TEDxLisboa’s mission for its 2023 event was to create an impactful, unforgettable, and professional experience for all attendees, while looking to TED for inspiration. One very important key to make it happen was Glide app. “The app works as a community,” said Marta Gonzaga, Organizer and Curator of TEDxLisboa, “It lets us keep an open relationship with our TEDx-ers.”
“You keep this movement alive with an app like we have now.”
TEDxLisboa has grown significantly since the return after the pandemic. Their 2023 event was themed around the idea of “Power”. They lived up to that theme by doubling the size of their event from 300 to 620 attendees and scheduling an ambitious lineup of compelling speakers of all kinds.
Everyone attending was able to download the TEDxLisboa app, where they could access all the information they needed to make the most of the day’s events. “It was just fun to see how people engaged with the app,” said Fabrício Monteiro, their Customer Experience Manager “Our website was more of a selling tool, more of a promotional thing, while the app was more tailored to the experience itself and the people attending.”
Glide made it possible to create an elevated experience with limited resources
TEDxLisboa manages to pull off a big event on extremely limited resources. Their entire team is volunteer. Fabrício teamed up with Head of IT Francisco Carmona and Web Developer Vasco Brandão to build the app in a short amount of time. “I would say that in just a couple of days, we had 80 or 90 percent of what we had at the end of the application build,” he said, “after that, we were just iterating.”
Before discovering Glide, they weren’t sure they would ever have the budget to develop a custom app for their event. “We all have these crazy busy lives,” said Marta. “The costs, the resources, the time…it would have been impossible to build this app without Glide.” With the app, they even saved on printing costs.
“I'm just happy because having an app was one of our dreams. We are volunteers, with the help of sponsors, but we largely rely on our determination. Thus, having this app was a huge accomplishment for us.”
The app was intuitive and easy to use for the public
Attendees happily downloaded the app and found it to be intuitive to navigate. “The application was so easy to use that older people and those who were not really familiar with technology didn't feel like it was out of their reach,” said Fabrício. “That’s so important. When doing this kind of event, you can’t expect everybody to be high-tech.”
They had a QR code at registration that gave everyone a link to install the application. More than half of them downloaded and logged into the app immediately. “Immediately, people were like, oh, I can do this on the application, I can find this on the application,” he said.
Through the app they could give attendees easy access to information
The app gave everyone attending an agenda of all the events in the program, links to the speakers' bios, information about sponsors and the TEDx volunteers, and a full map of the venue with essential locations like cloakrooms and restrooms noted.
The most impactful feature of the app, however, was the messaging functionality that let users message speakers and volunteers directly. “People can reach out to that person they admire,” said Marta, “people are engaging and feel like we have something more interactive.” The app allowed people to continue deeper conversations once the event was over.
“Imagine something between LinkedIn and a social media platform, but more relaxed, just for attendees. Giving people a chance to connect through their phones, through this app, throughout the year helps to grow this community.”
The app had the added benefit of providing users with a way to contact volunteers quickly throughout the event as urgent issues arose, without any volunteers having to make their personal phone numbers publicly available.
Now that they’ve seen what they can do with Glide, TEDxLisboa has big plans for next year
The success of this year’s event was in no small part to the ease of access to information and the strong community the app helped them build. Marta and Dirk Niepoort, co-organizers, are already plotting new features for the app and exciting possibilities for next year.
"For next year, I want more parallel rooms. I want more forums around events,” said Marta. “You rise in steps when you organize TEDx, and I think from this event forward, I can make it more complex. I want to rise to the challenge."
“The thing people were saying is that the event was perfect in production. It was very good feedback. ”
They plan to integrate Zoom to make talks available online and create a way for the audience to submit and vote on questions for the curator to ask speakers during Q&A sessions.
"I think everything went much more smoothly this time," Marta stated. "We had a fantastic venue, as well as highly professional lighting and sound teams. We had an excellent audio-visual team. We have a larger crew and additional volunteers for welcoming hospitality."
“We have a sentence in Portuguese, we say ‘isso é a cereja em cima do bolo’, it’s the cherry on top of the cake,” said Marta. "The event was great, and the app assisted us in taking it to a higher level."