Case Study – How TAPHERD Re-imagined their Annual Summer Conference

Every year, TAHPERD, a non-profit association with over 3,000 members focusing on health, physical education, recreation, and dance holds its annual conference.

The TAHPERD 38^th Annual Summer Conference held in the fall of 2022 had three major requirements:

• Needed a fully Integrated Attendee App allowing for attendees to track their own session attendance, which is crucial for Continuing Education Credit tracking.
• Needed the ability to track Membership status of attendees at the point of registration, as this is a crucial requirement to be able to register for any events TAHPERD hosts.
• Needed the ability to scale up for future growth with the focus on revamping existing manual forms and processes

EventsAir was brought in to assist TAHPERD in achieving these and other goals for their annual summer conference.

First off, the teams at TAHPERD and EventsAir focused on creating a comprehensive Attendee App as the gateway for all attendees.

They utilized EventsAir’s powerful agenda and my agenda functions which included the ability to check into and out of the sessions they attended utilizing Bluetooth beacon technology. This in turn made the process of tracking and accounting for Continuing Education Credits a breeze. 

Event Organizers at TAHPERD commented that in the past, the process of filling out paper forms to track attendance and having to turn these paper forms in at the end of the event resulted in lines and delays of up to 3 hours.

This time around, people were simply able to go straight home at the end of the conference! In fact, many attendees were so used to the long wait, that they were quite shocked to find out that not only were there no paper forms to manage, but that the Attendee App had given them back up to 3 hours of their time!

Next, the team turned their attention to creating a custom landing page integrated with the registration form.

Using EventsAir’s built in technology, attendees were able to register and have their registration details automatically populated, which also seamlessly checked their names against the organizations internal member list that had been imported from their IMIS system, confirming their active member status. 

Based on the status, registrants were either directed to a registration form or redirected to a membership renewal/signup form before being allowed to register for the conference.

This registration process was also provided onsite, which allowed attendees to self-register for the event and renew memberships onsite, something that had always been a technical challenge at previous events.

The event organizers TAHPERD were on a time crunch to get their Summer Conference built out and they were fully supported by their dedicated Success Specialist to create a plan to meet all required deadlines.

Since this was their first time using EventsAir, there was a lot of testing and design work going on. With their Summer Conference successfully under their belt, the organizers are now taking what they learned and applying this towards their 99^th Annual Convention with an eye to scaling all their processes and procedures for the larger event.

TAHPERD’s annual convention draws significantly more attendees and requires the use of a larger venue to accommodate more concurrent sessions and session rooms that require attendance tracking.

The annual conference places an even higher focus on attendee engagement as well as improving processes such as Speaker Abstract Management, which happened externally of EventsAir for the Summer Conference.

With the time saved building out events and processes, TAHPERD are focusing on how they can improve their future events

The team at TAHPERD are already hard a work looking to expand their use of EventsAir to facilitate even more processes and needs such as capturing Speaker Abstracts, building full integrations with QuickBooks, expanding onsite registration and check-ins and expanding ways to enhance attendee engagement and interaction.

With the efficiencies and time saved using EventsAir, The planners at TAHPERD are actively working to improve future programs with an eye to creating better attendee experiences. 

The TAHPERD 38^th Annual Summer Conference has already created new sense of excitement and positive buzz from attendees, and organizers are expecting to see continued growth and participation from their attendee base.

We are excited to see the great work that TAHPERD applies to their future events and wish them all the best with their EventsAir journey!

About the Author
Marco is a Customer Success Specialist at EventsAir. He has over 10 years of experience working with clients in a variety of roles. From product support, to project management and product education, always with an emphasis on delivering unrivaled client satisfaction.