2. LEADERSHIP
Kendra Aaron Jeremy
Wright Pederson Emerson
President Technical Creative
Director Director
Experience: Experience: Experience:
Began building Leads a team A classically-
websites in 1995 of highly skilled trained artist with
for Fortune 1000 programmers 14 years of
company Finds the online design
Started her own perfect experience
company in 1998 technology for Oversees the
Helps events the job process of
have a great A different bringing your
online presence. breed of techie brand to life
– speaks online
English! In touch with
client needs and
3. THE TEAM
Chris Lugar Cassie Daniel Bunn
Senior Roberts Software
Software Manager, Sale Engineer
Engineer s & Partnership
Jessica Chris Howard Jonathan
Bybee- Front End Hope
Dziedzic
Developer Software
Senior Account
Manager Engineer
Adam Dispenza Rebekah
QA Specialist Hardage
Marketing
Manager
8. THE GUY VS. SAFFIRE
The Guy Saffire Events
• Local business • Focuses solely on making
• Loves your rodeo events more successful
• Has a connection to people • Has a proven track record
involved in your rodeo with lots of events
• Is all-inclusive – gives you
everything you need to be
successful
• Provides ongoing support –
webinars, online
help, articles, etc.
• Provides community of idea
sharing with other events
• Takes your website ―the
guy‖ built to the next level
15. INTERNET WINS POPULARITY
CONTEST
The amount of time people spend overall on the
Internet has increased 121% over the past five
years.
In 2010, for the first time ever, Internet usage
surpassed television usage.
Are we following this trend?
Do we think our customers are?
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com
16. RODEO HOUSTON STATISTICS
―How did you hear about the event?‖
Newspaper – 2%
Rodeo Advertising – 4%
Radio – 9%
TV – 10%
Website – 46%
20. THE VALUE OF A FAN
eMarketer has reported that over 50% of
Twitter followers are more likely to purchase
from brands they follow
Coca-Cola has reported that Facebook fans
are 2 times as likely to consume & 10 times
more likely to purchase than non-fans
35. WHY SWITCH TO SAFFIRE
Increased revenue – when people
click, they engage, and when they
engage, they buy.
Stretched marketing dollars – Social
networking integrated throughout makes it
easy for customers to tell all their friends
about our fair (those friends tell more
friends, etc.).
Increased efficiency – We manage our
own content and online registration forms
without data entry
36. NEWEST SAFFIRE FEATURES
Saffire Events surveys customers twice a
year to gather ideas for new features
• New homepage layouts
• Even better interactive event schedule
• Even better page preview and editing
functionality
• Built-in image cropping tool
This is information about partnering with Saffire Events, a company that provides online marketing software to the fair, festival and rodeo industry. Saffire has offices in Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon.
Saffire Events was founded by Kendra Wright, who has been building websites since 1995, when the internet began.In 2000, she joined forces with Aaron Pederson, Saffire Events’ technical director, and Jeremy Emerson, Saffire Events’ creative director.
Since then, Saffire Events has added almost a dozen people, all to keep up with the ever-rising bar of online expectations.
Besides their work in the event industry, their team does work for large consumer companies in a lot of industries. This gives a breadth of experience that they bring to marketing events online.
Add picture to bottom left; add animation
Saffire websites are different than other websites because were custom designed for the industry. Saffire works closely with industry organizations, as well as clients, to provide websites that meets the specific needs of a fair. Here are some of the sites designed on the Saffire platform. You can see that Rodeo Austin has its own brand but awesome functionality and interactivity, which leads to increased revenue.
Brazos Valley Fair is a new event in Bryan, Texas that Saffire helped launch.
The mission of Saffire Events is to elevate the fair industry by improving the online presence of fairs to help them compete against all the other (non-fair) websites vying for customer attention. Saffire Events is also helping to promote fairs to fairgoers with FairsEverywhere.com, another Saffire site built in partnership with IAFE.ARC
Saffire Events has won lots of web marketing and design awards, from fair associations and beyond.
Five years ago, most of us probably felt like we were spending a ton of time online. But internet usage has more than DOUBLED since then! Even if we’re not personally following this trend, our customers are, and they are the ones we most need to reach in order to grow.
