MCI is a Global Consulting, Live Communication, Congress, and Event Management Company. MCI in the Middle East started its operations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the Business Centre of the Middle East, against the backdrop of the immense growth in the region for Destination Management (DMC), Association Management and Consulting (AMC) and Professional Congress Organization (PCO).
MCI is a globally recognised name in the event management industry. When they first came to us in 2014, the agency struggled to give an eminent web presence to their events. Moreover, with the velocity of their events in the Middle East, they needed digital support and consultancy round the clock.
This challenge called for setting up a dedicated team that provides digital consultancy and support for each event managed by MCI, in their own UAE timings. Since the events industry is highly short on turnover time, websites and web apps had to be built with agile methodology so that parallel teams can reduce overall development time. To increase reachability, all their websites had to be designed with responsive first approach and hosted with diligence to keep the live events running smooth. We came up with:
Smart web helped with managing the events just as well to increase operations efficiency and reporting structure for better positioning marketing efforts. We built evaluation, survey, registration, and webinar systems for many of their events and rendered event’s performance reports with the established data.
From a landing page to websites and to webinar systems – everything we designed was responsive and tested for cross browser compatibility. Responsiveness of these websites increased user engagement for these events as it made easier for the attendees to access it on different devices.
During the pandemic, MCI was initially hit by the inability to organise events and conferences. As a solution to this hindrance, we came up with designing virtual events where more than 500 attendees could be online at once and listen to and interact with the speakers. For seamless interaction, events were hosted on AWS for better load balancing. Live chat and faq sessions were created in real time.
We are talking of big conferences here where thousands of attendees and speakers attend and constantly engage with the conference website or web app. Comprehensive hosting solution and in many cases cloud managed hosting is offered to keep the websites running smoothly – no matter how large the footfall!
MCI hosts and manages scores of events and conferences and therefore any time delays can cause them serious business. We managed to cut short response time by working gulf hours, giving their managers quick access to our digital consultancy and project updates.
Again, since events are targeted for certain period, it is of utmost importance to keep the web development time as quick as possible. We quickly understood the domain of the MCI events and worked on number of web design and rapid application development modules so that we can expedite the development process for them.
Though organic SEO takes time to show results naturally and the events most often are designed for a certain period, so there’s less challenge in what can be done from the seo perspective, but that doesn’t mean the website should not be optimised. Unlike, most other website developers we optimised all MCI events’ websites so that they rank with their names and added Google analytics for performance reporting.
From domain buying to website hosting and from server management to cloud hosting – we covered every aspect of support and maintenance for the web solutions that we provided.
— Wordpress CMS enabled Website Development
— Event Web apps
— Cloud managed live events
— Webinar systems
— Evaluation and Survey systems
— Custom Marketing reports
— Online Registration forms
— Responsive web design
— eShots and landing page designs
— Brochure websites
— Optimised (SEO) Websites
— Website hosting
We brushed all their events with modern good-looking websites that resonated with the event’s theme and relevant information. MCI’s events now had smoothly running responsive websites with hundreds of visitors managed on the event days. Web applications and back-office systems further helped the management in organising events and engaging with the attendees, supporting all their digital marketing efforts.
Smart Web agency has been MCI-UAE’s technical partner for more than 7 years, and the partnership yielded: