281: How We Built a Fully Interactive Conference Hub (and How It Changed Our Attendees' Experience)

Speaker A: Hey, hey, Firestarter. You're listening to episode number 281 of the females on Fire podcast. And for this episode, I am going solo in partnership with Adobe Acrobat to talk about something that we built out for our upcoming conference, our upcoming event that has really, like, genuinely changed the experience for our attendees, also for our speakers and even sponsors, and just with the feeling of organization for my team and the event as a whole. And so if you are an event host, you're going to want to listen to this episode because it is going to give you so many ideas of a really cool way to engage your attendees, to give them information and to really just take their whole event experience to the next level. And if you are not an event host, I would encourage you to listen to this episode anyway because you may get some really good ideas for how to really upgrade the experience of your clients, of brands that you're partnering with or working with, of anybody that you are doing some type of collaboration with or giving information to in your business. So I'm going to talk about the, uh, conference hub that we set up for our attendees, how we set it up, what it looked like, and how it changed our attendees experience. So are you ready? Let's dive in. Hey there, gorgeous. And welcome to the Females on Fire podcast. It's the place to be if you're an audacious, dreaming woman ready to ignite your impact, burn your limitations, and spark your success. I'm your host, motivational speaker, personal brand strategist, and Dr. Pepper lover, Haley Luckadoo. And together with the coolest women I can find, we're going to bring you the best business and personal growth advice to help you build a profitable business and your dream life. So welcome to our little corner of the Internet, Firestarter. Now let's turn that spark of an idea into a wildfire of success. Success. All. Uh, right. All right. Welcome back. I am so excited about this episode because we are actually at the day this episode drops. We will actually be at the Females on Fire conference. So we will be fully integrated into day one of the conference when this episode goes live. And I wanted to drop it this week because I didn't want to spoil anything for our attendees in case they listen to the podcast before they showed up at the conference. Um, but I also wanted it to get dropped, like in a, in a timely manner, you know, like in a moment where it makes the most sense. So if you attended the Females on Fire conference, you're probably definitely listening to this a little bit Later. And uh, you already got all the surprises that comes with this episode. But if you didn't, um, in this episode I want to talk about how we built out a fully interactive conference hub and then more specifically, more specifically talk about how it changed our attendees event experience. So being an attendee of the event, how it really took their experience to the next level, how it made them feel, um, you know, way more knowledgeable about what they were walking into and just overall gave them a much, much better experience. So to kind of start this episode off, I will say, um, this episode is in partnership with Adobe Acrobat. So it is sponsored by the, uh, Adobe Acrobat team, Adobe Acrobat Studio. Um, we're very, very grateful for our partnership with them. But I want to preface this episode by saying that I do not partner with brands or promote tools and products that I don't personally use in my business and that I really, really love and would absolutely vouch for. So we're doing this episode in partnership with them because we built the interactive event hub out in Adobe Acrobat PDF spaces. So that's why we've partnered with them for this episode and are bringing it to you this way. Because I'm a big believer in partnering and promoting things that make sense, sense for your business. And we have just had such a phenomenal experience using Adobe Acrobat in a lot of ways, but especially in using PDF spaces. And I kind of talked about that on one episode last month about some ways that we were using PDF spaces and how it was really kind of changing the game for our business. But for this episode, we are specifically talking about how we set up this event hub. Um, and so this is not, you know, this is not just about like, organization, right? This is about making sure that every single attendee that is coming to our event is fully plugged into the event and it's crafting their experience before they ever even get in the room. So, you know, if you've ever been to any kind of event, even if it's like a local networking event, you buy the ticket and then you have a lot of questions, right? You inevitably are kind of like, okay, you know, I bought the ticket, I know when it is, I know where it is. But what do I wear? Who's gonna be there? What do I actually expect? Do I need to bring anything with me? Um, maybe, you know, like the city. But you need to know more specifics on the actual location and the venue. Um, maybe even if you know the venue, you need more details on the venue. You need to know if there's a meal or there's going to be any kind of, like, food available to you. You need to know what's around the venue, especially if you're traveling to go to an event now. You need to know where to stay and what's good to do in the area and what's safe and not safe and you know, what to kind of look out for. And there's so many questions that come up with attending any kind of event. And I don't know about you guys, but I have attended a lot of events where I buy the ticket. I start kind of planning my travel, kind of planning what the whole trip is going to look like. And I end up with way more