Mobile friendliness encourages better event participation and social interaction.
The Boy Scouts of America’s 2012 National Order of the Arrow Conference made a strong step forward through its planning committee as they determined that mobile and social media penetration is great enough in their audience that the use of QR codes would help them to improve the results of their efforts.
Therefore, mobile and social media were chosen to become an important element of the conference program.
The conference had two primary goals. The first was to boost the interaction that occurs among the scouts across the country. The second was to increase attendance to the event itself. To achieve this goal, it used unique QR codes created by Munzee, which featured various gamification elements.
Through the QR codes, it became possible to reach thousands of the scouts in attendance.
The event took place at Michigan State University and continued over five days. Each of the conferences throughout the event had its own unique QR codes. When the scouts used their mobile devices to scan the quick response barcodes, they were awarded points. Throughout the five days, there were more than 77,000 new connections made among the attendees of the conference.
In total, there were more than 150 different events with QR codes that could be scanned by the people who were attending them. The number of points that were assigned for each scan depended on the importance of the specific conference.
By the time the second day had started, the guests and staff were scanning at a record breaking rate of an average of 22 scans for every minute. To make the scores even more interesting and interactive, Munzee provided the event with a real time leader board that those attending could use to track their own scores and their ranks among the others, as well as the scores of their lodges, sections, and regions.
The participants that reached the top three scores received prizes that included a Macbook Air, an iPad, and a PS 3 game console. By turning the scanning of the QR codes into a competitive game, it achieved a participation element that had never before been seen at any National Order of the Arrow Conference in previous years.
