Executive Summary

The National School Safety Conference team utilized Whova’s event services to great effect, achieving high levels of engagement through our many networking features. The conference, which was held on July 12-19, also benefited from Whova’s convenient Name Badge feature, which allowed them to easily generate and print name badges on-site for checked-in attendees.

About NASRO National School Safety Conference

The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) is a nonprofit organization that trains school-based law enforcement across the United States and other parts of the world. According to its website, NASRO works with school-based police, school administrators, school security, and safety professionals to help keep schools and children safe.

The National School Safety Conference provided NASRO members an opportunity to train and network with officers from across the country. The event had a focus on updating officers on different trends, safety initiatives, and legal updates so that the officers are equipped with the necessary knowledge to be the best asset they can be to their students.

Challenges/Goals

Printing Professional Name Badges

Before Whova, NASRO used a different company for name tags every year. The organizers wanted to be able to print professional-looking name tags on-site without having to rent special equipment to do so. 

Make Lead Collection More Efficient

NASRO wanted to shift to digital methods of lead collection, so they were looking to add lead scanning capabilities for their exhibitors.

Facilitating Engagement

Since the NASRO conference serves as many school officers’ main opportunity to meet other resource officers outside their departments, organizers wanted to increase opportunities for networking.

Simpler Event Agenda Management

Organizers wanted a less complicated process of creating and updating the event agenda. Before Whova, if any changes were made to the agenda, the organizers would have to save it as a new PDF, reupload it to their website and relink the new document; at times, it was difficult to keep track of which version was the most up-to-date.

Real-Time Communication with Attendees

To keep attendees updated and the event running smoothly, the NASRO organizers wanted to communicate with attendees throughout the event effectively. 

Solutions

Easily Generate and Print Name Badges

Whova’s Name Badges feature helped organizers generate a professional-looking name badge for each attendee and print the badges on site.

Organizers created customizable name badge templates using the design tool in the Name Badge feature. Then, Whova pulled information from the attendee list to generate name badges for each attendee. Whenever an attendee checked in, the check-in staff simply pressed the “Print Badge” button next to the attendee’s name to print their name badge on the spot. 

The organizers did not need to rent any special equipment to print name badges; Whova allows organizers to set the name badge sizes and paper size parameters to meet the requirements of any printer and paper products they have access to.

Organizers set up name badge templates like the one above ahead of time, generated name badges for all their attendees, and printed them on-site for their attendees in one smooth process.

More Efficient Exhibitor Lead Retrieval with QR Code Lead Scanning

Exhibitors can easily collect leads by scanning attendees’ QR Codes, which are accessible on their name badges, as well as in the Whova app and Whova event pass in Apple and Google Wallet.

The NASRO organizers have called this feature a “game changer” for exhibitors. It facilitates more efficient connection between exhibitors and attendees, which increases exhibitor ROI and draws more exhibitors in for future events. In fact, the NASRO exhibit hall is now bigger than it has ever been in the history of the organization.

Encourage Attendee Engagement through Whova’s Community Board and Other Networking Features

Whova’s Community Board was a popular feature among attendees, who used it to start discussions on how to handle different issues across school systems, arrange casual gatherings like a night out at a sports bar, and share logistical information like airport ridesharing coordination.

Aside from large group conversations on the Community Board, attendees also chatted amongst themselves using the Whova app’s private messaging; a total of 7,354 private messages were sent over the course of the event.

“[Our attendees] love the opportunity to connect with one another and talk with one another. And a lot of these people enjoy coming and seeing what we call ‘the family’, or the NASRO family every year. We really enjoy the networking features that allow 2,000 people at a conference to feel like they’re really able to connect and meet people. It makes a really big conference feel really small and personal.” 

 

-Kaitlin Candelaria, NASRO Digital Marketing Coordinator

Smoother Agenda Planning Experience with Agenda Center

With Whova’s Agenda Center, organizers had one central place to create and update the event agenda, so all the event admins could work from the same, up-to-date information.

The organizers had the choice of importing an agenda spreadsheet into the Agenda Center or adding sessions manually if there were not many sessions in their event. The session information in the Whova Agenda Center was then used to automatically generate a clean, well-designed agenda on the Whova event app. 

Another benefit of the Agenda Center is that it is auto-synced across the organizer dashboard and event app. This means that instead of having to reupload the agenda to the event website every time it was updated, organizers could rely on Whova’s auto-sync design to automatically update the agenda information.

Once organizers input session information into Whova’s Agenda Center, the information was used to automatically generate the event app agenda for attendees to use.

Effective event communication through Announcements

The organizers were able to communicate with their attendees in real time using the Whova Announcements feature. The announcements feature allowed organizers to send messages through both email and in-app messaging— a design that boosts open rates from around 20% with email-only announcements to 80% with Whova’s announcements.

The NASRO organizers also made sure that every announcement they sent contained logistical information that was pertinent to the attendees, taking care to avoid flooding their attendees with notifications. With their strategy and Whova’s announcements feature, the NASRO event ended up with an announcement open rate of 81%.

“[Whova is] a 10 out of 10… We’ve been able to introduce it to [some of NASRO’s state affiliates] and they’re taking advantage of it for their conferences as well. They’re going to be able to utilize it to grow their conferences, the same way we have.”

 

-Kaitlin Candelaria, NASRO Digital Marketing Coordinator