As an event organizer, managing multiple meeting locations is key to ensuring a smooth and organized event experience. Whether you’re coordinating physical venues, exhibitor booths, or virtual spaces, Swapcard allows you to create and manage meeting locations efficiently. This guide will walk you through creating and organizing meeting locations, setting up capacities, and defining exhibitor meeting quotas.
Why create meeting locations?
Meeting locations enable seamless coordination of event activities by clearly defining where each meeting will take place. For hybrid or virtual events, setting up virtual meeting spaces allows participants to connect remotely. Organizing these locations helps you manage room assignments, streamline event flow, and control meeting capacities, which directly contributes to event success.
How to create Locations for your meetings or Exhibitor booths?
Log into the Studio.
Navigate to Meetings then Locations.
Under the Locations tab, you'll see a list of available locations for your audience to hold their meetings. This list includes both manually created locations and the automatically displayed locations of different Exhibitors (also named "booth"which are simply locations linked to exhibitors).
Click on the Add Locations button.
In the next view, choose a Name, Category, Meeting capacity, and whether it is a virtual or physical space.
Categories help group rooms, making it easier to find them when requesting Meetings. Categories can be based on nearby venues or halls, floor, or zone.
The Name helps to quickly identify the meeting space, like a Booth number or room name.
The Meeting capacity determines the maximum number of Meetings that can occur simultaneously at a location.
The Virtual toggle allows you to choose between creating virtual meeting spaces, to get a video call rooms, or physical spaces. For hybrid Events, it is ideal to have both types of spaces available.
You will be able to edit this information at any time from the detail tab of any Location, and also delete any one of them.
💡Once you've created meeting locations, you will be able to assign them to Exhibitors. Find out how here.
How to create exhibitors' booths ?
It is possible to assign meetings locations for Exhibitors in the exhibitors' details to easily spot them on the floor plan and assign them as booths but following the next steps will ensure that all Exhibitors' meetings will be held at their assigned booth:
Create meeting slots.
Create a dedicated meeting location for each exhibitor who will host meetings at their booth.
Go to the exhibitor list and assign each exhibitor to their designated location. Refer to the example below to see how this is done. ⬇️
Create a meeting rule to ensure that all meetings with Exhibitors will be held at their exhibitor's booths by choosing Exhibitor's Booths as locations.
Do not add exhibitor booths as general meeting locations. Doing so could result in these locations being displayed universally, which might cause confusion. For example, you wouldn’t want Adobe’s booth appearing as a meeting location for Google’s meetings.
If you don't see Exhibitors' booths in the available locations, make sure you have created time slots and locations first.
How to define the default meeting location capacity?
You can set a default capacity for the number of meetings a location can handle per slot. This capacity applies to all new locations created after the setup. For example, a capacity set to '1' means the location can only hold one meeting at a time. It doesn't limit the number of participants in the meeting, which can not be done.
To adjust the capacity of locations created before setting up this limit, modify them manually.
Use the checkboxes in the Locations table to edit the capacity of multiple locations in bulk.
How to define meeting limits for Exhibitors?
According to your monetization strategy, you can set limits on the number of meetings exhibitors can have, also named "exhibitor meetings quota", by using Meeting Capacity of exhibitor locations.
Exhibitor meetings quota = Meeting capacity of the exhibitor location x number of slots.
Step by step guide to implement exhibitor meetings quota
Create a meeting request rule where Exhibitors group (or any custom group including your exhibitors) is requester and/or invitee. Please note that you will need to get the Exhibitor Meetings add-on enabled.
In the request rule, select in Meeting locations "Exhibitor's Booths" only.
From the "Booth" field in an exhibitor edition page or from the Locations table, define for each location linked to an exhibitor the meeting capacity which will impact the number of meetings the exhibitor can have.
Example: if there are 5 time slots enabled for Exhibitor's Booth in your meeting request rule (as the screenshot above) and:
'1' is set as meeting capacity of the Booth X which the unique location linked to the Exhibitor X, then Exhibitor X will be able to have up to 5 meetings (1 x 5 slots = 5 meetings).
'3' is set as meeting capacity of the Booth Y which the unique location linked to Exhibitor Y, then Exhibitor Y will be able to have up to 15 meetings (3 x 5 slots = 15 meetings).
'0' is set as meeting capacity of Booth Z which the unique location linked to Exhibitor Z, then Exhibitor Z cannot have any meetings (0 x 5 slots = 0 meetings).
Why and how to add an external URL to a location?
If you're not using MapsPeople or ExpoFP as map provider for your event, you might want your attendees to be redirected to another interactive map provider when they click on a location to see where it is.
Adding an external URL on a location allows attendees to open a webview directly from the app and access an external map.
Log into your Studio account and go to "Meetings" and then the"Location" section.
Select an existing meeting location or create a new one.
Under the "Location details" tab, simply paste the URL in the "Location URL" section. The URL will be automatically saved.
Setting up and managing meeting locations is an essential part of event organization, allowing you to control space allocation, meeting capacities, and exhibitor interactions. By utilizing these tools in Swapcard, you can ensure efficient space management and enhance the attendee experience, whether your event is in-person, virtual, or hybrid.
For additional support, contact your Event Organizer or access related articles for more tips on optimizing meeting locations.