About DoubleDutch

DoubleDutch is a marketing technology company based in San Francisco. We’re fortunate to be backed by top-tier investors like Bessemer, Mithril, KKR and Floodgate. Our mission is to empower event professionals with visibility into the success of their live events as they are happening, and provide controls to optimize and improve over time - just as you would any digital marketing campaign.

The B2B events market is largely underserved by software. There currently is no system of record for capturing, storing and acting on attendee interest signals, which makes this a particularly exciting space to be in. At DoubleDutch, we have the opportunity to define how event success is measured, and provide an entire industry with the tools to start capturing and taking action on data for the first time.

I joined the amazing team at DoubleDutch in 2012 as employee #8, and I’ve touched or been responsible for pretty much every area of the product at some point in time. 

Here are a few things I have shipped:

Live Polling

My team's top priorities were to increase overall adoption and usage of the event app.

In order to do so, we focused on building features that had the potential to drive awareness of the existence of the app within the attendee base. If a feature had the potential to drive app adoption, drive direct interactions in the app, AND capture usable data for the organizer, we decided to prioritize it.

One opportunity that we identified was to build a modern, social version of a Live Audience Response system.  Polling is a common method of engaging attendees, and allowing them to interact directly with speaker presentations. Most event organizers are still using clunky, outdated hardware solutions (yes, really) to power these experiences. 

Building Live Polling into the event app solved a problem for the event organizer by providing a simple, software-based audience response tool, and proved to be a successful way to not only drive attendees into the app, but also drove increased app usage across the board. 

Live Polling was one of the most successful engagement features that I worked on - resulting in attendees who participated in a poll in the app having ~240% more visits to the app than those who didn’t.

Personalized Activity Feed

One of the most important design decisions we made was to land attendees using our app into a social feed, rather than the event content itself (i.e. the Agenda). Many features in our app are configurable, meaning the event organizer can choose whether or not to use them. After experiments showed us that Attendees who landed in the Activity Feed vs the Agenda ended up using the app 2x as often, we decided to remove the option for event organizers to disable the activity feed. 

The feed proved to be highly effective at driving attendees to use the app frequently during the event, and also served as a distribution channel for other features in the product, such as feedback features like Surveys, Polls, and Ratings, in addition to our native monetization features (Targeted Offers). 

One of the most successful additions to our personalized Activity Feed was a Survey Reminder card. By adding a card that reminded attendees to complete surveys for sessions that they went to, we were able to increase response rates by 166%. 

Recommendations

Over time, as we reached generally high levels of usage and adoption, we focused our roadmap to prioritize features aiming to increase the rate of specific actions from attendees. 

Strong signals of interest and intent, such as a "Bookmark" (signaling interest in a particular type of content) or a "Follow" (signaling an interest in connecting with another attendee) are highly valuable, as they help to build up a graph of connections between people and content at the event. 

In order to drive more Bookmarks and Follows, we built a recommendation engine to surface personalized Session and People recommendations to attendees.

Our first release (Q2 2016) has so far driven promising lift in the desired actions: on average at 18% increase in session bookmarks, and a 20% increase in follows. 

Channels and Direct Messaging

The Activity Feed is one of the most accessed areas of our app, but the engagement that it generates is largely passive (typically <10% of active users actually post a status update, but ~100% of our active users browse the feed intentionally). Active engagement is valuable as it provides signals we can use to build up a profile of interest for an individual attendee.

Looking beyond the activity feed, we started to explore Messaging features as a way to drive more user-generated content, and capture more data points that link attendees with people and content they find interesting. Messaging was a good fit within our product priorities, as these features had potential to:

• Create structured engagement (tied to objects - this is important in order to generate usable data)
• Help attendees discover people, discussions, and communities of interest
• Make the app more useful while sessions are live - provide a way to meet/chat with attendees, and interact with speakers presentations
• Increase 1:1 (and possibly face to face) connections on the platform

My team worked to identify three use cases for Messaging at live events, and shipped the following features:

1. Direct Messaging: private, 1:1 chat within the app
2. Topic Channels: public group messaging around specific topics of interest
3. Session Channels: public group messaging tied to agenda sessions