Attendware: Making attendance count
Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal
Sandie Allen
At the regular weekly meetings of the Entrepreneurs Club at Northeastern University, Greg Skloot remembers looking out at a mass of faces and thinking, “I don’t know any of these people.”
So, he decided to design a way to find out. The initial result was the simply-titled “Signin App” — students, upon entering, would provide their name, major and graduation year. Club leadership could then track attendance trends, week-to-week.
First developed by Skloot at Northeastern in September 2012, that initial application has since evolved into a broader software offering for event management. And Skloot’s Boston startup, Attendware, is now commercializing the software.
“There’s a white space in the events world around making some of these on-site processes, like attendance and name tags, work more smoothly,” said Skloot, who graduated from Northeastern in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Founded in March, Attendware is backed by a $1 million Series A round from .406 Ventures, announced in late June. It counts among its customers Northeastern, Mount Holyoke College and MassChallenge, with several other contracts pending, according to Skloot. Attendware earns revenue from annual licenses for the software.
“It’s a very simple product,” Skloot said. “(But) it solves a lot of old-school pain points.”
Through desktop and Web apps — with an iPad app forthcoming — the software offers a digital sign-in for guests, then instantly prints out name tags. Organizers can then receive real-time analytics and custom demographic breakdowns about their guests, can track flagged “VIPs,” and create automated email surveys.
As Skloot noted, collecting attendance data doesn’t sound that complex — but it is, as he knows from experience as the one-time president of NU’s Entrepreneurs Club. He joined as a freshman, when it had fewer than a dozen members. Over the years, he helped grow it into a burgeoning enterprise, with more than 150 members, a leadership team of 25, and a yearly budget of $35,000.
But because the group relied on “disorganized spreadsheets,” he found it difficult to extract any insights or trends from its regular events.
“Making data more available is very helpful and new for events people,” he said, noting that the goal of Attendware is to make it “as easy as possible” for customers to gain “deep insight” on how to improve their events.
That has been a crucial takeaway for Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation, directed by Tracey Dodenhoff. The center holds a Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo every year. This March, it used Attendware’s software to sign-in and track its roughly 2,000 attendees. Previously, guests didn’t register, Dodenhoff said, “so we never knew who was coming and going.”
But by finally having that data, they now know where to concentrate their marketing efforts for next year — specifically on alumni, she said, as there weren’t as many in attendance as they’d previously assumed.
So, ultimately, while Attendware is easy to use and adds a “layer of professionalism” to an event, she said, because of the data it provides, “it’s about much more than just the logistics of registering.”
Original story link.
So, he decided to design a way to find out. The initial result was the simply-titled “Signin App” — students, upon entering, would provide their name, major and graduation year. Club leadership could then track attendance trends, week-to-week.
First developed by Skloot at Northeastern in September 2012, that initial application has since evolved into a broader software offering for event management. And Skloot’s Boston startup, Attendware, is now commercializing the software.
“There’s a white space in the events world around making some of these on-site processes, like attendance and name tags, work more smoothly,” said Skloot, who graduated from Northeastern in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Founded in March, Attendware is backed by a $1 million Series A round from .406 Ventures, announced in late June. It counts among its customers Northeastern, Mount Holyoke College and MassChallenge, with several other contracts pending, according to Skloot. Attendware earns revenue from annual licenses for the software.
“It’s a very simple product,” Skloot said. “(But) it solves a lot of old-school pain points.”
Through desktop and Web apps — with an iPad app forthcoming — the software offers a digital sign-in for guests, then instantly prints out name tags. Organizers can then receive real-time analytics and custom demographic breakdowns about their guests, can track flagged “VIPs,” and create automated email surveys.
As Skloot noted, collecting attendance data doesn’t sound that complex — but it is, as he knows from experience as the one-time president of NU’s Entrepreneurs Club. He joined as a freshman, when it had fewer than a dozen members. Over the years, he helped grow it into a burgeoning enterprise, with more than 150 members, a leadership team of 25, and a yearly budget of $35,000.
But because the group relied on “disorganized spreadsheets,” he found it difficult to extract any insights or trends from its regular events.
“Making data more available is very helpful and new for events people,” he said, noting that the goal of Attendware is to make it “as easy as possible” for customers to gain “deep insight” on how to improve their events.
That has been a crucial takeaway for Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation, directed by Tracey Dodenhoff. The center holds a Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo every year. This March, it used Attendware’s software to sign-in and track its roughly 2,000 attendees. Previously, guests didn’t register, Dodenhoff said, “so we never knew who was coming and going.”
But by finally having that data, they now know where to concentrate their marketing efforts for next year — specifically on alumni, she said, as there weren’t as many in attendance as they’d previously assumed.
So, ultimately, while Attendware is easy to use and adds a “layer of professionalism” to an event, she said, because of the data it provides, “it’s about much more than just the logistics of registering.”
Original story link.
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