What's Next and Why Everyone's Focused on Building Community with SwapCard CEO Baptiste Boulard

Before we begin, I want to direct your attention to the bottom right of your screen. If you open up the live discussion tab, there are a few questions in the, the poll section that we posted that we'll revisit at the end of the session. There's also the Q&A and live chat, so we'd love for you to participate. So we'll begin. You may have heard the quote, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." Well, we took that to heart. Swapcard was an app for in-person events. And in March, like the rest of you, we saw the crisis happening and we adapted. We started reinventing our entire business model and essentially we created a new product to serve virtual and hybrid events. Since March, we released over 100 new virtual features and have another 35 in the pipeline right now. We saw a 400% growth in 6 months and we aren't slowing down anytime soon. We're on track to host 5,000 events this year with 10 million on our platform. So people were already spending more time online than off. We know this. Virtual is already happening. You were already networking on social media sites, learning from tutorials on YouTube, sourcing purchases, and reading reviews on Google. The events industry primarily focused on in-person experiences, but you were slowly seeing more and more virtual offerings. We were headed that way, but COVID accelerated our path to virtual and helped change our mindset along the way. In a survey by Harris Insights and Analytics, they noted that 35% of Americans are glad to avoid in-store shopping. That's not news, right? Otherwise, Jeff Bezos wouldn't be a billionaire. This doesn't apply just for shopping, but COVID has sparked a change in our behavior and our attitudes towards everyday travel. In a survey asking how likely people were post-COVID to travel for business, you can see now that there's a threshold when deciding. But pre-COVID, many of us, especially in sales, would travel any distance for business because that's our job. But after COVID and how easy it is to still meet most of your business objectives from home, people are really starting to evaluate what they're willing to travel for. Do they really need to hop on a flight and book a hotel to meet with the client? Can it be done through a video call? Perhaps you travel for the big annual event, but attend the smaller ones virtually. We're not saying that in-person events are going away. We're saying virtual gives organizations more opportunities on how they execute their events. So why do we do events from a marketing perspective? Perhaps for brand visibility, the opportunity to engage with your audience. With virtual, you can touch so many more people. For example, a few weeks ago we held our Evolve 2.0 event, and had that, we had about 10,000 attendees from all over the world join. Had this been in person, we would have had at most 1,000 people. And our clients are also seeing higher engagement across the board for their attendees and their sponsors. At an in-person event, you may be too shy to start a conversation or, you know, raise your hand for Q&A, but you might feel a little more confident doing it from your home behind your screen. Traditionally, at in-person events, you may have known the demographics of who attended your event, you know, their title, the company, their location. But at virtual events, platforms like ours give you the opportunity to capture targeted data from your attendees. You can now see who they connected with, what sessions they attended, what products they liked, what sponsors they visited. You have so much more information on your attendees' behavior. We have an open API that allows you to push all that data into your CRM tool. So you keep all that information. You can also deliver all this data to your sponsors along with the ability to monitor how their sales teams were performing at the event. You can know who they connected with, who they met with, what conversations they had. Another huge benefit is lowering your operating costs. You no longer have to pay for things like the venue and the catering. So event organizers are seeing higher revenue margins across the board. Everyone is saying hybrid is the next wave, and traditionally you may be thinking that means hybrid events, mixing virtual elements in with all your in-person events. But what we're seeing in the industry and from conversations that we're having from all our clients is more of a hybrid strategy when planning their events. Event organizers know not all their events are gonna be hybrid. Some events are naturally better suited for in-person. Some should have always been virtual, and now they're figuring out which events perhaps their bigger annual events or their user conferences, those might be the best for the hybrid events model. So to tell us more about what that means and what's next, I'll turn it over to Baptiste.

