Why?
The Hosted Buyer Smart Meetings feature is designed to help you easily set up and manage curated 1-to-1 meetings between participants—especially in events where buyers and sellers (or any groups) need to be matched based on preferences and objectives.
This article will walk you through:
What the Hosted Buyer feature does
Step-by-step setup instructions
Participant experience
Managing meetings
Common use cases
What is the Hosted Buyer Feature?
Hosted Buyer is a powerful matchmaking tool that allows you to:
Group participants (buyers, sellers, investors, exhibitors, etc.)
Let them select who they want (or don’t want) to meet
Automatically generate optimized 1-on-1 meetings and schedules based on mutual or one-sided interest
Fully customize the matchmaking settings, timeframe, and layout
Review, edit, and confirm draft meetings before publishing
Track meetings post-event to measure attendance and ROI
When to use a Hosted Buyer Event?
Buyers <> Sellers Programs:
Used in trade shows or expos where selected buyers meet with relevant sellers or exhibitors.
How to build it with Swapcard:
Create two conditions, one where Buyers select Sellers, and one where Sellers select Buyers (for mutual selection).
When generating the meetings, select both conditions. Give a slight priority to the Sellers when ordering the conditions.
Sponsors Meetings:
VIPs or Sponsors who select people they want to meet, and create their schedules.
How to build it with Swapcard:
Create one condition where Sponsors select other participants.
When generating meetings, just select this condition. It will generate for your VIPs a schedule matching their wishes.
Monetizing Meetings:
Sell meetings to groups of participants during your event, each group pay a certain amount of meetings to have inside their schedule.
How to build it with Swapcard:
Create your groups for each amount of meetings (group 10 meetings, group 20 meetings etc…)
When generating, select all the conditions with these groups, and give a slight priority to the groups who paid more.
Mentorship or Career Fair:
Match mentors and mentees for scheduled meetings during a career fair, accelerator event, or bootcamp.
How to build it with Swapcard:
Create a condition where participants select mentors or companies (as exhibitors) they would like to meet.
Generate the meetings on the exhibitors booth with a slight priority for participants.
What will event participants do?
Make their selections:
Once the selection phase starts, they will select who they want to meet or don’t want to meet as: must meet, nice to meet, or exclude.
Use powerful and advanced filters to help your participants finding their needs.
Select carefully the fields you choose to highlight inside the people profile in the list.
2. Find their meetings inside their schedule.
Go to My Schedule or My Meetings to find the confirmed meetings.
Participants can:
Reschedule the meeting, and change location
Open the map, if included in your event
Add participants
Chat with participants
3. Rate the meeting and validate their attendance.
Go to participants’ meeting details, and click on great, not great to validate the attendance, or was not held if the meeting didn’t happen.
Inside the Studio, you, as an event organizer, can access this information, above all the meetings that ended up as “not held”.
How to set up a Hosted Buyer event?
Go to the Studio and prepare:
Import your people and exhibitors.
Create your Groups.
Create your time slots.
Create your locations.
If needed, create your custom fields to customize even more your event.
Create your Hosted Buyer Selection Page:
Go to Meetings > Hosted Buyer
Click on “Create a selection page”. You will create the page where your participants will make their selections.
Select which groups will access the page and select people.
Select which groups will be selected.
Click continue
Your groups must have more than 2 participants.
Participants inside the groups need to be visible users.
Add the page name, icon, color, or background image.
The page will be available inside the Event Builder section > Pages and Menu. from here, you will be able to modify some page settings, or hide/unhide the page from the event app main menu.
Select the filters you want to display inside the page. You can create new custom fields, if needed.
Select the sort that will be applied by default in the selection people list.
Select the fields that will be highlighted on each person profile in the selection people list.
Click continue
You will now select the networking options. These options are here to help you refine the AI to answer better your needs.
Allow to meet contacts (people you are connected with)
Allow to meet colleagues (people that belong to your company / exhibitor)
Allow to meet multiple individuals from the same company
Select the targeted meetings number per participant: this is the number of meetings you want at the end of the generation inside each schedule of the participants of these groups.
This number is not sure to be reached, according to your other parameters.
Optional: Add a maximum meetings per participant: this authorize more meetings for some persons in your group, in order be sure to reach the minimum target.
Optional: Select the targeted minimum selection number: the minimum selections the participants of your group will be able to make.
Optional: Select the targeted maximum selection number: the maximum selections the participants of your group will be able to make.
Add a selection start date and time: this date and time will be the ones when the selection phase starts for the participants of these groups.
We advise to set up an email in the Email Manager to warn the participants that the selection phase is starting.
Add a selection end date and time: this date and time will be the ones when the selection phase ends for the participants of these groups. Users won’t be able to make modifications anymore, but if you want to, they will be able to still have access to the page.
Click Continue.
Select date and time slots when the meetings should happen.
Select locations where the meetings should happen.
The AI algorithm will prioritize the Exhibitors booth locations for Exhibitors. If you want people as seaters (who don’t move from their location), create them as exhibitors with exhibitor booth location and select the Exhibitors booths in this set up.
We recommend to have at least other locations, so that it gives the AI more room to generate the right meetings for everyone.
Click Continue.
Review your set up: If you want to modify one parameter, click ‘Edit’, and modify inside the flow.
Once ready, click ‘Confirm’.
You selection page is created, you are all set up! 🎉
3. Next steps:
Click on “See preview”, will display a preview of the selection page you just created.
Click on “Create an email” will redirect you to the Email Manager to create an email, a template, or a campaign. You can refer to this article to create emails.