questions than answers. And it's basically kind of a waiting game of waiting on the event host to send out, you know, a bunch of emails or a bunch of information to let us all know things. And that can be really frustrating, especially for all my type A girlies. If you're like me and you're like, I want to plan ahead and I want to make sure all of my stuff is booked and I want to know what I'm doing each day and kind of have an itinerary and all of that kind of stuff. It's hard to do that if you don't have those details. And so inevitably, what do you do? You end up emailing the event host and their team M and asking all kind of questions and then they've got some answers but not others yet, and they're like, oh, we're sending an email about that in a week. And then they send the email out. Now you've gotta bookmark that email in your inbox, which is very busy. We're all business owners. So, uh, our inbox is stay full, right? And you've got to keep up with that information. And that can be really exhausting if you're trying to keep up with seven different emails for different information, or you're now taking it upon yourself as the attendee to go and organize all of that information in your notes, on your phone or something like that. So that's something where I, as an attendee have felt very, very frustrated with that in the past. And also it's just a really lackluster experience. Right. Depending on how that all goes and how good or not good the host is at communication, it can really kind of mess up your attendee experience before you ever even step foot in the room at the event. Right. And so that can be really exhausting really frustrating. And that's something that we wanted to fix for our attendees as the host. It's also frustrating because now that's a lot of extra emails that you're having to answer to get information out there, or, you know, even if you're really proactive and you're very organized and you communicate really well, you're sending emails out kind of into the void and you're just hoping that they actually land in your attendees inbox, that the attendees actually look at the email, that they actually read it and that they pay attention to that information and bookmark it and, you know, know, do all the things. So even from a host perspective, it can be very disorganized and very exhausting and very frustrating. And so, again, that's a situation that we wanted to fix. And thankfully we're doing a lot of things in Adobe Acrobat, moving a lot of things in our business over, you know, into the Adobe, uh, Acrobat ecosystem, uh, specifically with PDF spaces. And so we had this idea to create an event hub in PDF spaces. So it would be one link that we could send out to our attendees. They could check that link for access to the hub with all of the information. It would get updated accordingly as we went. So the more information that we started having and being able to give to them, we would just update it in there and not have to, you know, send them a bunch of different emails with different information and they could check that hub at any time and it would make it really easy on them. Whether they're type A and proactive or type B and, you know, booking at the last minute, they would have that information at their disposal to plan their trip, to plan for the event, to, you know, not only plan, but also just feel like they were a part of it and feel like they knew, like, what was going on, what we were planning for, you know, all of those types of things. So I won't get too into like, the technical side of how we set this up in PDF spaces, because I've kind of talked about that a little bit in a previous episode about like, what PDF spaces is and how you can set it up and stuff like that, but I will say it is ridiculously easy. So if you've never played around with Adobe Acrobat PDF spaces, um, quite literally, you take your documents and you drop them in like you're dropping them into a folder, basically, you drop them in and it automatically creates a PDF space using your documents. And then there's the AI assistant, which pulls from the information in your documents. So it's a great use of an AI, you know, chatbot, but very, very different than something that's like an open AI, like Chat GPT or CLAUDE or anything like that. Because where those are pulling from information they've been trained on, which is pretty much like the whole. They have the whole Internet at their disposal. AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat and in their PDF spaces is. Is only pulling from the information that you have put into that PDF space. So it's a closed loop. So that's obviously awesome for a lot of reasons and a lot of different, you know, variety of things. But it's especially awesome if you're trying to do an event hub, right? Because instead of pulling from a lot of different information on the Internet, it's literally only pulling from that information that you've uploaded about your specific event. So you drop in your documents, it gets created, you can decide kind of what permissions your attendees have, like whether they can just view the documents and use, you know, the AI assistant tool, or whether they can comment on the documents and things like that. Which is, you know, side note, really cool if you're doing, like, collaborative things or things with your team or whatever. In this case, we just set it up where they can view the documents, they can ask AI Assistant questions. Um, but they didn't. They don't have the ability to change the documents that we've put in there. Um, and the way that PDF spaces works, the way AI Assistant within PDF spaces works, is you kind of have your own little hub. So if I'm the attendee in this situation and I get sent the link to the Females on Fire conference hub, and I