The motivation behind our idea is making creation of event websites a ‘Cakewalk’ and spreading awareness about them. This can be achieved through understanding the key concepts namely Event Marketing Timeline, Online Community Building and Progressive Web Application. Finally, who doesn’t want to create a website on the fly without learning the required coding skills.
Our Aim is to create a website where events and its participants come together. This website will empower societies and organisations to create websites for upcoming events and at the same time allow users signed up with us to know about the events. This gives the organisation complete control over the website without involving third parties. The progressive component of our web app will ensure that notifications about upcoming events reach all our users, so that no willing participant is left out.
The place we visited is the same place we go to five days a week (sparing any public holiday or an occasional mass bunk), our college Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Dwarka Sector-3, New Delhi, fondly known as NSIT. It is a place of pilgrimage for artists, musicians, debaters, dramatists, social workers, and technocrats, i.e. the Engineers of NSIT. It is a place booming with knowledge, creativity and innovation and to top it all, an incubator of many successful societies. Even in our short period at the college, we have seen quite a few societies come up. We wish to deploy our idea keeping the societies of our college in mind.
An interactive mobile website is a good proposition, but how about a website which performs like a mobile application? Coming to events, the following study shows how participation increases with an user-friendly and interactive website and multiplies even further if there is a mobile version to supplement it.
Personally I, Rohan Wadhawan, was a part of the organising committee of an event called ‘Art of the Start’, organised by the Finance and Economics Society of NSIT (FES) as part of Consilium 2017. Although the event was a success, but it would have been even better if we had some more thought provoking ideas pitched on that day. The key element missing was awareness. Moreover, I have visited several society meets in our college, but unfortunately I have missed quite a few because of lack of notification. Social media platforms like Whatsapp groups or Facebook pages are indeed helpful in spreading awareness but their coverage is limited. Through our website, we want to overcome this issue as every user signed up with us will know about each event irrespective of his or her stream, who knows what might interest someone.This way every willing participant will get a chance to win and not be forced to take a seat in the audience. The following are some photos from The Placement Talk and Java Bootcamp organised by IEEE.
We are targeting three main problems, they are :
1. Making creation of Pre-Event and Event websites easy .
2. Creating an Online Community of Organisations and People.
3. Making a Progressive Web Application which provides a Native Mobile Application experience.
Pre-event website is as important as an event website. By creating a pre-event page, you can have a central page to drive people to, use it to capture leads and early interest (which can then be contacted later) and it will help build up your SEO authority with Google. With our website, the organisations can create event websites for themselves just by filling a form and dragging and dropping the items they want on their website. They can launch their website even when it is partially complete thereby capturing leads and early interest.
Like a customer is to business, a participant is to an event. Once a participant finds you, returning to that beautiful website of yours will be of decreasing interest to them. It’s not that the new developments about the event are no longer of interest to the participant, rather it’s just that they don’t want to make the effort of coming back to your website. Here comes the importance of a booming online community, as it will attract them back to your website.
The Progressive Web Application or simply the PWA is new in the context of web development. It was launched by the Google a couple of years ago (in 2015). It was released and brought into the market with the intention of providing unmatched quality services as far as the mobile apps are concerned.
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One of the biggest advantages that PWA offers is low friction because it is a web based product. This means you don’t have to open the web page and the app separately.
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The installation procedure is simple and you can add it into your home screen. It has greater potentiality to draw customers and therefore, is used by a number of corporate houses, like Alibaba’s PWA, Flipkart’s PWA, etc.
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It always remains up-to date. If you are fixing bug or upgrading the version, then you have to update your app centrally unlike native apps where you need to submit the new version in app store. This means the users remain updated.
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PWAs are comparatively much budget friendlier and quicker to develop in comparison to the native apps. It also supports multiple platforms. This feature is a blessing for the new business owners.
For graphs : https://www.augustash.com/our-blog/mobile-friendly-websites-2017
For PWA vs Native Application : https://www.mindinventory.com/blog/native-apps-vs-progressive-web-apps/
For Event Marketing Timeline : https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/blog/event-marketing-strategy-ds00/
For PWA examples : https://www.tigren.com/examples-progressive-web-apps-pwa/