On the trail of LIVE attendee behaviour at FKOM2020

In this blog, find out how we used SAP Technology to keep our ear to the ground and tap into behavioural insights on the show floor. Human behaviour makes for the most fickle and unpredictable data in the history of analytics. Yet, for a smart enterprise, navigating this sea of information is but an opportunity to rise to the occasion.

At SAP, the Field Kick Off Meeting or FKOM, is one of our biggest regional events and the launching pad to communicating our business strategy for the year. It is a rallying call for the sales team, preparing them for the battle ahead. This annual event aims to inspire, educate and arm the team that rakes in the revenue, with everything they need to fight a good fight.

In 2020, we hosted FKOM in Singapore at the swanky Marina Bay Sands Expo, in a show floor that could house 2 football fields length to length. We had over 300 sessions running, for about 2700 attendees from 35 countries. For the event organisers, understanding an audience of this size is a challenge as massive as the event itself. But more importantly, it is key to shaping & running future events even better.

1. How we got it working

We worked closely with our partner, Extentia, to develop an app that attendees could use to navigate the 3 day event lineup. The app, built on SAP Cloud Platform, would help attendees find sessions, talks or demos of interest to them and mark their attendance at these sessions by scanning bar codes placed at the venue. Attendance, as well as feedback from attendees, was entered into an SAP HANA database and pumped into SAP Digital Boardroom through a LIVE data connection. The Digital Boardroom app was assigned its place in the spot light in the very middle of the show floor with 3 large 55” inch TVs displaying insights into attendee behaviour LIVE on all 3 days.

During the event, we wanted to track which sessions & talks they were interested in, what times of the day are seeing most attendance, which neighbourhood was attracting the most crowd, which market units have the most engaged attendees, which attendee had the highest participation (with giveaways for winners), among other things. Post the event, we also wished to analyse feedback comments and session ratings from the audience.

2. How it looked

We connected a laptop, with the Digital Boardroom application running, to 3 large TVs. While most demos on the show floor had people walking attendees through the content, Digital Boardroom’s intuitive interface needed no introduction, and spoke for itself.

3. What we tracked

In 2020, the show floor was organised into 7 neighbourhoods, each with a focus on technology or industry. In these neighbourhoods we had interactive theatres, with relevant talks, demos & presentations underway concurrently. In a section, outside of the neighbourhoods were the Best Run Theatres. These were for larger audiences & more strategic topics.

a.) Event Engagement: Here we put the spot light on events. Pitching the Best Run theatre sessions against each other, tracking which neighbourhoods were getting most attendance & which theatres were drawing the most crowds. We also summarised what the sessions were about by dipping into sessions tags. The word cloud, expectedly, highlights innovation & digital core. In an imitation of the show floor, the heat map lends a visual guide to where the crowds are concentrated.

B.) Activity Overview: On this screen we track activity. Which hours of the day are seeing the most participation (in terms of bar code scans), which MUs have the most engaged participants and a leaderboard that aims to gamify the learning experience. Attendees could also scan each other, via the app, to earn networking points. So the networking charts at the bottom complement the engagement ones at the top.

C.) Attendee Profile: With an audience of this size & diversity, the profile of the attendee & their interests makes for interesting analysis. Understand your other mates on the floor on this screen – which country / market unit do they come from, are they employees / partners / sponsors, what sessions are they interested in, are the specialist sales folks not attending the sessions that were curated specially for them, and so on.

D.) All Best Run Sessions: Because we ran some of these sessions on repeat, it was interesting to see participation in the repeat sessions dwindle over the days. Particularly, notice how sessions around lunch time are consistently less popular. No prizes for guessing why!

E.) All Interactive Theatres: These sessions ran concurrently, cannibalising into each others attendance. Indeed, may the most interesting – grab the most seats! Yet, sometimes, the location of these theatres may bias the participation. We were keen to see if this was true, and we compared concurrent attendances by neighbourhood.

F.) Top Interactive Theatres: Lastly, we wanted to colour the top sessions by the neighbourhoods to see if a colour (or in other words a neighbourhood) dominates the floor in terms of quality content. These sessions tagged by hour and day of their occurrence offered insights into content that was popular and potentially, what made it popular.

4. How it helped

Through the Digital Boardroom, the organising committee was able to identify empty pockets of attendance and strategise around increasing footfall in these spots. Post event we were able to identify time slots that were less than ideal for hosting sessions and notice how attendance tapered off in repeat sessions.

We also collated the feedback comments and ratings for individual sessions and built more visualisations – but that is a story for another blog!

SAP Digital Boardroom is a beautiful application, with features that allow interaction with the data through an incredibly intuitive interface. When hosted on touch screen TVs, these are a delight to play with. Knowing that the data you are playing with is LIVE, and is from activity buzzing around you at that instant, is a compelling argument for how technology is changing the way the world runs, and most importantly, how we run our events.

So next time, you can be sure, that we will run them even BIGGER and even BETTER.

Credits

A doff of the hat to those who chiselled, moulded and gave DiBo it’s final form: Jenni Lewis, Lok Kai Hui, Ginny Lee, Subra Jyoti Saha, Sujit Adichikat.

For all things to do with the app & the data, Devashish Nayak & his amazing team at Extentia.

References

Demo video here.

Keen to build this yourself? Hex codes for the colours used below.

Screen background: 222d38

Tile background: 343d49

Shade of orange: f0ab00

Color Scheme 1:

Color Scheme 2: