Delivering Items to Your Remote Attendees: Opportunities to Delight + Challenges to Deliver
After a year of social distancing, is there anything more appealing than finding a package—that you didn’t order!—sitting on your doorstep? With audience engagement at the top of the list of virtual event concerns, the team at Kennedy Events has found that you can get a lot of traction from a branded package delivered to attendees prior to your event. KE Partner Paige Buck recently sat down with Senior Producer Shelly Kim to discuss the opportunities—and challenges—involved with shipped items. Watch and learn how to make your pre-event deliverable a hit with attendees!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Paige Buck: When we’re producing events, whether it’s a large tech conference or an employee appreciation gathering, we have found that one of the best ways to create community and a social experience in these virtual events is to include some items that are shipped to each attendee. So we’re going to talk today about some of the unexpected fun and the challenges of shipping things to your guests for business and social events. Hey, Shelly.
Shelly Kim: Hey, Paige.
Paige: So what are some of the shipments that we have brought to client events and what are some of your favorite things?
Shelly: My favorite was obviously a sangria kit. The wine was provided by a local, black-owned winery, which was really nice. It came in a cute jar with dehydrated fruits and sugar cubes, and it was just so nice. So you just take the wine, pour it in the jar, and refrigerate for a few days. It had like four servings. It was really great. The other one was a terrarium kit. It came with the contents—like the bowl that it would go in, the succulents, and the rocks. You could use your own little figurines if you wanted to spice it up a little bit, but the nice part was that they send you that in advance and they have an instructional video.
Paige: We like these best when it's a shared experience. So you take the sangria that you've had brewing in your fridge for a few days and you're drinking it together during the cocktail hour, or you're making those terrarium kits together and then like holding yours up and sharing them. Then everybody has it for their home office afterward. If we've got local or regional shipments, we've seen some really rich packages put together where people had, we call them “porch packages,” for a fundraiser, and they included artwork from the nonprofit and this beautiful cheese board and a beautiful wooden board with gourmet regional cheeses and crackers. We had VIP, high donor attendees who were just blown away by how VIP they felt in their own homes.
Shelly: Yeah, totally. I feel like if it's a local event and most of the attendees and guests are all local, the world is your oyster. There's so much you can do because everything is delivered and there so you don't have to think about shipping and how long it’s going to take.
Paige: Some of the other things that we’ve got for our holiday packages include a cookie decorating kit where the cookies are pre-made, but it comes with the decorating supplies, and then we’re having a kid or family-friendly experience altogether where people get to decorate the cookies. We have also included printed, branded material for each client. So you're not just having a digital experience. You get to open something and see what the event is going to hold and what the instructions are and maybe what to wear and how to show up and what the experience will be like.
Shelly: Yeah. And what's also fun is when they brand the actual box that your goodies come in and you’ve got like the agenda on the inside lid of the box and on the outside, it has like your company branding or your event branding. There's so much you can do. It’s so much more fun.
Paige: It's a lot of thought to make this work well, what are some of the things that you think surprise people who are considering doing shipping or delivered items for events?
Shelly: It doesn't sound like a lot of work when you're first thinking about it. And then when you get into the actual planning and logistics and fulfillment, you come to realize like, man, this is a lot of work. You know, just even thinking about what you're putting in the packages. You know, if you're shipping food, you have to be really thoughtful about that. Also how long it’s going to take. You know, you can do overnight shipping, which is really expensive, but if you do two-day, three-day ground shipping, especially during the holidays, who knows how long it's really gonna take to get to people and, once it's delivered, how long is it going to sit outside? It’s maybe not so much of a problem in the winter, but if it's in the summer it can get really hot in some places. And, you know, if you've got something that is not going to do well, sitting outside in a hundred-degree heat for three or four or five, six hours, then you'd want to be really thoughtful about that. Also if you're shipping things to your team, you might not have access to their addresses now that people are sheltering in place somewhere and not where they would be normally. I think costs in this new world for shipping can be a little more than expected just because people are scattered all over the place now, and not just near headquarters or your office.
Paige: So I think you’ve done a really good job in this time of identifying what some of the hurdles are like HR compliance concerns around people having one another’s personal addresses or who has access to that. You know, depending on where you’re shipping to, there can also be GDPR concerns around the collection of data. So some of the things we’ve done to overcome this is signing an NDA and compliance certificate with our clients, collecting the addresses in a third-party system that we provide where the attendees are freely giving this and understanding that it's only being used this one time for this one shipment and that the data is being properly stored and then disposed of. They’re also aware that we have trusted vendors in place to handle all of that and handle it professionally and do it in a COVID compliant way where you can trust that what was packaged was done so by somebody who was following proper safety protocols for handwashing and glove-wearing and mask-wearing. All of this has to be thought through.
Shelly: That’s something that people don't really think of when they start to embark on this adventure is how long it could take. Not only the shipping of it but in order for your vendors to fulfill the actual elements that you're putting into the packages but they may need your addresses and your final order sooner because it could take seven, 10, 15 business days in advance, depending on what time of the year it is. So I think it takes a lot for in-person events when you have swag or whatever, or even if you’re registering people for in-person events, you can take them up to the very last minute. When you're shipping things to people though, there’s actually a real deadline that you've got to consider. And so I think making sure that you have enough time to actually deliver and fulfill is important.
Paige: And then you have to build an extra lead time just for, you know, getting your attendees to take action, to sign up and give you what they need by the time you need it. So that's a really good consideration.
Shelly: I will say another one is simplicity. We always want to make everybody happy and give people options but when you’re including things that come from different vendors and you’re taking custom orders, those final boxes that are arriving on people’s doorsteps are a big undertaking. Making it as streamlined as possible is going to be important. If you’re taking, you know, two orders of terrarium kits and one cookie order, and you’re making these custom packages for folks, it’s going to take a lot of time in an aisle and a lot of work. Right?
Paige: Right? I mean, it’s one thing to say, you're going to have this one variable. Certainly, we want to provide people who do not drink alcohol with non-alcoholic packages, but then if you also have to provide gluten-free and vegan, or someone doesn't want you to send them the terrarium kit, you don’t want it to go to waste. Then it’s suddenly complicated. You have to try to think through all of those variables and simplify your offering down to the common denominator that's going to please everybody.
Shelly: Yeah. That's exactly it.
Paige: Well, great. Thanks for talking to me about this.
Shelly: Of course. Any time.
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