There’s no doubt that building attendance is critical to organizers of conferences and trade shows. Besides the extra revenue to help pay the costs of the event, increased attendance brings valuable benefits to event participants who are the ultimate audience that event organizers serve.

More attendance at conferences means attendees have access to more people for “networking”, making events more rewarding and beneficial. At trade shows, exhibitors and sponsors generate more business when more prospects show up for face-to-face discussions. Even event organizers benefit from greater attendance as they are often part of associations interested in building larger memberships for their organizations, so events are often “membership drives”. Do you identify with this?

It’s no surprise that social media is very effective in building attendance to events. Just a few years ago before social media, people found out about events through “word of mouth”. If you were a networker and attended events, you would find out which events to go to through colleagues or friends who told you about events they would go to.

Social media is the modern-day version of “word of mouth”, except like a sports car compared to the horse-drawn buggy. Success stories are starting to roll in. Ticketing companies like Eventbrite blogged about their recent success with Twitter experiments.

How Presdo Match Builds Attendance For Your Event

Presdo Match brings you more people to your events through a powerful feature called Social Invites. Built into Presdo Match, Social Invites are simple, powerful and very effective. For every 100 Social Invites sent, an average of 2.6 people will register for your event. Compare this rate to conversions generated from email campaigns, and this becomes a highly effective way to bring new people to your events.

Any attendee—whether an attendee, exhibitor or sponsor—participating in your event is automatically presented with a list of their LinkedIn contacts.

By simply clicking on names, attendees can invite their LinkedIn connections to your event. As the event organizer, you can personalize Social Invites with a link directly to your event registration page along with a promotion code if you wish. Social Invites are delivered to the invitees’ LinkedIn Inbox and they get an email notification.

Think of the exhibitors and sponsors now being able to easily invite their clients and prospects to your events, or conference attendees who bring key contacts to your event so they can catch up with them.

Thanks to Social Invites, Presdo Match actually pays for itself. The additional tickets sold through Social Invites pays for the cost of Presdo Match several times over, making the use of Presdo Match for your event a no-brainer.

Today, we’re finally delivering on your desire. We’d love to tell you about the center of our new scheduling user interface.

Upon creating your event, you see our new calendar UI for selecting times.

It does all the things you’d expect for selecting times, like clicking to add times and dragging time blocks to change a proposed time. You can change the duration of your event by resizing the time block. You can propose up to 3 times, since as before, guests are allowed to pick from 3 times to indicate their availability from the times you choose.

The gray areas are the times you have already booked, so you can now see what times should not be proposed (unless you want to). Combine this with the ability to sync with Google Calendar and now you have an up-to-date view of your availability when scheduling.

Oh, there’s a nifty thing that Presdo does. If you don’t want to poke through the calendar to look for free times, let Presdo do it for you. On the home page, you can still type in a phrase for a time window, like “Friday”. Presdo uses its Time Suggestion Engine to suggest 3 suitable times for you based on your availability, spreading out times to give guests some good choices to pick from. Of course, you can fine tune those times before sending the event to guests.

All these things go toward making scheduling even easier.

We’ve gather a lot of detailed feedback over the years, and out of all this feedback, we are re-thinking and streamlining the process to make scheduling faster and easier than ever. This release is the first of many enhancements around the calendar to come in our quest to make Presdo more usable and useful to more people. More to come!

We’re not the first to have a contact importer, but we promise the world’s easiest… and it’s now built into Presdo.

Here’s a quick run-through of how it works.

You’ll see a small link next to the WHO section on any event page to start importing contacts:

Click this link, and it will redirect you to Google to give permission for Presdo to access your Google contacts.

Your contacts will become available in Presdo within a few seconds.

And, whenever you want to use new contacts which Google has added for you since the last import, just go to the Contacts tab of Presdo’s settings page, and click the “Update Now” button.

You can import contacts from all Google and Google Apps accounts.

We promised it was easy.

Up until now, Presdo has been a great tool for people who organize all of their events within the app.  But let’s face it, a lot of people already use calendars, and until now, there was no good way to get people’s schedules into Presdo.  Presdo was sometimes considered an unreachable island of functionality, however great it might have been once you got here!

Some users suggested that we create a one-time calendar importer function to manage the gap, but given the dynamically changing nature of people’s calendars, we knew that wasn’t good enough.  The Presdo team has invested considerable effort to create a syncing capability that we would be proud of, and we’d like to take you on a brief tour of it.

Works with Your Availability

What does syncing with Google Calendar give you?  Briefly, you can now use Presdo to schedule events with your availability in mind.  When you schedule a Presdo event in your desired time window, Presdo offers multiple times from this time window to your guests to gather responses.  With sync, there’s a new and valuable twist.

Let’s say you’re traveling and will be in town to meet with someone on Thursday, and you’re trying to set up some meetings for Thursday.

Before syncing, the times that would be suggested for Thursday were only scheduled around other events you already had on Presdo.  Without information about your availability, Presdo suggests times spread throughout Thursday to your guests:

With Google Calendar sync, Presdo now has access to your calendar and events and knows not to suggest times during which you are unavailable.  Let’s say you have already booked meetings between 9-10:30am and 1:30 to 3:30 Thursday.  On your new event, Presdo now suggests only times that are still available to guests:

See how the times suggested to guests take note of your availability?  Cool, huh?

One View Inside Your Google Calendar

What we’ve described so far is only one half of the new sync feature.

The syncing capability continuously updates any changes in both directions.  When you confirm a specific time for an event on Presdo, your event is automatically placed on your Google Calendar:

The events that you schedule using Presdo are placed onto a separate and personalized calendar that you are automatically subscribed to called “Presdo Events”.  This way, you can clearly distinguish between the events coming from Presdo versus your own Google Calendar events.

And as you might expect, if you reschedule the times for Presdo events, they get automatically updated in Google Calendar.  Many of you have asked for the ability to automatically save events and change them on your calendar, and we’re very happy to finally deliver this capability to you.

Other Cool Things

• Events before and after – since Presdo now has access to your Google Calendar, it does some cool things to make the overall scheduling experience better.Whenever you see specific times being proposed inside Presdo, you will see a simple pop-up that shows your agenda for that day.

  

  The day agenda shows your events before and after the time in question so you have better context to decide whether it’s a good time that’s being proposal.

• Works with multiple Google Calendars – Since any Google account can subscribe to more than one Google Calendar at a time, such as a work and family calendar, you can also sync Presdo with any selection of the calendars you have access to, so you can control the availability that Presdo sees for you.When you set up syncing, just choose which calendars you want to sync:

  

   

• Works with Google Apps – finally, our syncing feature works for both normal Google accounts as well as with calendars inside Google Apps accounts, so it’s great for professional users using Google Apps.

With sync with Google Calendar, we believe Presdo will benefit a whole new audience of users already using Google Calendar to keep track of their schedules.  You now have an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that works with your Google Calendar to find the best time for group events.

So give it a spin, and get started here!  More information about our sync feature can be found in our help.

We look forward to your feedback on the new feature!

• Presdo now notifies you and your guests on the day event(s) happens. Presdo used to send notifications the day before, but we’ve made this behavior more familiar so that no one forgets about the event on the day of the event.

• Presdo used to notify you on events that need your action, whether responding to an event you were invited to or confirming a final time. Whenever there’s an event in this category, we now bring this category of events forward so that it is the very first part of the notification. This way, you won’t be missing invites requiring your attention.

• Whenever Presdo sends you a notification caused by the above reasons, Presdo also tells you about events that might be coming up in the next few days—if there are any. Normally, Presdo won’t bother you with these events until the day of, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded a couple times of such upcoming events several days in advance just in case.

We’re very happy with these improvements. They are built on top of an existing slick reminder feature that combines all the day’s events into one message, delivered to you before the start of the day when they happen.

So, don’t worry about forgetting, since Presdo reminders will be here to help!

To use Presdo with Google Chrome, make sure you have the latest version of Chrome, which is at least 2.0.172.39.  To find out how to update Chrome, check here.

