Over the past six months, global assurance provider BPA Worldwide has led a group of over 15 organizations from the event industry, including trade show organizers and digital platforms, in creating the BPA Reporting Standards for Digital Events (RSDE). The goal of the project is to “bring consistency and trust” to the data reported by digital events and platforms.
Event data has been an important topic within the industry as virtual platforms greatly facilitate its collection, but it can still be a challenge for planners and organizations to draw actionable insights from the data if every platform reports it in a different format.
Similar initiatives, such as VSef, have also been launched since the beginning of the pandemic to address this issue. VSef guidance has been fully incorporated into RSDE, so any platform that currently follows the RSDE standard is compliant with VSef by default.
“With hundreds of digital platforms and the reemergence of the industry in a new era, there is a tremendous need to develop industry standards for taxonomy and data formats for digital events similar to what exists for physical events,” said Glenn Hansen, BPA’s President and CEO, in a statement. “We are following in the footsteps of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which successfully set the standards for the digital advertising industry during its infancy. And, in doing so, helped stabilize and empower the media and marketing industries to thrive during a time of disruptive change.”
The measurement standards for digital events developed by the BPA-led working group of industry experts will provide a valuable foundation for the industry to be able to analyze and leverage their event data more easily. The group also acknowledges that these standards will evolve as needed.
Rhonda Wunderlin, SVP of Performance Marketing for Questex and a member of the working group, added: “As an event organizer, Questex is fully behind the initiative to create standards that will hold platforms accountable so we can bring a new level of confidence in the data to all parties involved: organizers, sponsors, exhibitors and attendees alike.”
During the first phase of the initiative, the group recommended updates to the Auditing Rules for the Statistics of UFI Approved Events to allow digital and hybrid events to qualify. It has also created a glossary of terms, data formats, and tables for reporting as part of its phase-two goal of developing the reporting standards for digital platforms.
The third phase, now underway, is to establish a protocol to certify platforms’ compliance with the standard. This will allow platforms to be pre-validated by BPA and assure organizers that their data outputs are accurate.
Industry professionals can now review the documents set forth by the RSDE working group and leave comments and questions.