Executive Summary

The South Carolina Music Educators Association (SCMEA) partnered with Whova to manage their annual 2025 Professional Development Conference, bringing together nearly two thousand music educators. With hundreds of different sessions and speakers, as well as collaborations with sponsors and exhibitors, they chose to manage every part of their conference under the Whova platform and ultimately run a successful event.

About the South Carolina Music Educators Association’s Conferences

SCMEA’s annual Professional Development Conferences host thousands of music teachers from public, private, and collegiate institutions each year. At these conferences, the attendees join to listen to concerts presented by their peers, attend sessions and receptions, and participate in professional development trainings. These events provide attendees with the valuable opportunities to network, earn professional development credits, and meet a variety of exhibitors.

Challenges/Goals

Problematic Event App Experience for Attendees

One of the main priorities for the event organizers was to find an event app that was easy to use for their attendees. In the past, they’ve received feedback from their attendees that the event apps they’ve used were clunky and challenging to navigate. One of their goals with switching to Whova was providing a new mobile app to attendees that would be easier to use.

Inefficient Registration System

For these events, the majority of the organizers’ pre-event work is dedicated to getting the attendees to register. Prior to using Whova, the organizers have tried accomplishing this in a variety of different ways.  First, they attempted to facilitate registration within an app. Then, they tried a different registration system, but had to import the information into another platform. These methods were inefficient and tedious for the organizers, making registration a time consuming process for each of their events.

Complicated Collection of Speaker Information 

Previously, SCMEA’s event organizer was the sole person responsible for collecting all speaker information, including their photos, session descriptions, and more. The organizer would act as the main point of contact for speakers if they needed to update any of their information. This created a lot of back and forth between the presenters and the organizer, who needed to manually tweak any changes on their behalf.

Lack of Exhibitor Management Tools

SCMEA works with many exhibitors for these conferences, and exhibitor management plays a key part in their event planning. One of their main goals for these events is to offer a positive experience for the exhibitors as well as the attendees. Thus, organizers were looking for an event management platform that would help them increase their exhibitors’ ROI through a simple lead retrieval tool, as well as help boost interaction between them and the attendees.

Providing Certificates to Attendees

Each year, the event has attendees who are in the process of renewing their teaching credentials and need certificates to verify that they received the proper professional development credits. Providing these certificates is typically a tedious process that requires the organizers to track session attendance and share that data to certain attendees after the event has ended.

Solutions

Positive Event App Experience

Switching to Whova’s event app, the event organizers found it to be seamless and intuitive compared to what they’ve used before. With the main goal being a positive experience for their attendees, they found that the app was easy for attendees to access and log into, and helped facilitate interactions with others. The attendees used the app to send messages, plan meet-ups, and connect on shared interests through the Community Board. The ability to feature sponsors and exhibitors within the app, and then also have those exhibitors interact with the attendees, was highly beneficial. Their primary organizer, Ryan Tinker, expressed how “a lot of our members as well enjoyed the ability to interact with individual attendees within there in terms of making connections or sending messages or using a message board to create meetups. That was pretty positive.” The app provided more than just a schedule, offering an interactive space for attendees as well as a tool for exhibitors.

For the organizers, it was especially useful to schedule push notifications to send to attendees and provide them with real time updates when needed. The organizers noted a few different times where they needed to make changes to the schedule, or send out announcements to their attendees during the event unexpectedly. The ability to use the mobile app to notify all their attendees was especially valuable in those situations. The event organizer, Ryan Tinker, explained how “for us, having an app that attendees could use during the conference where we could schedule push notifications or just provide an up-to-date schedule no matter when they looked at it, that was really helpful.”

Streamlined Registration System

Whova’s registration system provided a simplified way to allow attendees to register for the event while also collecting all their registrants’ information. Since they were using Whova’s all-in-one platform, it was easy to store all the registration information and streamline the data to the event app. When attendees register, their information gets automatically added to the attendee list, which is used for check-in, name badges, and the attendee profiles in the app. This simplifies the entire registration process by storing all attendee information in the same platform and in turn reducing manual work for the organizer.