Thank you so much, Unn, for really listening to the audience for the benefit of running virtual events. I want now to focus on what's next, how virtual event will evolve towards community. We believe at Swapcard that virtual events will be part of a bigger opportunity, a bigger experience, and something that will incorporate virtual events into a global marketing experience. We, the event industry, are in a 3-step market evolution. We used to do face-to-face events, And we are now doing fully virtual events, virtual events only, because we're forced to because of COVID-19. This will last until summer this year, minimum. The next phase, the second step of the market evolution, is to move to virtual to hybrid events. As Eun was mentioning, hybrid events, the simple format of a hybrid event, it's a 2-day conference where people are attending online and onsite. And we're having all discussion with our customer, all over the world to how do we create the perfect experience for hybrid events for Q3, Q4 2021. But the conversation were really interesting with our clients, it's how can we turn events into something much bigger? How do we turn virtual events, face-to-face events into a global community? And that's something where we see a lot of traction with our clients who are all marketers. It's a very different way to market. There is the old world and there is the new world. The old world is what we have been doing since many years. An event experience, it's a very siloed experience. Let's say you're a marketer and you're running 10 events a year. Very often you will create a website for each of your events. Me as an attendee, I need to go through all these websites and for each event, I need to register, and I will have a specific form, and I will have to register many times. And then, once I'm registered, I will only have access to the content of that specific event, so my experience is very limited. With the community approach, you're putting your customer, your audience, in the middle of your marketing strategy. Within that community platform, you can, of course, list all your events into one platform. I can discover every event you're running. If it's a massive event, is it just a webinar, any type of event, webinar you want to— you're doing within the platform can be accessible. Maybe I can have access to some content, maybe the content is restricted, I need to register. But then, all the content you are creating from your events can be pushed to an on-demand access library, a kind of a Netflix for your own company. The good news also with the community is that I will be part of something much bigger because I will have access to all the attendees that register to all your events. So let's say I'm attending an IBM event. By attending one event, I will have access to all the members of the global IBM community. And of course, within that community, you can also push services. If you have partners, you can list them, list their offerings, so I can discover great— all your ecosystem and great tools or services I would need. The last thing, it's also something because it's a social media, social network, your attendees, they can also create their own content and interact within the social feed. So this is a very bigger experience. And the true fundamental change for us as marketers, why do we run events? As Un was saying, is to capture market share, is to create brand awareness. But when we used to run events, the experience we were providing was really limited to the date of the event. So let's say during 2 days, you work during 1 year to have 1 massive user conference, And then after this user conference, nothing happening. Your brand is gone, and then you have to work again to recreate everything. And so there is the waste of marketing effort and marketing cost, because let's say you're spending $20 to attract an attendee. The attendee will log and register. Half of the people who register will not attend your event, they will not come. With virtual event, hybrid event, of course, we can have more people joining, so we can reduce non-show. But then, you need to nurture them and to retain them. And this is a big challenge for us running events, is how do we keep all these people coming every year? And this is what you can do with the community approach. Instead of organizing a 2-day event once a year, you can turn your event in a lot of small virtual events. And so then you are able to run virtual events at scale, every week, every month. It's very easy to use Swapcard to do so. You can do any types of virtual events. It can be a short webinar. We have clients are using Swapcard as a hosted buyer program for their partner ecosystem. We're powering lots of conference like Saastr. We haven't done most job fair for universities. So you can really provide a lot of value and then you will plug also your hybrid in-person events into that platform. Platform. And that's something that we were not expecting. When we start to have a lot of traction from the market, the marketer who were running this event, they told us, hold, we will not use the platform just during 2 months. We want to keep our event open and constantly updating and creating a community. We at Swapcard have also launched our own community of event planners, when we launched our first virtual event in June last year. We just done our second virtual event, evo 2.0. We moved from 5,000 attendees to a global audience of 10,000 event planners. The good news is that they're already registered to that platform. So every time we update the platform, we push content, they don't need to find out, they don't need to register, they don't need to go through these boring forms. They are already part of the community and people start engaging to each other, creating more engagement, bigger brand awareness. And this is the beauty of community, is to keep the relationship with your audience. So, a community offers more value than just events, as we have seen, and so you can really create something much bigger. You will have all your events, as we just discussed. These events, you know, now it can be just a small webinar of half an hour, But it's also a great way to have your own media. We are all using LinkedIn or different platforms where there is so much noise happening. You can use your community to push news about you, your ecosystem, your partners. You can have your curated media that people can consume and people can interact with this content, and you can also sponsor content within that community. Of course, there is the networking element. I can network with people within the community who are my peers, who share the same knowledge, experience, and this is something I can do all year long, chatting with people, launching video calls, scheduling meetings, not just on an event basis. And if you are part of the exhibition industry, for instance, you might want to have a marketplace of all your exhibitors with all their services. So this is, this is a great add-on. It's a lot of value for us as marketers to offer something bigger to our audience. And that approach is not something new. This is just a list of logos of great companies who have a community approach. And that's something that's been really successful both on the B2B part and on the B2C part. So it's something I really suggest you to have a look. The reason why I want you to think about community is because it will add a lot of value for you as marketer. As I just mentioned, our main challenge as marketers is to acquire customers, leads, or members at the lowest cost and to keep these people in our global audience. So having a community approach will reduce the cost of acquisition because we will be able to create network effects and word of mouth. So more people will know about your brand and more people will come to your events or be part of your community. As I mentioned, it will increase retention forever because people, once they have attended an event, they are part of that community forever if it's a free community. Of course, because the second thing is that you will learn a lot because you will be able to track everything happening to the community, what content people consume. When you run an event, a big event, there is so much content that it's impossible to to look at all the sessions or to network with everyone. There is so much missed opportunity and missed learning. And that's something they can do within your community. They can keep going. So you can learn from all these market trends. And of course, the beauty is that you can really nurture your audience. You can keep posting them, providing value, and you can use all these leads and have a much better lead scoring for your sales reps because you are able to push that to your marketing system, marketing platform, marketing automation tool, to your CRM. And so you will be able to capture much more behavioral data, what people have consumed, how much they log, with who did they interact. So these are my 3 takes away why you should move from events to community. And I think pandemic had a huge effect on all business. We are one of the lucky ones to have been able to really grow very, very fast because of COVID-19. Not everyone is growing. And I know it's a challenging time, but it's also a very good time to rethink and think about what's your strategy as marketer. Do you just want to run events once a year, how we used to? And do a very limited experience, or do you want to create something bigger? And I think it's the right time to sit with your team, with your CEO, with everyone involved in strategy, marketing, to move to event-only and think about hybrid and then community, create network effects, and reach a global audience. So, thank you so much for being with us. I will pass over to Unn to see if there is any question in the chat and happy to answer any question you have.