Thanks to our users who recently pointed this out to us.

Of course, we continue to support Presdo on the latest versions of IE, Firefox and Safari.

In keeping with our approach of simplicity, there is actually nothing to configure to use the new reminders feature.  All events are instantly enabled for reminders.  Here’s how it works.

The day before any event you have scheduled, Presdo sends you an email reminding you of the upcoming event.  If you have multiple events on that day, these events are grouped into the same notification message so you see your upcoming events at a glance.

Need to reschedule an event because something suddenly came up?  The reminder provides an easy way to get to the events by providing links to each event so you can reschedule them easily.

Worried that your guests need a reminder for your event too?  No problem.  Presdo automatically sends your guests reminders for the same event too.  Maybe one of your guests hasn’t responded to your invite yet.  Presdo still sends them a reminder, and tells them that a reply is still needed.

We put a lot of thought into the reminders feature to make it just right.  Hopefully it will come in handy when the time is just right!

When you get invited to events or are notified about changes to events, Presdo automatically attaches an iCalendar event to the email that can be saved directly into your calendar.  Of course, the time of the event has to be set.  This iCalendar event not only includes the date and time, but also other details such as the location and who’s coming.

Some email programs even do cool things when they find attached iCalendar events.  If you’re a Gmail user, Gmail will automatically show you events from your Google Calendar before and after the Presdo event… right inside your email!

We hope you enjoy this little feature, which makes Presdo even better to use.

We made such changes recently by removing the time scroller part of our UI, a.k.a. the UI for picking a “best time” while creating events.

We’re here today to discuss this and other design changes and fill you in on Presdo’s design process.  These changes are subtle but important changes and we want our users to know about them and more importantly, why we did them.

Many users will know that you were able to pick a best time within a time window or choice of times when you create an event:

Even though it was a useful feature at times, we decided to eliminate the ability to pick a best time when setting the time for an event.

What this means now is that, like before, when you give a time window or a choice of times for an event, Presdo will make specific time suggestions to your guests within your time preference and collect their input about best times.

Why We Did It

First, we felt that there are more situations where it was actually more useful if the organizer did not pick the best time.

We’d like to illustrate this with an example.  Let’s say Henry is a small business owner who wants to use Presdo to schedule consultations with different clients at his office.  Henry does not care when clients come in, as long as they come in during on Thursday or Friday afternoon when he has set aside time for such visits.  It makes sense for Henry to give clients the first opportunity to pick a time within the time window he desires.

With the recent change to the way Presdo works, it’s now possible to achieve this; Henry enters a time window, “thu or fri afternoon”, for every meeting he wants to schedule and sends them off to his clients.  Each party picks the most convenient time for themselves.

Here’s what Henry’s guests will see when they reply:

As time slots for Thursday and Friday afternoon are filled, new clients will have only still-available time slots suggested to them during Thursday and Friday afternoon.  By removing the time scroller UI, we actually make Presdo’s behavior more useful for Henry.

Have we lost anything?  Not too much.  Some users already told us they would still like to pick a “best time”.  In fact, we believe that it’s not so much that they want to pick a best time as there are times that are not as good for them.  To get around this, you can still guide Presdo by being more specific about the times.  For example, you can enter individual time choices like “thu 2:30 or 4″ or time windows like “thu after 2:30 or friday afternoon” into Presdo.

New Time Entry Feedback

While we were at it, we also enhanced a feature that users told us they loved, which is a confirmation below the time text field showing what Presdo recognizes as you type it in:

New Guest Reply UI

We also simplified the user experience for guests by removing the “Suggest Another Time” button when they reply.  The “Yes” and “No” buttons are still there as before.  Of course, it’s still possible for guests to suggest another time, but now it’s part of deciding “yes” to the event instead of a totally separate action:

We believe this change will make it even easier for invitees to understand and interact Presdo.

By taking away some parts of the UI, we’ve actually made Presdo more flexible and powerful.

What do you think of these “less is more” changes?  Let us know!