American Express Meetings & Events teams up with DoubleDutch to provide customers with greater insight into meetings' ROI

American Express Meetings and Events today announced that it has teamed up with DoubleDutch, a global provider of mobile event technology, to launch an exclusive, data-driven dashboard for meetings professionals. This dashboard integrates quantitative metrics from American Express Meetings and Events with DoubleDutch's measures around attendee experience. With a snapshot view of these key analytics - available during a single event or over the course of multiple events - meeting owners can better assess the total return on their events investment and identify which levers to adjust to enhance the effectiveness of their meetings programme going forward.

As part of this agreement, DoubleDutch's event app will be made available directly through American Express Meetings and Events to its customers. This app is already highly-regarded in the industry for the engaging way it facilitates social interaction between meeting attendees and between attendees and event-specific content. The insights the app gleans from interactions with attendees will feed into the dashboard and help meeting planners optimise the event experience.

"We aim to create the curve on technological innovation, including through integration with leading peers in the industry, in order to revolutionise the meeting and events experience for both planners and attendees," said Issa Jouaneh, Vice-President and General Manager, American Express Meetings and Events. "We are particularly focused on providing actionable data and insights for our clients' programmes, and by combining our keen understanding of experience design and cost control with the reporting on attendee engagement enabled by DoubleDutch, we can deliver a more immersive and effective method of measuring and enhancing the meeting experience."

Mr Jouaneh continued: "Furthermore, by adding the DoubleDutch app to our portfolio of solutions, we are able to offer our customers the full set of tools they need for an end-to-end integrated meetings experience. In addition to overall planning and implementation, we can also support the goals of our clients' meetings by incorporating the direct development of mobile solutions into their programme."

"We are excited to work with American Express Meetings and Events, the premier meetings and incentives company in the world. The DoubleDutch app sparks conversations and drives attendee engagement in very compelling ways and American Express Meetings and Events customers can now experience it first hand," said Lawrence Coburn, Founder and CEO, DoubleDutch. "In using a DoubleDutch app, planners can make more informed decisions based on real-time feedback, a key differentiator in the industry space right now. The power of our data next to American Express Meetings and Events' wide-ranging metrics will deliver an enriched event experience for our shared customers."

The proprietary dashboard is an intuitive tool displaying easily digestible data points to help measure achievement against meetings goals. Specifically, the metrics reported include event cost, savings and length; attendee population, interest metrics, and sentiment measures; and app interaction metrics, among others.

Compatible on any smartphone, the DoubleDutch event app promotes deeper attendee engagement through a variety of components. Attendees are able to connect with each other onsite, create customisable agendas from the events' master schedule and receive relevant push notifications before, during, and after the event. The app also has gamification elements, including points, badges, and leaderboards; surveys and live polling; and the ability to link a user's social media accounts to the app and send updates to his or her larger social network. For planners and facilitators, onsite app management is simple - from pre-programming messages to pushing out last-minute updates.

These solutions are now exclusively available to all American Express Meetings and Events customers. For more information, please contact MeetingsEvents.Solutions@aexp.com.

American Express Meetings and Events also invites attendees of IMEX America to visit its exhibition booth #529 for further information on the app and custom dashboard October 14-16, 2014. In addition, please join American Express Meetings and Events and DoubleDutch executives at booth #529 from 1pm - 1:30pm on Tuesday, October 14 or 10:30am - 11:00am on Wednesday, October 15 for discussions of "Meeting Apps and Measuring Meeting Effectiveness".