All right, so we have a question about how would community model boost engagement with our audience?

The reason why it really boosts engagement is because you have access to much more content. You, as I said, it's no longer siloed experience, it's a global experience. So I don't need to register to all of your events and I will have access to much more content, much more people, which means more value for me. Then I will be able to interact with all this content and you will create more engagement, but you will also create longer engagement instead of creating engagement during 2 days. You're able really to create engagement all year long with your community.

Let's see, we have another question. How should we structure membership and payment for a community?

I think this is really a strategy. You can have a very curated community which is paid only. And something which is really restricted to few members, for instance Harvard as a paid community, and it's nothing free. But maybe you want to use your community to have something bigger, and in which case you maybe want to create network effects, and maybe you want to have as much as people attending your community. So it depends on your strategy. You can have a free community, I will register to event, maybe I only pay to event and then I'm part of a free community, or maybe I can have the event paid, and then maybe you want to set a subscription or a freemium version. So it really depends on what you want to achieve, if you want to give it for free or if you want to monetize it. Also, with community, if it's a free community on the attendees part, you can always sponsor it, you know, you can create sponsor package, you can have a partner doing a webinar within the community once a month. So there is a lot of ways to monetize communities.

Baptiste, you bring up a good point about how sponsors would get ROI from community because, you know, in essence, it's kind of like a business directory come to life, right? It's not just, they just look at their profile and there's a phone number. They can actually see their products, they can engage with the sales team. Is there any other ROI that you see, you know, from sponsors on the community platform?

I think one of the challenges of the event industry for every sponsor, every exhibitor, and from any marketer is to measure the return on investment. And I think with virtual events or community platform, the really added value is to be able to track everything happening to the platform, and that's really a game changer for the event industry.

Very nice. We have another question: any tips on how to best nurture event attendees? Top dos and don'ts?