go ask AI Assistant, you know, hey, what time does the event start? Or what am I supposed to wear? Or any of those things, none of the other attendees or even the host or anybody on the Females on Fire team can see what I've typed in. They can't see what I've asked it, they can't see. See what it has answered. They can't see any of that kind of stuff. So you get your own little private hub as an attendee to ask questions, which is just really cool. And it makes it feel, you know, really open and transparent for our attendees that they don't have to feel like, oh, my gosh, I feel bad asking the host this because I know they sent this information out. Now I'm that person that's asking them questions again and again and again, right? They can feel really comfortable in being able to go in, ask the questions they need to ask, get the information they need to get. So it's been a really cool experience for them. So we set this up in PDF spaces, and what we initially included was just an attendee guide, which is something that we've created every year. But we used to have to, like, you know, attach the PDF to an email, and then we would have to send this email out over and over and over again. You know, again, just what we were talking about before. Attendees, uh, are having to download it or bookmark it or whatever to keep up with this information. And so in this attendee guide, we give them, you know, all of the information about travel, you know, where. What city are we in for the conference this year? What is there to do in that city that's fun? You know, what areas should you definitely go to? What areas should you kind of avoid? Where can you take a little day trip if you're staying an extra day? Here's the airport you should fly into. Here's how far the venue is from that airport. Um, here's, you know, what public transportation looks like. Um, if you're not wanting to spend a lot of money on, like, Uber or Lyft or something like that, here's your options, here's what we would recommend, and what's going to be safe for you as an attendee in, you know, a city that you may not be familiar with. Here's the hotels that we recommend you stay at. Here's some local places to eat that we recommend or grab coffee in the mornings or things like that. What does parking look like at the venue? If you're driving or renting a car? Um, what time does the event start? So you're getting kind of a full schedule of what time does it start each day, what time does it end? When is lunch? What's expected of lunch? Will there be snacks? Will there be breaks? Who are the speakers? Um, all of that kind of information is in there. What do you wear? What are all those extra little events? Right? Like, we do an after party that we call our afterglow party. It gives you all of the details of what to expect about that, what you're supposed to wear, what you need to bring. We even remind you, like, hey, yeah, it's really hot, our events in the summer, but the air conditioning is going to be pumping, so you might want a sweater because this is kind of a big, open venue or things like that. Uh, we give them basically any information that we could possibly think they would need, that we could possibly think that they would ask about. That goes into our attendee guide. We also do a, ah, speaker document where as we're announcing speakers, we're kind of updating their information, what they're going to talk about. You know, we've got their bios in there, uh, where you can follow along with them, things like that. And then we give our attendees a, uh, to do list. So this is, hey, as an attendee, this is what your responsibility is before you ever walk into the room at the event. So for example, we have a registration form that they need to fill out. So it tells them you need to fill out the registration form and here's the link to do that. We make sure that they are reminded to book their travel and accommodations and just kind of remind them that like, hey, we're not covering your flights if you're flying in and you want to make sure that you know, if you're utilizing public transportation or something that you kind of know what that looks like if you're renting a car that you've booked that. If we have a hotel block that they want to book through, we want to make sure they have the information about that and know where to book and when the cutoff is for that. So we have sort of a to do list for them. So those are kind of the couple of documents that we dump into this PDF space and then they are able to go in as the attendee and not only are they able to view those documents, so we've got these beautifully branded documents. Mind you, these are not things you need to spend a lot of time on. You could literally type it out in a Google Doc and then just download it as a PDF and dump it into PDF spaces. You don't need to, you know, have your logo on it. You don't need to make it super branded and pretty and you know, do all of this crazy work on it. It could be really simple if you wanted it to be, but we just have kind of a easy branded template that makes it look nice, not too complicated. And those are what we've put in. And now as an attendee they're able to go in, they're able to view these documents, read through them at their leisure at any time. But this is where it becomes really interactive. And this is where I feel like it stops just being like a guided attendee document and it starts actually setting the bar for the experience that they can expect from the event. They now can go into their hub, right, which is private to them. It's got all of those documents in it. But they can go to the Hub and AI Assistant is in there. They are now able to go in and say, you know, hey, AI Assistant, what time does the event start on day one? Or, what time do doors open? And it's going to tell them they don't have to hunt through those documents to find that out. They can say, what's the cutoff date for the hotel room block? They can say, what speakers are going to be talking about XYZ topics. They can say, I'm renting a car. What should I expect for parking at the venue? What's the address of the venue? What am I supposed to wear to the afterglow party? Literally all of those questions that we anticipated and we built that information into the documents, they now do not have to hunt for it. They don't have to hunt for it in their emails. They don't have to even hunt through the documents and read a bunch of information to find the answer to one question. And the grand part, they don't have to email us and ask our team. All they have to do is pop that question into AI Assistant. It's going to analyze the documents we've put in there and it's going to give them that information. So we've even gone as far as with, like, local, you know, restaurants and coffee places and things like that that we think they should try out. And we recommend, we've labeled those, like, hey, this is. If you're looking for Mexican food, this is the place to go. It's super close to the venue and it's really highly rated if you want, you know, skyline views in the downtown area of the city, here are the restaurants for that. So they can quite literally go into AI Assistant and say, hey, I want a restaurant with a gorgeous skyline view. And it is going to recommend. Those restaurants that we pointed out had skyline views. Now, because it's a closed loop, it's not pulling from the whole Internet and recommending all these different places to them. It's only recommending what we've put in. And so if you don't put that information into the Hub, into your documents, the AI Assistant's going to come back and just say, like, hey, I can't really help with that, but here's as close as I can get based on what you asked. So if we had not put in, you know, anything about a Mexican restaurant, we just listed out restaurants and you said, hey, I want Mexican food, where should I go? It's going to say, I don't know of specific Mexican restaurants in the area, but here's a list of recommended restaurants nearby. Right. So it's still going to give them like somewhat of the answer they asked for. So it all really just depends on what you load into in to the hub and into your documents. But the more you can load in, the better of an experience they're going to have. And so this is such a cool thing because they now don't feel bad if they're re asking a question that they've already asked. They don't feel like they're wasting our time. It's not really something that they now have to remember to go and ask. Right. They can just do it anytime they want to. They could pop in there at 3am when they're thinking about it and it's not a big deal. They also don't have to hunt for anything. It just makes it super simple. And because it's so integrated and it's so organized and it's so anticipatory of the questions that they're going to ask, they as attendees are now feeling like we care more about their experience. They're feeling like the event is even more organized, it's even more prepared for them because we've anticipated these things that they're going to ask and we've put it all in one place so they're not stressed out at all about the information or about what to wear or when to show up or, you know, feeling a little bit nervous about being alone in a new city and not knowing where to go eat or where to stay or anything like that. They have all of that information at their disposal now. Here's where I'm super proud of what we created because we not only wanted to use this as, you know, an interactive attendee hub for them to get the information on the event. I wanted to say, like, how do we take this one step further and really make it an experience that our attendees absolutely will not forget. And so, you know, I'm playing around with PDF spaces, I'm playing around with what AI Assistant, you know, can really do and is able to answer. I'm thinking about what all we need to put in these documents and how to really up our game on this and really just make it a fully well rounded experience for our attendees. And I'm, I'm starting to notice something and I'm starting to think through something and I'm like, I wonder if this will work. And we tested this theory and it did work. And so this is why I didn't want this episode to go live before our attendees actually got to the event. Because we have a little surprise for them, which is that post event we have actually used the registration form that we have our attendees fill out along with a little bit of our own, you know, investigation tools, you know, just snooping around on their Instagrams and their websites and all that kind of stuff. And we have put together attendee profiles on each attendee. So when they fill out their registration form, they're giving us a little bit of information about their business. Not private information at all, not like, you know, how much they're making or anything like that, but just how long they've been in business and you know, what their business is or their different businesses are, who they serve, some of the services that they offer, you know, things like that. They're telling us that in their registration form. And then we're also, like I said, going out of their website, going on to their Instagram pages and finding like fun information about them, things that they like, particular ways that they serve their clients, awards that they've won, like, things like that that are, you know, public facing information. And we're including all of that in their attendee profile. They also upload, uh, a headshot. So we're putting their picture in there and we're putting together these attendee profiles. And then during the conference. So right now we are dropping one giant PDF with all of these attendee profiles in it into our interactive conference hub. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's great, Haley, but why would you do that if they've already met each other at the event? Because now they can go and they can peruse through all of those profiles. Or better than that, they can now go into the conference hub. Um, they can go to the AI assistant and they can say, hey, there was a copywriter at the event, but I don't remember her name, who was she? Or they can say, I really want to hire a virtual assistant from the event. Who does that? Who do I need to hire? They can say, I'm local to Toronto. And there was another attendee that was also from the Toronto, Canada area. Who was she? They can do that. And AI assistant is going to come back. It's going to pull the information from those attendee profiles that we've created and it's going to answer their questions. So now they can go in and utilize this tool not only for information, not only to prepare for the event, but after the event to connect with other attendees that they maybe missed when they were in the room to make their next hire or their next referral from attendees that were in our room to connect with people that maybe are close to them, location wise in their area, to connect with people that they did talk to and connect with, but maybe can't remember the name of. And we've all been there. And it's so awkward because you're going back and you're trying to figure out who was that person that I connected with. I know she was a copywriter, I know she did xyz and uh, oh, she was so cool and she wore that great jacket or whatever, but you can't remember her name and you can't remember her Instagram handle. And now you're searching through like trying to figure out who she was and find her and you can't. And it's so awkward and so frustrating. And no longer is that a problem for our attendees because we've put these profiles together and they can literally go in, ask AI Assistant, hey, who is this person? And it's going to give them the answer so they don't even have to look through the profiles to find that out. It's so simple for them. And so we took this from being an organizational tool to help them prepare for the event and get the information they need to, you know, take their attendee experience to the next level and make it nice and easy for them. And we took it even one step further and we made it an actual connection point. We made it a way for them to build better relationships and better connections even after the event is over. And so this is something that I feel like really just took the interactiveness of it to the next level. And our attendees are going to love it. They've already commented on how much they love the event hub and how easy it made it for them. So I know they're going to love this. And I've been on the attendee side of it with events where you are in that very frustrating situation where you can't remember who was who or you're kind of feeling a little bit frustrated because you know, you didn't get to get around to everybody and you don't know what you don't know. So if you didn't meet someone, it's almost impossible to try to figure out who they were and follow up with them, unless you just happen to come across some post they made about the conference or something like that. So we really utilized this conference hub to its fullest potential and I am so proud of that and I'm so excited to see what our Attendees have to say about it. And so if you're an event host, this is something so simple that you can do that is going to really take your event to another level. It's going to make it easier on your team because you have fewer questions in your inbox. Your attendees are going to feel way more confident and way less stressed walking into your event because they have all of the information they need. They're fully equipped. You've got this m very elevated brand perception, right? Because now your attendees are like, oh, they're her and her team. They're so organized. The whole thing was so organized. This event runs like clockwork. And now if you do what we did with these attendee profiles after the fact, now they feel even more like you care about their experience beyond just what happened in the room. And so you're really saying, hey, you're not just a number to us. You're not just a ticket. We want you to have this really amazing holistic experience. And that goes way beyond once you travel home. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm not an event host. I told you in the beginning that you should still listen to this because this is not just for events. You could absolutely create an informational hub like this that has these connection points and is really interactive for your programs, for your memberships. If you run a retreat, if you're doing, um, like, you use it as, like a client onboarding portal or offboarding portal or both. Um, even just a client hub in general where you're working with them on certain documents or you're uploading documents for them, or maybe you're coaching and so you're, like, taking notes and you're putting their notes in there. There's so many different ways that you could utilize an interactive hub like this that's going to take the experience to the next level for your clients, for your attendees, for your customers, for your collaborators even. And, you know, that's something I may talk about in the future is what we've done in Adobe Acrobat's PDF spaces for working with our sponsors, because we've even done some things with that. So that's something I might make an episode on in the future. But there's so many different touch points that you can have within