The Event

IPVS, 24th International Pig Veterinary Society Congress. The congress took place in July in Dublin, Ireland at The Royal Dublin Society.

“The 24th Congress will be a truly unique event as we have joined forces with the 8th European Symposium of Porcine Health Management to consolidate the pig veterinary conferences in Europe in 2016 and to create a special event in a special city.

The Congress will be held over four days, bringing together world experts in PED, PRRS, New and Emerging Diseases, and Management and Reproduction.”

The Challenge 

A regular congress feature is to let attendees decide where the following year’s congress will take place (previous locations include, Durban, The Hague, Barcelona and Bangkok).

In the past this meant paper polling, ballot boxes and long queues. Unfortunately the vote is always held at the end of the congress when attendees were keen to get home or had already left.

The IPVS needed a solution that would support quick and easy polling that would maximise participation rates.

The Solution

An event app polling platform contained within the congress event app.

Because the event app could be downloaded onto attendees’ mobile device, every single delegate had ready access to the poll. The app’s security feature ensured a fair ballot of one vote per attendee.

As soon as the poll closed the result was instantly available to show on the Live Display big screen. It was extremely close with a difference of only 1% of the 1,1000 votes deciding that Prague in the Czech Republic would host the 2017 congress. A paper vote that close would have led to a costly and time-consuming recount!

The Logistics

As the event app polling was new to the society, CrowdComms were onsite to promote event app adoption and to make sure delegates were comfortable with using the polling platform.

Things We Loved

The event app polling was seen by the organisers as a roaring success. The poll was completed by over 1,100 delegates, tripling previous poll participation rates.

What they Said

‘At the previous IPVS, I stood as an attendee at the back of the room and watched for hours as people voted for their next destination, and listened to multiple complaints from people disenfranchised from the process due to being unable to attend the final day and the physical vote’

‘When I returned to Ireland, I laid out the problem with Stuart in CrowdComms and we came up with a plan to do it digitally. This wasn’t just a simple vote, it was a multi-million euro decision for the countries involved, so security, integrity and the ability to cross-check through in-built redundancies were vital.

Through Stuart and the CrowdComms team’s flexibility and technical expertise, we put in place a system where the number of delegates voting more than trebled (from around 300 to over 1,000) and the whole process took less than fifteen minutes on the final day. It also – and as a marketing person this is always a bonus – made more people engaged with the process and helped us to do the dramatic reveal to lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’!’

Hugh Torpey, Marketing & Communications manager, MCI