It depends on if it's virtual or in-person events. I would say that what you have to deliver, it's really amazing content. These days, people really attend events, virtual events, for content. For in-person events, we mostly attend for networking opportunities. It's a different game. So I would say that really focusing on the content and making sure you have A great content will attract people and then they will network from the content. So you write content, then you will create networking, and that's where you should be focusing as marketers these days.

Very nice. I'm gonna just look at the poll questions and the question we asked about, are you planning to incorporate a community approach for your organization? Interesting to see that, so 22% are already using community, 11% do not have plans, but 67% are actually, they're all thinking about it, and this is the time that they're evaluating and needing more information about, you know, what that means and how they implement something like that.

I think just if you want to launch a community, you need to create adoption, so focusing on events and create engaging events, and from the event, convert them into a community. It's very important to create adoption at first, and so events, it's a great way to start a community. It's much, much harder to create a community if you don't have a live event, if it's virtual or hybrid or in-person events. So use events to create emulation, and then you will end up with a community.

And then the question we asked about, have you run a virtual event in the last this year, 86% have, and 14% have not yet, but they're planning to. So that's very interesting.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I think we should not be scared to run virtual events, and virtual events should not be webinars. Virtual events are not Zoom. This is very different from running a webinar. Don't forget that events, it's a lot of stuff. There is a lot of conversation, it's able to do roundtable, it's able to schedule meetings, interact with people, and do networking. So I would really recommend you, if you run virtual events, if you have run virtual events, you have seen challenges, maybe just to benchmark new platform and think about how you can create better and more engaging virtual events.

We have a question on any tips on how to avoid community fatigue and not to spam the community?

To avoid what?

Community fatigue, so overmessaging.

That's a really good question. It's— frankly, I don't really know if we can create community fatigue like Zoom fatigue. For me, when I'm part of a community, normally the community give me the knowledge, give me the value. And there is, you know, we all want to belong to something. I don't have much communities. I don't know if you guys have a lot of communities, but me, even LinkedIn is not a community. There is so much noise. I just want to network with peers who are having the same challenge as me and then can really give me value. So I will not subscribe to many communities. I will try to find one community, who really fit my needs and fit who I am as a person and my job title. So maybe if we all go towards community, we will have a community fatigue in few months, but right now I have mostly a Zoom fatigue.

Okay, so another question. What are the best tactics to community building you've seen to be the most successful in your experience?

Yes, so as I was saying, I think it's really, really creating a gathering of people that you want to target with an event. About Swapcard, we touched very quickly, we had to adapt, otherwise we would have died. When COVID-19 arrived, we lost all our clients, we lost all our pipeline, and we had to adapt as a platform and say, okay, we need to evolve and we need to provide virtual events. And so, To prove this new module, this new platform, that was something you can rely on, we have run our own virtual events. And so we were planning to have maximum 1,000 people, and we turned out to have 5,000 virtual events. Something that really make us to be successful was this virtual event where people logged and did discover us, and they were able to answer a lot of their questions about how do I launch a virtual event, what is a virtual event, how do I monetize virtual events. And so we really give the power to people within the ecosystem, not pushing Swapcard. We gather lots of speakers and we had like partners, so every time someone would register, was posting on LinkedIn, so he was creating some word of mouth on LinkedIn and more people were noticing that virtual event. And once we have done that virtual event, because we had so much engagement and people really love to be able to speak to each other because we all have the same challenges, then we decided to turn it into a community. And then what we have done is that since June, we do once a month a virtual event on a specific topic, and we keep sending polls and surveys to the community to say, what are your challenges? What do you want us to focus on the next episode? And so my strategy, because this is what we have done, we learn it by doing it, it's to really turn your event into a community. I think if we have launched a community without all these events who attract the people, we have never had 10,000+ community members. Maybe we will be 1,000 members. And so my advice for you is to keep the relationship with your audience. And now with virtual events, you know, it's so quick to launch, it's so quick to run. It's not like what you used to do in-person events with lots of costs, lots of logistics. You can really run a virtual event once a month, it's very easy to implement. Once you have done once, you know how to do it very quickly at scale. That would be my advice for you guys.