Additionally, the organizers utilized Whova’s dedicated exhibitor and sponsor registration to easily register everyone under the same platform while keeping different ticket holders distinct. Just like with attendees, all the sponsor and exhibitor information was synced directly to the rest of the Whova platform. This helped to simplify the registration process further and saved time for the organizer by keeping all the data in one place.

Efficiently Collect Speaker Information in the Speaker Center

With Whova’s Speaker Center, the headaches of going back and forth with speakers and manually filling out their information was no longer a problem. By utilizing this tool, the organizers could easily send out a link to a question form from the Whova platform and allow speakers to add and update their information themselves. All the speaker information then updates automatically to the event app and webpage, meaning the organizers wouldn’t have to make the same changes on multiple platforms. With SCMEA hosting anywhere from 150 to 200 different sessions at these conferences, this was a major time saver.

An Enhanced Exhibitor Experience Through Lead Retrieval, Passport Contests, & More

Being a large event with several exhibitors, Whova’s features for exhibitor management made a significant difference in their ability to improve the exhibitor experience. The in-app lead retrieval proved to be highly useful for exhibitors collecting leads, as they could easily collect attendees’ information by scanning their QR codes rather than manually writing it down each time. Furthermore, this feature is included at no additional cost, meaning they didn’t have to apply any extra charges to their exhibitors to use it.

The exhibitor passport contest was one feature in particular that their event utilized to increase foot traffic to different exhibitors. This encourages attendees to visit various exhibits in order to get their passport scanned and become eligible for prizes at the end of the event. With over 2,000 stamps collected, this was a highly popular tool that provided an easy way for attendees to engage with exhibitors, and for exhibitors to receive more leads. By simply scanning each attendees QR code, it was proven much more convenient than writing down each name and then manually drawing names to pick winners. This, along with a high number of in-app exhibitor impressions, provides useful data to the organizers that they expect will attract a greater number of exhibitors in the future.

Additionally, the event utilized two of Whova’s newer exhibitor features: exhibitor registration and exhibitor booth selection. Whova’s dedicated exhibitor registration proved to be just as useful as the attendee registration, where all exhibitors’ information was streamlined directly to the event app, and kept distinct from other registrants. 

This, along with the exhibitor booth selection, provided the organizers with additional tools for managing their exhibitors. The exhibitor booth selection feature allows exhibitors to choose their exhibitor booth themselves from an interactive floor map. This resource eliminated the organizers’ need to rely on a separate vendor to assign and map out exhibitors to booths, and then have to import them into the management system.

Easily Track Session Attendance and Award Certificates

Whova’s session attendance analytics simplified the process of awarding certificates to attendees. What is typically a tedious process of allocating the appropriate credits to each attendee became significantly easier with Whova’s session check-in tool. The staff and organizers could easily scan each attendee’s QR code on their Whova name badges to effectively track who attended which sessions. This data could then be viewed directly on the Whova dashboard for the organizers to export and share with their attendees. This way, attendees can accurately receive the credits they need without creating a complicated process for the organizers. The ability to easily provide certificates with Whova analytics was highly valuable to both the organizers and attendees.

Conclusion

Overall, the South Carolina Music Association was able to provide a positive event app experience and facilitate higher interaction among attendees and exhibitors by partnering with Whova for their 2025 Professional Development Conference. By utilizing features such as exhibitor lead retrieval, speaker center, and Whova registration, the conference organizers were able to successfully run every aspect of their event under one platform.

Testimonial

“I think the experience with Whova, just in terms of how intuitive it was and easy it was for [attendees] to utilize, was helpful. And the ability to interact with speakers and other attendees, I think they did find that useful.”

– Ryan Tinker, Event Organizer for the South Carolina Music Educators Association