this hub, and there's so many different ways to use it. But we're really proud of the way we, we used it this year, and I'm so, so grateful for this tool and for our partnership with Adobe Acrobat. Because again, it has just made it so easy and seamless for me and for my team and our planning and our organization. But our attendees are already feeling the effects of it and how easy and seamless it has made it for them. And that's what we really care about, is making sure that their attendee experience at our events extends far beyond the room. Right? So we want them six months out, three months out, one month out, a week out, to feel really confident that we're prepared for them to show up in the room, that we care, that they're more than just a number or a ticket sale to us, that we genuinely have an experience prepared for them to have that's going to change their business, to change their life, to give them the connections that they, they need and that, that extends far beyond the room once the event is over. And so I think we were able to do that with our conference, um, hub, um, in Adobe Acrobat PDF spaces. And I'm really, really proud of that. And so I just kind of want to leave you with this, that, you know, if you genuinely want people to feel taken care of and if you're listening to this podcast, I know m that you do because we bring together a community of women who genuinely care, they genuinely want to run impact driven businesses. Right? That's part of our tagline, ignite your impact. So if you want people to genuinely feel taken care of, don't just give them more information, don't just equip them with more knowledge, give them a better way to access it. Really think through their experience as a whole and don't say, oh, we just, we need to give them even more information. We need to overwhelm them with all of the knowledge and all of the things, go beyond that and anticipate their questions, anticipate their fears, anticipate where they're going to struggle or where they're going to be a little bit nervous or where they're going to feel, you know, a little bit like, oh, this isn't as organized as I hoped, this isn't as, um, prepared as I had hoped, or this is the experience I want to have and I'm not entirely sure how to get it. Dig really deep into those things and provide them with a better way to access that information and a better way to have that unique experience that you want them to have. So if you want to try out Adobe Acrobat's PDF spaces and you want to build a hub for your own event or your own program or your own, you know, client Experience and try this out. We are going to link up a seven day free trial in the show notes. It'll also probably be in the description of this podcast, wherever you're listening. So go try that out, try the 7 day free trial and see what it would be like to build your own hub. Like I said, this was so simple for us because we have that template for our attendee guide. We just dumped the information in there and then popped those documents into the PDF space and it was created in under 10 minutes. And then we just share that link with our attendees. We can keep sharing that one link with our attendees. They can go into that link anytime, access that information, utilize AI Assistant to their advantage, and now even go in post event and use it as a connection tool. So it has been phenomenal for our business and for our event, but especially for our attendees and for their experience. So I would encourage you go try it out for yourself. Thank you so, so much to Adobe Acrobat for partnering with us, uh, to bring this episode to the podcast and just make sure that everybody knows about this tool because like I said, I only talk about and promote and partner with tools and platforms that I can really get behind, that I believe in and that I am using myself. And we are constantly finding new ways to use Adobe Acrobat's tools to utilize PDF spaces, to utilize AI Assistant to make the experience better for our attendees, for our clients, for our community. And we're just always finding new ways to do that. So I'm excited to get to bring that to you here on the podcast. So check out that seven day free trial. Um, let us know if you tried it out and if you're loving it or you have questions, we'll be happy to try to answer them ourselves or pass them along to the Adobe Acrobat team who are absolutely amazing and phenomenal with answering questions and things like that. And let us know if you loved this episode and if it kind of got you thinking about how you can create a better experience, whether for your attendees because you're an event host or even in other areas of your business. So again, thank you to Adobe Acrobat for partnering with us on this episode. I hope you will check out all things Adobe Acrobat, but especially PDF spaces. And that is a wrap for this episode. I'm m so excited for our attendees to get to know about these, this last little connection point and these attendee profiles that we've dropped in post event. But right now we're right in the middle of it. So we're going to let them enjoy that and then find out about it right there at the end. So that's a wrap for this episode. Tune in to the next one and I will see you guys next time. That's a wrap. Head over to females on fire podcast.com to check out this episode's show notes, find fun bonuses, and grab your Females on Fire merch. If you loved this episode, make sure to hit subscribe, leave us a review and share your favorite takeaway over on Instagram and tag us emalesonfire. Want more? Check out our upcoming events, some courses, or how to join the Firestarter Club, all at AH femalesonfire Co. And tune back in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for new episodes to keep you fired up for your big dreams.