Exciting times are ahead, with events finally returning on-site again! Seeing our customers invite their attendees to physical venues not only comes with a major sigh of relief for countless stakeholders, but it also comes with a newfound understanding and responsibility of what meeting in-person involves in a post-pandemic world.

A trend we’re noticing is that even for events returning on-site, there has never been a greater focus on safety, sanitization, and self-serve abilities that are as touchless as possible. A couple of months ago, we renewed and launched our on-site check-in and badge printing kiosk system, called PheedLoop OnSight, designed for a post-pandemic world. Several months prior, we launched PheedLoop Go!, our brand new mobile app optimized specifically for the hybrid event experience from the ground up with loads of on-site features packed in. Features ranging from PheedLoop Meet built-in so virtual and physical attendees can easily communicate with each other, to wireless badge printing, lead retrieval, streaming, mobile check-in, and beyond.

Today, we’re excited to announce a major update to on-site session check-in and the optional CE credit tracking experience that makes it self-serve, infinitely scalable, fast, touchless, and gamified!

All events now have the option to offer a fully self-serve experience to attendees to check-in to a session. So instead of having to scan attendee badges at the gate for each room at the venue, attendees can also do it themselves!

How Does It Work

Simply put, attendees using PheedLoop Go (the mobile event app) on-site at your event (virtual has its own dedicated options) can now tap a button on the session page for a session they are sitting in to self check-in. They have two options to self check-in: first, they can scan a QR code, and second, they can enter a text code.

Whether you provide text or QR codes (or both) depends entirely on you. The expectation is that most events will have the session’s speaker(s) place the text or QR codes somewhere in their presentation slides, or the event staff would post them somewhere in the room the session is being held in. These methods help ensure attendees genuinely did attend the session.

The option for the classic session check-in system still exists, of course. The existing system allows all event staff to scan attendee badges in and out of a session to more precisely track attendance. Of course, both approaches (self or managed) allow for immediate and streamlined reporting and analytics.

You can choose to enable or disable self check-in for sessions in your dashboard, and it’s also where you can set your custom text codes or download the QR codes. Keep in mind that you can pair the session check-in experience with other methods of measuring activity or attendance like feedback surveys, check-in surveys, polls, and more.

CE Credit Tracking, Analytics, & Games

Checking into a session comes with many benefits, but we’ll quickly highlight 3 of them for you in this post. For starters, you get a rich set of analytics telling you exactly who attended a specific session using systems like SmartSight, our Advanced Custom Reports, and DataViz.

Second, you can leverage PheedLoop’s very popular CE credit tracking system. This allows attendees that check-in to sessions to earn a number of credits that you set, and it contributes to the certificate they download (PDF generated by PheedLoop) post-event as well.

Third, you can associate checking in with earning gamification points. You can set a custom number of points for each session and encourage attendees to not only attend sessions, but check-in as well, by awarding them with points for doing so. A win-win situation for everyone!

Why It’s Important

The primary motivation for this feature is to add to our suite of tools that help events return on-site in a post-pandemic world - specifically by reducing unnecessary physical contact on-site. This feature has been requested a lot, so here it is!

The bonus is that this feature actually makes your on-site operations much faster and cheaper for the majority of events. For large events, it’s almost impossible to check-in each individual without creating massive crowds at entrances and exists, no matter how many people you have on staff. For small events, the budget to have people standing around for each session often doesn’t exist. In short, features like these help make your events a lot more scalable!

For events that need highly precise check-in information, the less scalable but tried and true system of scanning badges will always exist.

How Much Does it Cost?

Session self check-in comes at no additional cost, and is included in the Touchless Event Check-In Power-Up (which the vast majority of on-site or hybrid events already have). This new feature will roll out within the next few days to all accounts, so keep an eye out and let us know if you have any questions!