Strategic Pivot: Splash's Expansion into Attendee App Solutions
Overview
Splash, a trailblazer in event marketing platforms, empowers event hosts to fuel business growth with a diverse set of tools to:
Simplify event creation and marketing processes
Amplify and generate compliant branding at every interaction
Market to the right people
Measure event success
Splash serves a diverse clientele of enterprises, nonprofits, and educational institutions, facilitating over 500,000 events annually.
Business Objective
Business Problem: Splash, known for small, repeatable events, was losing a significant percentage of opportunities partly due to a lack of features aimed at large, complex events—especially an attendee app. Large, complex events meaning 2,500 attendees spread across three different venues with three different tracks each with 30+ different sessions.
Business Problem: In addition, CFOs are pressuring their marketing departments to consolidate their tech stack so there a threat to retention as well. If a large, complex event platform can handle small, repeatable events then that pressure to consolidate is a massive threat to Splash.
Business Solution: Offering an attendee app within Splash should be the first step to address large-complex events.
Business hypothesis: If we offer an attendee app, we will grow business with prospects and retain customers who want to run large, complex events.
Research Objective
Research was then broken down into understanding the following:
Identify current usage of attendee apps in the market and current usage of attendee apps amongst our current customers
Identify use cases and how attendee apps fit into our customer’s ecosystem
Identify barriers to adopting attendee apps for events
Methods
A comprehensive research strategy was employed to gather nuanced insights:
Desk Research: reviewed marketing and communication materials of competitors, internal data, analyst reports, and review sites like G2 to understand the current state of the market and frustrations.
Attendee app mentioned in 145 closed lost, and 21 churn reports
$2.8 billion dollar attendee app spend by 2030, 14% YoY growth
~760 different attendee app vendors
~62% of event guests adopt an attendee app
68.5% of event attendees consider an app an important to the experience
78% of companies that use attendee apps for large events say it improves ROI
Annual nature of attendee apps means customers have time to manage change to new vendors if dissatisfied with experience
Stakeholder Interviews: conducted stakeholder interviews across the company to understand the qualitative feedback about attendee apps and their expected impact on the business
Sales cited attendee apps as a need because it is included in RFPs and without checking that box Splash is eliminated from contention
Solutions cited attendee app as a need but considered other features like meeting booking and sessions registration as higher because they considered it to have more direct impact on net new and retention
Customer Success thought attendee app would cause several issues: Sessions and other improvements more important for retention, low customer enthusiasm for attendee app, reconciling attendee app with Splash reputation for small, repeatable events, additional costs and contract negotiations challenging in macro economic climate
Product, Engineering, and Design believed in order to make the Splash <> Attendee App vendor relationship successful would require generating data in Splash that could then be streamed through integrations to Attendee App vendors. Depending on the size of the event may mean high support and maintenance costs if not correctly associated with pricing model.
Survey: created a brief four-question survey in Pendo pushed to all eligible enterprise users. Survey included dynamic questions about:
Usage of attendee apps
Barriers to adoption
Attendee App vendors
Open-ended “why?” questions regarding usage and/or challenges
Data Analysis: Analyzed survey data from over 1,500 participants, reaching statistical significance for our user base and leading to a rich dataset.
Attendee app usage: 62% reported non-usage
Barriers to adoption: 55% citing no perceived need, 13% deterred by cost, 8% do not use because of dissatisfaction with attendee app vendor capabilities
Cataloging preferred apps, with "Splash" mistakenly identified as an attendee app by 47% of respondents, highlighting a significant branding and communication gap
21% of the 38% of customer base who use attendee apps open to changing vendors
User Interviews: identified 25 survey respondents cleared by CSMs for contact and successfully recruited 8 users for interviews.
Attendee App users only used an app for a large, complex event because of the high cost (in the millions of dollars), the high visibility (CEO considers it the most important event of the year, high value customers attend, big marketing spend), and that they offer a more seamless attendee experience that can scale
All events, no matter the size and complexity, require the following capabilities but at different scales: Schedule Management, Event Navigation, Centralized Information, Engagement & Social Features, Feedback Channel, Push & Passive Communications
Large, complex events produce a vast amount of diverse data that is then integrated into an attendee app vendor or within one product.
Engagement and Social features are considered to be the biggest differentiators for users when they evaluate vendors because that is where attendees find the most value and give attendees a reason to download the app i.e. participate in networking. Other important capabilities were branding and customization of the app experience as well as ease of integration. Users do not want to double their work and copy + paste.
Current Product Capabilities: The analysis was further deepened by considering Splash's existing product limitations and strategic challenges, particularly in enhancing the sessions feature and enabling complex, segmented experiences, essential for large-scale events where attendee apps are most common.
Users currently used workarounds to produce events with multiple sessions. This had caused several gotchas and caveats that made scaling and redeploying event types critically poor.
Recommendations & Outcomes
The research yielded the following recommendations and outcomes
Pivot from Attendee App to Attendee Experiences:
Essentially, in the matrix of complexity and size of event, attendee apps only addressed one quadrant: big and complex events
Splash current capabilities were not able to meet the data needs of large and complex events. Segmented registration for multi-site, multi-session events was not available. Therefore, even if Splash integrated with an attendee app, it would not be able to generate and stream data to the vendor
There was a massive opportunity for Splash to expand and solve valuable problems for customers by focusing on addressing attendee experience needs at smaller, less complex events. For example, automated centralized information day of the event, survey and feedback channels workflows, engagement solutions, SMS solutions, meeting booking, etc…
Long term, in order to get Splash known as the platform that excels at simple events AND can handle large, complex events it needs to build complexity and size capabilities over time so that the data is available for attendee apps to leverage
Product Development Guidance: There was a need for better session management and segmented experiences, directing product enhancement efforts. This feedback was instrumental in prioritizing the development roadmap to better meet user expectations. Based on churn and closed lost reports there was a potential of at least generating $1MM/quarter by solving Sessions.
Strategic Communication Plan: The confusion over Splash's role in the attendee app ecosystem led to the development of a strategic communication plan aimed at clarifying Splash's offerings, the benefits of attendee apps, and how potential partnerships and integrations would come to market.
This case study demonstrates the pivotal role of UX research in bridging the gap between user expectations and product capabilities.
Through a methodical approach to data collection and analysis, the project not only identified key areas for product improvement but also informed a comprehensive strategy to enhance user engagement and adoption by pivoting towards a larger universe of attendee experience solutions.