Lux Events Case Study | Beezer
Lux Events
Discover how Lux Events uses mobile apps to streamline event coordination and
drive engagement with Beezer.
Joanna Blunden
Event Manager at Lux Events
Lux Events is an Edinburgh-based events company that run a wide variety of event types. They organise private dinners, launch parties, small marketing conferences with 25 to 30 attendees, and large events such as Showcase Scotland, which ran over two days and had delegates from all over the world. They have worked with notable clientele, including the Obama Foundation, CNN, and TedX.
Since discovering Beezer, Lux has used it to build event apps for a number of their events. The ease and affordability of the platform has, for them, turned event apps into a “nice-to-have, if there were time for it” to an obvious and easy value-add for their clients.
We sat down with Event Manager Joanna Blunden to learn more about Lux, her role there, and how she uses Beezer for the events that she helps to plan.
Joanna’s background began in the public sector:
“I studied events at college and then Uni, and then worked 4 years for the NHS, before moving to this job. At the NHS, I worked organising health conferences.
My team there used to facilitate all of the health conferences in Scotland. We did some private events as well – big European disease control conferences and things like this. We did one big event like that in Sweden, which was really cool. But most of the events we worked on were summits, or launches for flu vaccines, or conferences on breast feeding…all this kind of stuff.”
Why did you move out of NHS into the private sector?
“I think it was just time. I was leading a team, but I was no longer going anywhere with my career. I’d progressed so much, and I’d learned so much, but I eventually hit a kind of wall with NHS boundaries. So, I’ve gone from public to private.
The team at my old job was fairly big, and I was in an office with about 13 or 14 people. But here we’re just eight – so it’s really nice and intimate. And it’s all women, as well, which I think is great.”
When and why did you start using Beezer?
“There are a few different things that can lead to us launching an event app for our clients. In some cases, it’s been completely a suggestion on our part. But other times, clients have said to us ‘we want to do something more.’ And often, too, it’s about using less paper.
They want less paper, and we’re always pushing less paper. Because you know what it can be like: you’re sending however many things off, and it really gets away from you – print this, print that. So we’re quite behind that paper-saving element of what technology does for events.”
I’d actually had an app made before – for that big conference that we put on in Sweden when I was with the NHS. The whole process was so convoluted that I’d said, ‘I’ll never make an app again.’ We hired a developer, but they pushed a lot of it back onto us. And we didn’t have the time – this was a huge conference, for something like 700 people over three days.
And that level of people just needs a lot of an event planner’s time – before the event, and during. So, we just felt very stressed by the app. We did it, and in the end it turned out fine, but I wasn’t exactly boasting about it afterwards. I didn’t want to mention it, in case someone else asked for one too and I’d have to go through the same thing!
“Whereas with Beezer, I actually still have all of the apps I’ve made for clients on my phone, and when I go to meetings I say: ‘look, we made this one, and we made this one.’ Because I could do it again. It’s easy.
One of the MDs here discovered Beezer, and I’ve now used it for a number of events. We actually get contacted by agencies and people offering to build apps for us all the time. But none of them can compete at all. Beezer’s platform is perfect for us. We like it, and we’ll continue to use it, because it works, it’s easy, and it’s not a hassle.”
“Just this morning I got a text saying, ‘I need an app for this afternoon.’ And I’ve literally gone into Beezer, registered it this morning, and I’m halfway through it already. I just need to do the aesthetics of it. So Beezer is really handy for us, to just crack on.
What’s an example of an event that you’ve made an app for?
“We did Showcase Scotland, which was really great. It was an event which gave a chance for Scottish food and drink suppliers to showcase their products to companies all over the world. So we had folk from Australia, folk from Dubai, lots of folk from Japan, coming over to sample and to speak with all of the suppliers.
It actually worked kind of like a speed dating situation. We had around 150 mini tables set up, and each supplier had a table, and they set up their product and they had their laptops. And they just ran meetings for 25 minutes at a time. That was two days.
And we had two dinners as well, where the suppliers would come and set the food and drink – so that the companies were actually tasting it as well, not just sitting at a table and hearing about it.”
Joanna built an app for the Showcase Scotland event using Beezer. The app provided a convenient portal for all of the information that could be needed by either the Scottish suppliers or the buyers.
It included features like an agenda, easily filtered to show events relevant to each of these attendee types, showed the timing and location of speakers, lunches, tours and more; a “useful information” page provided details such as the wifi password and help numbers; and venue information and maps.
Are you ready to build your app and join the app revolution with Beezer?
