Attendees who access the VCD event, App, or App Website will be able to choose “Offering” and “Seeking” tags that are used to make smart recommendations. ‘Offering’ tags relate to what the attendee/company can offer, while ‘Seeking’ tags relate to what the attendee/company is interested in.

Event managers will be asked to provide a list of interests/tags during the initial event configuration. Attendees choose what they are ‘Offering’ and ‘Seeking’ from the same list of tags. To make changes to your list of interests/tags, please contact your client success manager at Eventsforce.

This article will cover the following:

When using Eventsforce for event registration, we recommend adding two “multi checkbox” questions to your registration page. One question should be created called “Offering”, and a second question created called “Seeking”. Learn more about ‘How to add a registration question’.

Attendees will select these tags as they register and their selections will carry over to their VCD or App profile. If offering/seeking tags are not configured within registration, attendees can still select these tags when creating their VCD or App profile.

Important: Make sure the same list of alternatives (tags) is used for both questions.

By default, attendees will be asked to choose their interests and tags when logging into the VCD event for the first time. In addition, tags can always be amended by attendees by selecting “My Profile” on the ‘Home’ page, then selecting “Edit Tags”.

Note: Attendees must choose at least one ‘offering’ tag and one ‘seeking’ tag. Attendees can update their profile and change their tags and interests at any point in time. After changing interests, the smart suggestions will update within 60 minutes.

Once interests/tags have been chosen by attendees and companies, the VCD/App platform can make “smart” suggestions on who the attendee may benefit from meeting with. On the ‘Home’ page of the VCD event or app website by default, attendees will see an area for “Recommended companies” and “Recommended attendees” and can see which tags were used for matching (this can be removed if you prefer).

There are various “levels” of matches on the VCD/App platform. The level will depend on how many common interests/tags exist between two parties. The levels of match are shown below:

Note that the algorithm additionally adjusts for tag spamming by not matching tags that exist on only one party and not the other. This prevents a company or individual from being a 100% match with all other parties by selecting all available tags -- each tag they have selected that is not selected by a particular match actually lowers their match.

If you are using tags with your attendees, you can also tag your sessions or other types of content using the same tags. If your content is marked with these tags, the system can recommend sessions, posters, or abstracts based on interests in addition to attendees and companies.