Alright, I'm seeing if there's any other questions. There aren't right now, but let's see. So in your conversations about this that you've been having with clients, what have you been finding is, you know, what are they saying about their need? Like, why are they launching a community? Why aren't they just doing events?

I think we are in a very different— what they realize with virtual events is that you can have a much bigger audience. When you used to run face-to-face events like SASster, I would have never been able to attend SASster. I would have maybe never taken a flight to become a speaker at SASster. Maybe there is a lot of you guys joining now who would have never attended SASster because it was maybe too expensive, maybe with all the associated costs, maybe because of the region, maybe you were too busy to travel during 3 days. So with virtual events, our customers were not really willing to do virtual events at first, but then— sorry— then they learned that virtual events, you can have a global audience. There is no border for your events. And because they have been able to attract so many members or attendees, they say, oh, we now have a global audience, so what do we do with this global audience? And because they have captured so much data, as I said, 'Oh, we should keep going, we should keep tracking all this stuff.' And then, of course, they learned to do one virtual event, two virtual events, and now they are experts into running virtual events. So when the event team could only focus on one event a year, now they can turn virtual events very quickly. So because they learned that you can scale virtual events, you can run lots of virtual events, This is why they have the global audience and now they understood they can provide value at scale and keep going and provide something much bigger than just throwing events once a year.

Alright, someone's asking if we have any, I don't know if we've thought about this yet, but any cybersecurity features for community?

Cybersecurity. We do a lot of cybersecurity events. We actually are powering Black Hat, US, Asia, and Europe. It used to be 3 separate events, and they are launching a cybersecurity community where they will have all these Black Hat attendees and content. So I would say, I don't know if we have any specific feature for cybersecurity community. I would say that we have a very good security not to be hacked by the member of these communities. So that would be my answer.

All right, let's see. I'm trying to see how much more time we have. All right, yeah, well, what Baptiste is bringing up, a good point, is we were seeing— oh, we have 15 minutes. We were seeing already that, you know, our, our clients were using our platform already the way it is as a workaround for community. Is that, you know, safe to say, Baptiste, that a lot of people were kind of using that evolved model where they're having their big event, but then they were doing little mini webinars beforehand to kind of get the excitement up, and then post-event they were doing, you know, perhaps another virtual event where they went over what they learned and maybe trends You know, on that community is just kind of the next step, right? The next evolution where you keep all that engagement, you know, like Baptiste was saying, the acquisition, like the dollars you spend to get that, you know, attendee, you're keeping them in that platform, you're engaging them throughout. What I think is great is also, you know, for sponsors, another thing is, you know, they can also perhaps do a survey to that group, right? That's their key group. So they could probably work with an event organizer to do some, you know, user research for a new product launch. There's a lot of ways that, you know, community can be monetized.

I think something regarding this, something, a learning was that When we were doing in-person events, the content was nowhere. If you were not attending the event, you could not consume the content afterwards. With virtual events, everything is recorded, so you have access to the content in a digital format. And because our clients have been able to capture all content, they have created the library of very valuable content, and that enable them to monetize that content. We have a lot of clients that the community is paid, and if you pay the subscription, then you have access to all content they organize all year long. And so some of our clients like a really large event like South by Southwest is one of our clients. And so they are able to create a lot of content and all over the world because they organize many, many events. And then they will create all this content into the platform and turn it into on-demand access. And that, if your community is paid, that's gold, you know, because every week, every month, there is updates, content has been updated and pushed to the platform. And if you are really good at creating engaging content, if you have a great relationship with the top speaker of your industry, like Saster, Saster could turn all their content into this library, and me as a CEO of a I want to reach out to VCs, I want to know better SaaS, you know, I will subscribe to the community because I will have access to all the most valuable contacts plus all the most valuable content. And that's why this community starting to be on every, every mouth because I have the content, I can turn it into a revenue model, I have a global audience, so now I have a community. And people were not ready, but now they have lots of community in their hands.

Alright, we have a question. Typically, what profit percentage should we push for as organizers, especially when we are doing virtual events?

