National Association of REALTORS® Conference Live

Goal

As a membership organization, the National Association of REALTORS® thrives on the participation of its members. The annual REALTORS® Conference & Expo is the organization’s most important membership engagement event, bringing together real estate professionals from across the US and around the world.

In order to connect more deeply with retail professionals, the Association’s marketing team sought to create a virtual experience to augment the REALTORS® Conference & Expo – bringing the live event experience to members through their computers and mobile devices.

Challenge

The in-person 4-day REALTORS® Conference & Expo is home to the largest trade show floor in real estate, with over 20,000 attendees, nearly 400 exhibitors, 100 education sessions, star-studded entertainment and close to 100,000 square feet of show space.

“Our challenge was – how do you bring this enormous, one-of-a-kind in-person event to life in the digital world?” said Allison Fitch-Markham, Marketing Director at National Association of REALTORS®.

 Strategy

To help achieve their goals, Fitch-Markham and her team at the National Association of REALTORS® sought the help of the Dewey Square Group.

“We were impressed by Dewey Square Group’s digital work…and thought they’d be a great partner for bringing our event to life online.”

“We were impressed by Dewey Square Group’s digital work with Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference, and thought they’d be a great partner for bringing our event to life online,” added Fitch-Markham.

To make it happen, the team would design and build a website that made it easy to upload new content frequently just moments after it was captured live on the show floor. Visitors to the site would be able immediately to access this content, creating a sense of being immersed in the action. The site would also feature responsive design, so that real estate professionals using everything from a mobile phone to a tablet to a laptop or desktop would have high quality user interface experience.

To enable the creation of a large amount of high quality content, DSG recommended deploying digital news teams throughout the event, producing video segments that could be rapidly shot, edited and uploaded to the site.

Execution

With a strategy in place, the Dewey Square Group team designed and launched the REALTORS® Conference & Expo website, narconferencelive.com. To feed the site with continuous new content, the DSG and NAR team deployed more than 40 content creation specialists to cover the range of exciting activity at the annual REALTORS® Conference & Expo.

Over the course of the 4-day event, the content and technical teams worked 14-16 hours per day continuously publishing content covering the latest action from the show floor and highlights of valuable education sessions and keynotes.

Results

The new online event experience was an immediate hit.

“Our event sponsors…appreciated the added opportunity to get their message out.”

“Not only were members who couldn’t attend visiting the site to get the live experience, but members who were in attendance enhanced their event experience by logging into the site on their mobile devices or from their hotel rooms,” says Fitch-Markham.

“Our event sponsors, who are crucial to the success of the REALTORS® Conference & Expo, also appreciated the added opportunity to get their message out as part of the video and written content on narconferencelive.com,” she added.

Having successfully achieved the goal of bringing the event experience to life online, the National Association of REALTORS® has continued to work with Dewey Square Group for the last 6 consecutive REALTORS® Conference & Expo events.