This November, the port town of Varna — the key center for grains and oilseeds exports from Bulgaria — hosted Grain Academy 2018, the third international conference for agricultural industry experts. Specifically for this event, Eventicious-based apps have been enriched with Bulgarian localization.

We asked Petar Dimitrov, the founder of Agricore Ltd and one of the Grain Academy organizers, how popular mobile apps are for events in Bulgaria, what good smartphone notifications do and about the experience of including the mobile app sponsor into sponsorship package.

«Without having any official statistics, it is difficult to make a general conclusion, but perhaps excluding the IT forums that gather together people advanced in the cutting-edge technologies, it seems the use of mobile applications for other events in Bulgaria is still a challenge. And it is for both the participants and the event managers.

In most of the cases the participants search the event website or social media for any updates in the schedule and the guest speakers, while actually it is the mobile app that gives unrivalled possibility for instant notifications directly on the participant’s phone for any significant updates.

We found in the Grain Academy mobile app many advantages. First of all, it helped us summarize at one place the most important information about the event – the speakers, the hours, the venue and location. The participants could access this information at a glance.

Then comes the instant notifications option - very useful on the event day, when the schedule hours need to be changed slightly or more. Networking, chat and photo gallery are also very good options for real-time communication and sharing.

The most important is the app’s user-friendly interface with simple and intuitive navigation, fast and easy-going with great design at the same time. And Eventicious delivers exactly what we needed.

We used email marketing campaigns to encourage all event participants to download the mobile app with clear instructions how to do that and the application’s main advantages. On the event website we publish as well some news about launching the application. The sponsorship levels of the Grain Academy event also pay special attention to the Mobile App, highlighting the name of the mobile app sponsor, so that since the very beginning all participants could be aware of the mobile application for this particular event.