Austrade
Stova partnered with Austrade to deliver a successful event
4,000
delegates
900+
app downloads
27,000+
individual app interactions
About Client
Austrade is an Australian federal government agency. Austrade’s role is to advance Australia’s international trade, education, investment, and tourism interests by providing information, advice and services to businesses, education institutions, tourism operators, governments and citizens. Helping Australian companies grow their business in international markets is an Austrade service which entails events such as offshore and inbound missions, seminars and webinars.
Challenge
Although Austrade is experienced in running successful trade missions, AWIC presented a new set of challenges due to the size and complexity of the event.
With a focus on enhancing the user experience and creating new efficient processes that could be applied to other events, the prioritised areas for improvement included: streamlining the registration process, communicating with delegates more efficiently, and managing sessions, programs and attendance.
With only three months to implement, Austrade established a multidisciplinary team to deliver a service for AWIC that was simpler, clearer and faster for both the coordinating staff and the delegates at the event, says Nils van Boxsel, Austrade’s CIO. He adds: “When assessing EMS providers, we were surprised by how closely Stova's platform could meet our needs.”
Austrade had to deliver the event management software solution on a tight schedule, and Stova’s professional services team were on-hand to provide consultation, configuration, logistical and technical support.
Solution
Austrade undertook analysis of potential cloud-based software as a solution (SaaS) event management software (EMS) providers. Critical EMS attributes included an optimised user experience and platform features that could be configured to meet event specifications.
Austrade’s compliance obligations required the registration information to be housed in Australia. Stova’s global SaaS infrastructure includes a local data instance in Australia with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Austrade selected Stova and secured the services of Stova’s professional services team to assist with training, configuration and consultation throughout the accelerated event build, testing and implementation, says van Boxsel. This included deployment of an offline mode and a local partner in China for onsite support.
Event
In April 2016, Austrade conducted the successful Australia Week in China (AWIC 2016) trade mission. AWIC 2016 was Australia’s largest ever outbound trade mission with more than 150 sessions, 4,000 delegates and was held over a week across 12 cities in China. Attendees included the Prime Minister of Australia, three ministers, four state and territory leaders, and a number of other business and government officials from Australia and China.
When it came to planning the event, key high volume processes such as registration and attendance were automated using the Stova platform. According to van Boxsel, 4,000 badges were printed accurately on arrival with little or no queueing at venues.
For the event’s gala lunch, 1,900 delegates were registered and seated at their correct table quickly and efficiently; the whole process taking less than 30 minutes. The drag-anddrop seating capability streamlined the organising process for the event coordinators. This functionality was also used to support a smaller 500 guest/50 table event in AWIC.
With Stova’s native mobile app, delegates had all the information they needed right at their fingertips, says van Boxsel. Delegates were also kept up to date with over 12,000 individual push notifications to their mobile devices. The app provided a news feed and a private social networking platform.
Overall, AWIC 2016 delegates used the app heavily, with over 900 downloads of the app by the 1,000+ Australian delegates prior to the event. There were also 27,000 individual app interactions logged during AWIC, and another 10,000+ networking interactions logged in the following weeks.
Stova was very good at ensuring we were able to do our app configuration and set up, providing design and technical support throughout the project.
Nils van Boxsel
Chief Information Officer, Austrade
Austrade
Location: Australia
Founded: 1985
Employees: 565
Industry: Government Agency
Products Leveraged:
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