Lanyrd and the MOO API

Who is Lanyrd?

Lanyrd was created by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe whilst on honeymoon (which is definitely an unusual time to be brainstorming business ideas, but whatever works - that’s what we say!). They both realised that the conference and event community was missing a service that could help attendees, speakers and conference organisers to get more out of events, promote learning and professional broaden horizons. So they created Lanyrd - a social conference directory, focusing on events for professional development. They help people to find the right events to attend, get the most out of them whilst they’re there and to catch up on slides, notes and videos after the event.

Lanyrd, MOO and SXSW

SXSW is a huge event with thousands of panels and talks. We wanted to make an easy and accessible way for speakers to promote their talk when they’re out and about in Austin.” Operations manager Sophie Barrett tells us “We thought that helping speakers to create MiniCards as talk flyers would be an excellent way to do this.

“Generally, the feedback has been that the Lanyrd/MOO speaker cards were an excellent way for us to show speakers and attendees what a great resource Lanyrd is. We’ve since heard from other event organisers who would like to order the cards for all the speakers of their own events as a special speaker gift.”

Hello there, API

So how did it work? Speakers could log into Lanyrd and create their MOO cards using the schedule information already available. The cards displayed the time, date, speaker names and even a mini-map and venue information to help people to find the session.

“We used different coloured tabs on the cards to indicate which day the session was on.” Sophie tells us “This helped people who had gathered quite a few speaker cards together to easily order and separate them into the different days.

“Lanyrd already has data about the sessions at SXSW, gathered for our unofficial schedule planning site. We built the speaker card offer using a combination of MOO’s API and our own system for dynamically generating card designs. Speakers were invited to connect Lanyrd to their shopping basket on MOO.com. We then generated two business card designs - one optimised for panels, the other more suitable for single-person talks, and showed them to the speaker who could then chose from the two designs or to have half of their cards using each design.

The card designs were generated using HTML and CSS. Once the user was happy with the designs, we used the API to drop the cards in to their shopping basket and placed their free MOO coupon in the basket - they could then check out as usual at MOO!

Sound like something you might want to try? Learn more about using the MOO API and see what you can come up with for your customers.

Written on:

06 Nov 2013

Categories:

Events, Small Business, Internet, MiniCards