Saffire helps with the organization of our homepage, which is critical to get people intrigued to delve further into our website.Designing a homepage is an art and a science. There has been a lot of research on how people read web pages (or don’t read them, which is more accurate!). A good homepage should have a natural hierarchy, and the information should be in the shape of a capital F, because that follows people's natural eye patterns online. The most important information is across the top, then down the left side with a little bit across the middle, where the featured events reside. Research shows people can't remember more than 5-7 items in a list, so there should not be more than 5-7 links in any one place. Additionally, a homepage should have interactivity to involve the senses, like a music player to HEAR the sounds from an event, a countdown to raise excitement about it and photos to SEE the event.
The next most important thing about our website, after our homepage, is relaying engaging information to entice people to attend our event.Saffire includes an interactive event schedule that makes it easy for fairgoers to find activities to attend. It includes categories to help people quickly find their specific areas of interest. It’s easy to sort and filter by these categories to narrow down the list.We can designate events as “Our Picks,” which will automatically appear at the top of the list. Customers can also “Fan” events, post them by Facebook or Twitter, or email them to friends, getting more people engaged, thus helping us do more marketing at no cost. Customers can also create a custom event schedule and print it out to bring with them.
After clicking on one of the events on the interactive event schedule, customers are taken to an Event Detail Page, which gives all the detailed information for a specific activity that goes on at our grounds.Our customers will be enticed to attend our events not only by the information presented but also by the interactive options on the pages. For instance, customers can upload their photos to our site (with our approval) by clicking the yellow “Share it” button. This is a great way for us to get photos as well as let our customers feel a connection to our event. They are also able to add events to either their own custom event calendar on our website or to their Outlook calendar. And using the SaffireCommerce, people can log into their accounts, so they can easily make repeat and mobile purchases!
General sponsors can be promoted on our homepage, as well as on a dedicated, categorized Sponsors page. Individual event sponsors can also be promoted on event detail pages, giving another benefit to sponsors of specific events and activities. Logos also link to the sponsor homepages, which is a benefit for our sponsors.
It is so important to have a solid online ticket sales strategy. Why? In 2011, we had major weather events that affected so many fairs. Advanced ticket sales are like money in the bank (before our event even starts). So we need to make our website interactive, to get people in the habit of clicking, which makes them much more likely to click to buy!
We can use Saffire’s built-in ecommerce engine, or any other ticketing agent… or a combination of both!
Saffire gives us a password-protected website to manage all our event content, making it easy to completely control our own website without ever waiting on Saffire or anyone else to do it.
We can edit the features on our homepage and even pre-schedule them to appear on certain dates ahead of time!
We can create custom event category names and reorder them anytime.
In fact, we can add any new page to our website, dragging and dropping text and photos, as well as spots for links, PDFs, sponsors, items for sale, forms and more… on every page. It is easy enough that anyone comfortable using Microsoft Word can update our website.
Saffire makes it easy to keep track of the people most important to our event, including sponsors, vendors and volunteers. With Saffire, there are no more paper registration forms or PDF forms that we have to keep in a binder or type into a spreadsheet. With Saffire, we can easily create unlimited online forms that come via email after customers complete them online, and we can also easily import them into a spreadsheet or a database without ever doing any data entry.
Mobile is becoming incredibly important, as smartphones proliferate our world. People are spending almost 3 hours a day on their phones, and mom-aged women (the ones that control the pocketbooks) are the most active group!So even if we aren’t thinking about our mobile site, our customers are already looking for us on mobile. We should provide them with a good experience!
By 2014, more people will access our website via mobile devices than desktop computers!Looking at the trajectory on this graph, it is inevitable!
Mobile websites are included in every Saffire installation.
Tablet sites are included with every Saffire installation.
There are so many reasons Saffire is a great choice for us, but two of the most important are increased dollars and efficiency. They bring so much experience from the fair industry, and they are helping so many fairs to be successful.We can use Saffire to upgrade our event’s virtual front door, the first impression for so many of our customers.
Rodeo Austin has been a great partner to develop Saffire into what it is today (and what it will become!).
This quote epitomizes why Saffire exists… To help elevate the fair industry by improving its most important front door, the one so many people will see regardless of whether they ever come to our event (but hopefully they will!) – our website. And they do it in such a way that makes our lives easier, because we’re empowered to manage it (and enjoy doing it!) without any outside help.