We recommend creating emails to engage with your audience, and warn participants about the different phases of your event.
Click on “create another selection page”: If you want to create multiple selection page.
It can be useful if:
You want to create a mutual selection (Buyers > Sellers and Buyers < Sellers)
You want to create multiple target meetings per participant for different groups (e.g., Sellers 10 meetings, Sellers 20 meetings, Sellers 30 meetings)
Or, you can leave the page by clicking again inside the menu > Hosted Buyer.
4. Selection phases and followup:
You can still create another selection page.
The selection phases are:
upcoming: the selection phase didn’t start yet.
ongoing: the selection is ongoing, participants are making their choices.
closed: the selection phase ended, users cannot make their selection anymore
Inside the Hosted Buyer tab, you will now see the list of all your conditions. For each of them, you can:
Click on it
Edit
Delete
Export the selection > this option is important and will bring you the followup you need about your participants’ selection. It will download a csv with the list of your participants linked to the condition and show you their number of choices.
5. Selection closed & meeting generation:
Once the selection phase is over, you can click on the “Generate meetings button”. You will now go through multiple steps:
During the generation, no conditions can be edited or deleted.
First, an informative panel explains how the AI work and what will happen by generating the meetings.
Generating meetings will generate draft meeting, visible only by the event organizer.
Any must meet, or mutual selection will most probably be generated.
Exclude will never be generated.
The AI generates meetings according to your setup: location capacities, time slots, meetings created etc. Your setup might alter the matchmaking.
The AI is made to maximise the number of meetings created to produce as much as possible networking inside your event.
Choose selection page: Select here which conditions you want to generate.
Select a priority between your conditions: this help to give a slight priority to one of the group, so that their meetings are slightly prioritized.
For mutual selection, we recommend to select both conditions and generate them at the same time. This will create meetings for both sides, by including everyone’s choices.
Optional: Generate additional meetings for under-matched participants: The AI is made to maximise the number of meetings created, however, it can be useful in case participants haven’t followed the number of selections recommended, we offer the option to fill the empty time slots with meetings based on public profile information like common interest, goals, or knowledge.
Optional: Regenerate previously canceled meetings: This options is here in case you discarded meetings that you wanted to happen. If you want completely new meetings, we recommend to not check this option.
Now, just click on Generate draft meetings, and wait for the magic!
During the generation, conditions cannot be edited or deleted, however, you can continue your experience inside the Studio.
You will be notified by email that your draft meetings are ready to be managed.
6. Meetings generated, management & confirmation:
Click on Review draft meetings. This will redirect you to the “Meetings” tab, where you will find all your draft meetings, but also all other meetings. Tips: Use the filters to help you manage the meetings!
You can now click on one meeting and:
See why this meeting has been generated
Edit time, locations, participants statuses, etc
Discard the meeting
Add participants to the meeting
Confirm the meeting: By confirming the meeting, the participants will be notified if you allow it and will see the meeting inside their schedule as ‘Confirmed’.
When you are ready, click on Confirm meetings, or confirm some meetings in bulk.
Any modification on draft meeting is invisible to the participants.
By confirming the meeting, the participants will be notified if you allow it and will see the meeting inside their schedule as ‘Confirmed’.
What are the best practices?
Test with dummy groups before going live
Communicate early to participants so they know to expect selection emails
Set clear deadlines for both selection and meeting confirmation
Use filters and profile fields to make the selection process meaningful for your participants
Follow up after the event to collect feedback and measure success
If you need help setting up your first Hosted Buyer event or want advice on optimizing it for your audience, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.
How does the AI work behind the feature?
To schedule the meetings, the AI considers a set of rules that define the possible meetings and their quality, plus a few extra parameters.
To solve the problem, we first pre-select the potential meetings, that is the meetings that are compatible with the rules.
Then, by decreasing value, we browse all potential meetings and try to allocate a place and time that suits all participants.
Rules & Constraints
The rules correspond to the settings you create, and specificities are added on the AI side. They include:
Participants and groups
The selection made (must meet, nice to meet, unselected, exclude)
The locations and their characteristics: private (e.g. booths) or public; physical or online; dedicated (e.g. meeting room) or not (e.g. ``main hall''); category. Locations are ranked based on their specificities. For example, exhibitors’ booths are preferred over others.
Priority is given to private, physical, and dedicated places. The AI also tries to keep participants in the same location or same location category when possible.
Availability of participants.
Minimum (mandatory) and maximum (optional) target number of meetings.
Advanced options: allow matches between contacts; allow matches between colleagues, allow to meet multiple members of the same company; fill empty slots using AI if no selections remain; re-generate canceled meetings.
The AI detects members of the same company based on their email domain.
Step 1: Extract potential meetings
In a first pass, the algorithm identifies all pairs of participants who could be involved in a meeting based on the rules and constraints. Explicitly excluded meetings (”Exclude” selections) are discarded at this stage.
Step 2: Sort potential meetings
Then, the AI sorts the potential meetings so that the most important meetings are processed first, and the other meetings are processed afterwards, if there is room. Sorting is based on:
The reciprocity of the selection: mutual, one-sided, or no selection (the latter only occurs if the “fill with AI” option is selected).
The importance/priority/rank of the rule(s) involved.
The selection type: must meet or nice to meet.
The profile similarity between participants based on their public information. It is used even if AI fill option is not checked, as a tie-breaker for similar meetings. It never overrides the selections.
The sorting is based on a hierarchy where basically the highest priorities are must meet and mutual selection.
Step 3: Allocate meetings
After all potential meetings have been extracted and ranked, the allocation phase starts, which consists of finding a place and time for each meeting.
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