It has been argued that no business is better than bad business. While this may be true for established organizations in well defined industries it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for many organizations within an emerging industry.
With that said, IMHO, the on-line events industry has done itself a disservice by involving its products and solutions in races to win business it shouldn’t have entered in the first place. Sometimes when the solution isn’t a solid fit then it is best for the long term health of the individual firm and the industry at large to let the business (and subsequent revenue) walk away.
Many have expressed their dissatisfaction when attempting to secure an apples to apples comparison from on-line event providers. The variety of vaguely written RFP’s has done little to help address the issue.
A great analogy put forth within a LinkedIn group on this topic compared shopping for an on-line event platform to shopping for a car. “Like shopping for cars that all have 4 wheels – there are a lot of variations to suit all kinds of needs”. Most car shoppers have a general idea about the type of vehicle that fits their initial criteria before visiting the car lot – budget included.
Most vendors don’t have their rates published anywhere that is publicly available which understandably results in the upfront “how much does this cost?” question. To further expand on the above analogy the overall hard costs for producing an on-line event are similar to what you should expect to pay for car.
Granted that is a broad range but at least it provides a general idea as we have no way of knowing if a simple old pickup truck is enough to get the job done or if a brand new luxury sedan is required.
With this in mind, in addition to these suggestions, my advice for anyone searching for an on-line event platform is to categorize your objectives in some fashion similar to below as the basis for your decision making (always taking the project budget and cost effectiveness into account):
– Features/Services that are mission critical: these we MUST have
– Features/Services that are somewhat critical: these are desired by some key stakeholders
– Features/Services that add marginal value: these would be nice to have but we can live without them
– Features/Services that are trivial: these have little to no importance and may in fact deter from the overall user experience by making things more complicated then they need to be.
There is an abundance of information now available about on-line events. A little time invested in determining/prioritizing what is most important for the key parties involved in, and influenced by, the project will go a long way towards making the process of comparing the apples and oranges of on-line event providers and their solutions much smoother.
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