Why do ASAE’s Demo Days work so well, while virtual expo halls were a massive flop? And could this work for your organization?
Now that we’ve been working alongside the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) for almost three years to execute their vendor showcase series, ‘Demo Days’, there have been so many important lessons on what works well when your organization is setting out to be the go-to source of support for your members in making their big buying decisions.
For ASAE, carving out this niche has been incredibly beneficial: Demo Days has become a highly appreciated supplemental member benefit. Not only that, this initiative is quoted by Demo Days creator Reggie Henry, CAE as being their “most successful new channel for generating non-dues revenue“.
To help you evaluate whether a similar digital initiative would work for your organization, we’ve rounded up a few things we have learned from partnering with ASAE to design, deliver, and iterate Demo Days over the past three years:
How do Demo Days work?
If you’re a member of ASAE that has been involved in purchasing a new technology solution for your association, chances are you’ve attended at least one Demo Days event and may already be familiar with the format:
In ASAE’s case, Demo Days occur monthly. Each one is themed around a specific product category. Who shows up? The people who are actively making a purchasing decision for their organization and are evaluating different solution providers.
Attendees are invited into the Matchbox platform a few days in advance of the live showcase, where they can evaluate the marketing collateral shared by the participating solution providers and decide which demos to attend live. Then, on the specified day (or days), they come watch consecutive live demos to decide which ones they want to evaluate further.
If an attendee is interested in learning more about a particular solution, they can “drop a business card” to communicate to the specific vendors that they are interested in a further conversation, or they can save the information for a later time when they are ready to move forward to a next step.
As Reggie explains,
“It is not unusual to see multiple people from the same organization join a demo day event partway through the day. It means their colleague was attending and probably brought them in to evaluate a specific company they like.”
How is a vendor showcase different from a virtual expo hall?
Nothing (and we mean nothing!) flopped more over the covid period than the “virtual expo hall”. Admittedly, this memory of failure may be a significant challenge you’re up against when trying to secure organizational buy-in to launch an initiative like an online vendor showcase.
In fact, ASAE launched Demo Days because they recognized that the virtual expo hall was not satisfying their vendor community (mostly because the virtual expo hall was not meeting the needs of their member community, which is the engine that drives everything).
How are these different? Here’s a handy graphic to help explain the distinction between the two:
In-person conferences leverage co-location and are a hub of social and economic activity, taking advantage of the fact that so many people are on-site together at the same time. Online experiences need to be much more purpose-driven and therefore value propositions must be clear and specific. Virtual expo halls existing to the side of online education conferences almost always perform very poorly because it is not the reason why members are attending.
However, vendor showcase or demo day events carve out a specific time and place for discussions purely around products and services, and those “discussions” are low pressure, webinar-style sessions where members with purchasing needs can ask questions, and also benefit from the answers to questions posed by other attendees.
In ASAE’s case, they knew an online vendor showcase would solve their members’ needs after running a study of their online community and determining that ~65% of posts were about product and service queries for recommendations.
“Our members are seeking this information already. This gave us a way to give it to them at the point of need.”
This is why ASAE is able to keep a regular rotation of Demo Day events where the most popular categories reoccur in the same year.
At each Demo Day event, ASAE consistently welcomes several hundred attendees into the online experience and they record incredibly impressive watch times throughout the day. For the vendors, this is a huge win because those attending are qualified buyers.
How does ASAE monetize Demo Days?
The economic model is simple. ASAE sells demo slots to solution providers, while making attendance free to members. “Over the years we’ve thought about innovating the revenue model, but we don’t want to mess with a formula that works,” as Reggie explained. Their formula is to sell each slot at about the price they sell their in-person conference exhibitor booths. Because they know that Demo Days will deliver qualified leads ready to purchase, and they do not have additional travel and shipping costs, the vendors are happy to pay this price to participate. For each monthly Demo Day, they sell about 8 demo slots on average.
Demo Days has been a financially lucrative model as a standalone source of non-dues revenue, but it also increased vendor spend with ASAE in other areas:
“[Our vendor community] is seeing the value of participating in Demo Days, and for some it’s actually causing them to invest deeper into other opportunities with us.”
Are Demo Days right for my association?
If you are considering launching your own ‘Demo Days’ vendor showcase digital initiative, here are some next steps to consider:
- Read our interview with Reggie Henry on how ASAE markets and sells ASAE Demo Days to their vendors and members, including advice on piloting your own version of Demo Days.
- Check out information on our vendor showcase module to learn how Matchbox supports you in offering vendor showcases just like ASAE’s Demo Days.
- Ready to get started? You can reach out directly through our contact form below, and during our first call we can work together to help determine if this digital initiative is right for your organization by looking at our recommended qualifying criteria and running the numbers with you using our ROI calculator.
