We were so excited to catch up with Emilie Colker, the Director of Marketing at GlobalEnglish, a Pearson company committed to improve the performance of the global workforce through on-demand Business English development and support solutions.
Last month, Pearson held an internal development event for four companies and 60 guests in Brazil. After seeing a Yapp “out in the wild” at a World Economic Forum conference, and not yet realizing that it was a DIY app, her team was determined to create a similar experience for their own event. They asked her,
‘Can we build this?’ After researching the cost and time dedicated towards building an app from scratch, it was clear that the answer was no, an app could not be built with their available resources and time frame. But through speaking to her colleagues at the World Economic Forum conference, she realized that it was indeed possible – through Yapp!
Emilie loved that her Yapp was perfectly customizable and was easy enough to use that she could pass along the project to another colleague. In fact, her team loved Yapp so much that they opted for a paperless agenda through the app.
However, what we loved most was the creative uses of the app for onsite, in-person engagement among the conference guests! Guests posted presentation comments and questions as well as photos to the news feed, and the groups also used Yapp to present “polls” to the audience and collect responses in real time. Emilie said that it was amazing to see attendees use their phones for engagement rather than a distraction for a change.
GlobalEnglish plans to use Yapp again for an upcoming conference next month in Thailand. Wish that we were going!
Have another creative idea for using apps to enhance in-person engagement? Let us know here!
