Symphony

NHS Modernisation Agency, Coronary Heart Disease National Conference

Background: ExCeL Docklands, 1250 attendees. This was the largest conference held by the NHS Modernisation Agency and over 1200 delegates from a variety of backgrounds attended the conference at London Docklands. All invitations to the event were distributed electronically via an email inviting guests to visit the event website and book their attendance for this event.

What Symphony needed to do:

• Provide an easy to use online system for delegates.
• Provide an easy to use administration system for the event team.
• Allow delegates to re-visit their booking and make any necessary changes.
• Allow the event team to allocate rooms across nine different hotels.
• Collect information from delegates on their preferences for three workshop sessions.
• Provide an overview of the programme for the conference that could be updated at any time to reflect changes to the agenda of the event.

Benefits delivered:

• By using password protected log-ins delegates were able to re-visit their own booking to make changes, this drastically reduced the number of calls the event team received from delegates, thus freeing up more of their time.
• The event team benefited from having access to a live web-based application and as such could keep a constant eye on demand for workshops and hotels and manage this accordingly thus enabling them to be pro-active rather than re-active when dealing with the logistics of the event.
• The conference programme could be altered online using Symphony to ensure that delegates always saw the most up to date information on the conference.
• By using the data collected in Symphony the event team were able to produce high quality delegate badges and personalised itineraries.

To assess how well the conference was received by delegates we produced an online questionnaire that delegates who attended the conference were able to log onto after the event and answer a series of questions relating to various aspects of the event

The overriding impression from the feedback was that the conference was a resounding success and many people commented on how quick and easy the registration process was.

"We organised the largest ever NHS Modernisation Agency conference using Symphony; everything went very smoothly and the whole booking process contributed greatly to the success and professionalism of our event. Symphony is a fantastic event management tool, that I hope to be using on many more events in the future."