Wow, that's a tricky question regarding profits. I don't really remember, but we sponsored a study with Sear, which is the association of the event industry, which is available on our website. If you go to swapcard.com, there is a resource center, and then there is this white paper you can download. And there is actually a benchmark about the profit you can generate with virtual events. We haven't seen a standard margin. We have some clients who really struggle to generate margin. This will be mostly exhibition because they're used to sell square meter. And so the price of the booth was really expensive. And so when I have an online booth, I will not spend as much as a booth with all the furniture. So the very large events, they reduce revenues. And you know, because it's a different game, it's mostly buyer and seller meeting, then it was hard for them to have a high margin events. If you are doing Conference, it's very different. Conference is really focusing on content. We have done Black Hat, Black Hat was really successful in terms of ticket sales. I think too, we had also EMAP, a client who have done a case study. They said that with virtual event, they have increased margin. And we have some clients who have a +70% margin. And so I think the more you understand how to streamline your processes to organize virtual events, the higher margin you will get. And again, as I was saying, you can, once you have a community, you create network effects. So you can monetize all this, you can monetize events. So you can say this event is paid only, you can say that accessing to the content is also something paid, but then if your community is free, you can have sponsor. In Swapcard, you can run ads, target groups, So there is a lot of ways you can monetize, but I would say that your virtual event should be higher profit, and you can ask for higher ticket sales, because if I was attending your events, it will cost me a lot of associating cost. I will have to take a flight, I will have to book a hotel, I will have to pay for my food, maybe it will be me and who's coming, so 2 people, double cost, but I will still come to your event. Organizing a virtual event, you remove all these associated costs. So maybe you want to increase your ticket sales because, you know, you're still providing the value, and why don't you capture this piece of this part of the cake? So I would say that it depends on where you are. I will be glad to send you afterwards the ebook to download, and there is a benchmark run by SEER about that average margin.

Alright, so we have a question: What are the most effective metrics for measuring virtual events?

So I would say that the main metrics, it's engagement during live session, how many sessions your audience watch, and Did they really watch the session all, I mean, for the entire duration of the session? Something cool about Swapcard is that we have a picture-to-picture, so you can navigate and go to other page and you still watch the session. And so this is another way to capture the attention of your audience. So for me, you should have a look at, of course, total people of, total of people who register, who log to the platform, and then how long they spend into the platform. And so we have learned that for virtual events, the main metric these days is on the content versus the networking. We are in pandemic, people want to really learn before to network. Once we will get back to hybrid events, trust me, it will be the opposite. People will want to just have a good time and network and meet all the people they have missed. So for me, the main metrics would be the engagement on all the sessions you create. And of course, the feedback you will get. With Swapcard, you can roll, send polls, surveys, you can get a lot of engagement. And we have seen that lots of people share when they have a good session in the live chat, For our last event, we had a lot of messaging, "Hey, it was very helpful, it was very valuable." When you are in in-person events, people watch the session and they leave, they don't say anything, they don't share that feedback. So I think you can also collect a lot of feedbacks, and that's something you can really track.

Another good way, I think, to measure the ROI or the effectiveness of the virtual event is, you know, how your sponsors are acting. If it's an event that you had sponsors on, you know, like we were saying earlier, you can deliver all this data to them about not only, you know, in an in-person event, like let's say they're at a booth, they're not really gonna see the people who just kind of came in, maybe you were too busy to speak to them, so, you know, they looked around and they left, you know, maybe they forgot to come back, that might be a lost lead. Where now in, you know, in virtual, it's, You're going to get all that information regardless. You'll see when they came in, you know, what they looked at, you know, what papers they downloaded from you. It's, you know, you have a wealth of knowledge now, and that you can deliver to your sponsors as, you know, some metrics on, you know, how they did, how their engagement was. Um, see. Okay, so I think they are telling us to wrap up. Up. Um, thank you so much for having us. This is really, really great.

Thank you so much, guys.

Yeah, thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it. Great questions coming in, so it's great to learn a little bit more about the platform and what you guys are seeing. And for all our attendees, thank you for joining. We've got some other sessions going on right now as well as some networking opportunities, so we'll see you at the next session.

Okay, we're backstage.

Do we just go off now, right? Or because we don't do, we don't do the roundtable session now, right?

No, Amelia said that there is no roundtable session, so that was a roundtable session.