How to Pilot Photo Delivery at a Single Event
TIME&SPACE · Business of Events
Do not roll this out across a season on the strength of a demo. Run one event properly, measure four things, and you will know more than any sales call can tell you.
How to Pilot Photo Delivery at a Single Event
In short: Pick a mid-sized event you already run, decide the four numbers before it happens, and do not change anything else about the event. Most pilots fail because nobody agreed in advance what success would look like.
We sell this, so read accordingly. What follows is how we would want a sceptical organiser to test it, including the parts that make us look worse.
Pick the right event
Not your biggest. Not your smallest.
Good pilot: a mid-sized event you have run before, so you have something to compare against. Ideally one with a returning audience, so the people involved can tell you whether it was better than last time.
Bad pilot: a flagship where the stakes are too high to accept a rough edge, or a one-off where you have no baseline and will not run it again.
Somewhere between 200 and 1,500 guests is the sweet spot. Enough people to produce meaningful numbers, small enough to fix problems on the day.
Decide the numbers first
This is the step that gets skipped and it is the one that makes a pilot a pilot rather than an anecdote.
1. Scan rate. What share of attendees engaged at all. This is the honest measure of whether your signage and your prompt worked. It is almost always lower than people expect the first time.
2. Photographs per guest. How many each person actually found. This tells you whether your coverage was pointed at guests or at the programme, which is usually the real finding of a pilot.
3. Download or share rate. Of the people who found photographs, how many took them. A high find rate with a low download rate means the photographs are not what people wanted.
4. Time to live. Hours from the last frame to the gallery being usable. This is the number that most affects everything else, and it is a fact about your photographers and your workflow, not about the software.
Write down a target for each one before the event. Then you cannot rationalise afterwards.
Change one thing
The discipline that makes a pilot readable: keep everything else the same. Same photographers if you can, same coverage brief, same promotion.
If you simultaneously change the delivery mechanism, hire a different photographer and add a new sponsor, you will learn nothing about any of them.
Where pilots actually go wrong
Nobody told the guests. The most common failure by a distance. The technology works and nobody scanned, because there was one small sign near the exit. Delivery is a promotion problem as much as a product one.
Coverage did not match the promise. You told guests they would find themselves, and the photographer shot the stage all night. Fix the brief, not the software. How to brief your event photographer is the relevant document.
The gallery went up too late. By the time it was live, the audience had moved on. Time to live is the number to protect.
No plan for the empty period. Guests looked the same night, found nothing, and never returned. The guest who looks before the photos are up covers what that page should say.
Ask the guests
Numbers tell you what happened. Three questions in your usual post-event survey tell you why.
Did you find your photographs. Was it easy. Did you share any. That is enough, and it is worth more than any analytics dashboard for the specific question of whether this was worth doing again.
Then decide honestly
A pilot that produces a low scan rate has not necessarily failed. It has usually told you that your signage was wrong, which is cheap to fix and would have cost you an entire season to discover otherwise.
The question at the end is not whether the technology worked. It is whether the guest experience was better than what you did last time, and whether the numbers justify doing it across your calendar. If you want the questions to put to any vendor before you get this far, twelve questions to ask a photo delivery vendor is the list.
The short version
One mid-sized event you have run before, four numbers agreed in advance, nothing else changed, and three questions in the post-event survey. Promote it properly, brief the photographer at guests rather than the stage, and protect your time to live.
Founder, TIME&SPACE