Elvire de Chalus of Colloquium was the celebrated winner of the IAPCO Driving Excellence Award 2019, as announced at the impressive IMEX Gala Evening in Frankfurt. Christophe Painvin was delighted to accept the award on Elvire’s behalf, presented by Mathias Posch IAPCO President.
The Innovation Award is part of IAPCO’s programme of Driving Excellence Awards and is designed to celebrate an innovative achievement. Mathias Posch stated “Our Conference Managers are confronted daily with growing customer demands and the challenges of an ever-changing economic environment. Our two finalists this year Elvire de Chalus, Colloquium, and Veysel Guzel, Kenes Group, were confronting very different problems – be it to co-locate an event that grew to 15,300 delegates in a venue fit for 8,000 or to create a brand-new application that addresses the ongoing issue of financial management in a complex international industry like ours. Both have displayed operational excellence and innovative spirit that showcases the incredible talent that we have in our industry.”
The winner Elvire, said “We started working on Colloquium Numbr after a simple observation: knowing how to manage an event budget is one of our main key assets as event professionals. The way you draw up a budget will influence the whole event organisation. As a PCO, we were looking for a digital tool that would allow us to monitor our events' budget and our events' data. Although we receive tons of emails about new event tools every day, none of them matched our needs. Most are mainly about either registrations or marketing, which is only a part of our work and so we decided to create our own tool: "Colloquium Numbr". Reviewing a budget on a regular basis is a key tool in managing an event… but it is time-consuming. From budget creation to the closing process, Colloquium Numbr assists the project manager in each step of the budget. It can just select a budget template (preloaded or customised) and start to manage its budget by following Colloquium Numbr advice. At any time, Colloquium Numbr will calculate an accurate evaluation of income and expenses in order to help the project manager to make good decisions. Colloquium Numbr also assists the project manager in selecting suppliers, specifying its needs and analysing proposals. Once it has made its decision, you validate the offer and Colloquium Numbr will automatically update its budget accordingly.”
The IAPCO Innovation award is in its fifth year, and again attracted high-quality submissions. The two finalists presented their concepts to the audience of the IAPCO Annual Meeting in Basel for the final vote. The results were very close and both finalists deserve recognition for their hard work.
