The speakers finished answering the last attendee question, the event host finished thanking everyone for attending and reminding them about the next meeting in Arizona or Mexico City or any of the other great conference locations, and the attendees with afternoon flights picked up the last of the suitcases hidden behind your information desk, and finally, you can say, “We did it! We’re done!”

While this may have been true in the past, it’s not true anymore. 

I am sure you know all about how the modern attendee lifestyle requires the need to make your events about both information sharing and creating attendee experiences. While photography used to simply serve the purpose of documenting the event for future internal or publication needs, it now plays a huge part in your attendees’ overall event experience. In our visual media-driven world, photographic memories of experiences have become increasingly important to attendees. This is why it is so important to treat your event photography not only as a way to document the event for yourself but as a way to enhance your attendees’ experience.

The best way to do this is to provide your attendees with an easy-to-access event gallery with images from the planned social activities held at your event within days of the event concluding (while their excitement level is still high). The gallery should provide them with the ability to view and download free high-quality image files. We have also found that the galleries are more successful if they only include images of the attendees at the social activities and do not include any of the images of details, plenary sessions, speakers, etc. This makes the gallery about them and not about you.

How do we know it works? Based on tracking the gallery activity of our client events for the past twelve months, we have found the following:

• 80% of attendees accessed the galleries
• each attendee who accessed the gallery downloaded an average of three image files
• a quick search of Instagram and Twitter hashtags found many of them reposted the images on their social media even when the images had the event host’s logo in the corner

It is clear that even though attendees are taking and posting pictures with their phones during the event when provided with professional pictures of themselves after the event, they will elect to share those images on their social media as well.

This becomes a win-win situation for you and your attendees. They can download professional images from the event helping them relive their experiences, and you can extend their event experience until well after they return home. Additionally, when they share the images on their social media platform with your logo, they are exposing your brand to an even larger social network.

If you have any questions about other ways photography can enhance your attendees’ experience at your event, please feel free to contact us at ivan@ivanapfel.com