsors connect to attendees.
- Creating digital content is a difficult, time intensive process.
- The seamless, consistent delivery of this content to attendees takes expertise.
- Capturing and reporting on data from a digital platform can be arduous.
The Virtual Event Bags platform provides event organizers a custom-branded, micro-website that serves as the central hub for all of the event’s sponsor and exhibitor related promotional content. Our platform simplifies the creation, sharing and reporting of this content.
We encourage you to learn more about Virtual Event Bags, if only to see some the new tools that are available to event organizers.
Happy designing!