How BW Events Tech uses existing platforms, custom integrations, and practical problem-solving to remove friction from attendee experiences.
Partner content notice. This article was written by Adam Parry and originally published by Event Tech Live on March 31, 2026.
BW Events Tech has built its reputation not on flashy product demos or industry awards alone, but on something harder to sell: solving the problems clients don’t know how to articulate, using their existing tech stack with BW’s expertise in customization.
Imagine you are running one of the most high-profile media summits in the world. You have carefully curated a lunch programme where influential guests sit with expert moderators to discuss the issues that matter. You spent weeks assigning tables. Then the event opens, and the no-shows arrive, not in person, but as empty chairs. Half a table gone here, three seats lost there. The arrangement you crafted falls apart before the first course is served.
This is the kind of problem that looks mundane on a briefing document but creates genuine chaos and disappointment on the day. And it is precisely the kind of problem that BW Events Tech was built to fix.
Working with a top media organisation’s flagship invitation-only summit, BW’s team had a straightforward brief: make the lunch experience impactful by reducing empty seats and keeping check in queues quick. Their solution was anything but straightforward in its thinking, even if it looks deceptively simple in hindsight. Using their own on-site check-in platform, ShowUp™, BW added a custom question at the point of badge printing.
As each attendee arrived and checked in, they were presented with the available table topics to choose from. The moment a table reached capacity, that topic disappeared from the options list for everyone who came after. No paper lists, no staff members manually redirecting people, no empty seats. Over 200 guests loaded in approximately six minutes. Every table was full.
That six-minute figure is worth sitting with. It is not just an efficiency metric. It is a measure of friction removed, of an on-site role eliminated, and of an attendee experience that felt personal rather than premeditated.
BW Events Tech describes itself as a full event tech stack management and agency services company. That description undersells the work considerably. The agency, which has worked with clients including Adobe, Google, DocuSign, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Palo Alto Networks, has built over 118 custom integrations, supported more than 3,000 events, and maintained an NPS score of 84. They also hold the Event Technology Award for Most Creative Agency in Event Tech.
But ask Rae Malcham, who leads the agency’s client services team, how she would describe creativity in event technology, and she does not reach for buzzwords.
“Creativity doesn’t often equate to flashy or new,” she says. “That’s especially important in tech, because sometimes you think, oh, no one’s even mentioning the technology. And that’s actually a good thing. It usually means everything worked to keep everyone’s attention on the program itself.”
Malcham describes two distinct buckets of creativity. The first is using what already exists, pushing platforms, combining tools, writing integrations, finding what a client’s current stack can actually do when you really understand it. The second is introducing something genuinely new to the event experience, technology that an attendee notices in the right way, something that makes them think they haven’t seen this before.
“We’ve really leaned into the first one with our clients,” she says. “There’s a lot of creativity in being a problem solver, in saying yes and looking at what’s available to try and solve problems with technology.”
This matters because the dominant conversation in event technology tends to focus on what is new. New AI features, new immersive experiences, new apps. BW’s position is that this framing can easily lead organisations in the wrong direction. Before recommending a new mobile app to a client who was unhappy with their current solution, BW asks what specifically did not meet their needs. Often, the answer is something that can be fixed or supplemented without the disruption of switching platforms.
Managing the gap between what a client asks for and what they actually need is one of the quieter skills in event technology services. Most agencies do not talk about it much, because it involves politely redirecting the person paying the invoice.
A concrete example: one of BW’s clients needed to provide attendees with proof of attendance for professional certifications. They required evidence, not just of event presence but of which sessions a person attended and for how long. The registration platform the client was using had no native feature for this. The data, however, existed in the platform to the event organizers.
Rather than jumping to find an external solution, BW’s approach is to first understand the problem, and look to the existing tech stack to solve first.
Working with RainFocus for Autodesk, BW connected a report to an API, ran a script, to produce personalised PDF session transcripts for each attendee. It looked like a purpose-built feature. It was a well-constructed use of available data. No new platform, no significant additional licence cost, no manual exports. Just someone who understood both the problem and what the tools could actually do.
“It doesn’t feel flashy,” Malcham acknowledges. “But that’s a real use case our client asked us to solve.”
Some of BW’s most interesting work stems not from technical innovation but from an understanding of how event technology is commercially structured, and then using that structure creatively.
A case in point involves Swoogo, the registration and event management platform. Swoogo operates on an unlimited events pricing model, meaning clients pay a flat fee per admin license regardless of how many individual events they run. Most agencies use this straightforwardly. BW uses it as a structural advantage.
For clients running complex activation programmes at major industry events, such as Adobe’s presence at Cannes Lions, the challenge is managing what is effectively a dozen separate events nested within a single overarching experience. There might be a VIP dinner, an invite-only panel, a general attendee activation, and several other sub-programmes all running across the same week. Each has its own RSVP list, its own capacity, its own access rules.
Traditionally, a single attendee could get asked to register and provide their contact information five or six times across five or six separate registration forms. BW’s approach is to build what Malcham describes as a parent event structure, where a single initial registration pulls through into each sub-event via webhooks and APIs. The attendee provides their info once and sees only the additional programs they have been given access to. The client gets a unified view of RSVPs across the full programme.
From the attendee’s perspective, the sub-events feel included within a single agenda rather than separate events requiring separate registrations.
“We’re trying to remove the friction of re-registering,” Malcham explains. “We are considerate about both what the client needs on the back end to make their lives easier, and what we can do on the front end to make sure the attendee doesn’t feel the pain of a disjointed experience.”
This approach only becomes possible because BW understands Swoogo’s pricing architecture deeply enough to build with it rather than just in it. The unlimited events model becomes a canvas for creativity and problem solving.
Much of the attention in event technology discussion goes to pre-event registration, digital content delivery, and post-event analytics. On-site experience, the part that actually happens in front of attendees, gets comparatively little serious coverage. BW’s position is that on-site is where the real experience lives, and where the biggest gains are still available.
At an incentive travel programme run in collaboration with a destination management company, BW encountered a familiar problem. Attendees pre-registered for afternoon activities, but roughly half of them wanted to change their choice when they arrived. The existing solution involved a person stationed at the registration desk, manually handling requests, checking availability, and updating spreadsheets.
BW built a simple prompt into the ShowUp™ check-in kiosk. At the point of check-in, attendees were shown their selected activity and given the option to change, seeing only the activities with available capacity. The updated preferences fed automatically into a report for the DMC. This freed up the staff member to support the program in other ways than being stationed at the reg desk.
The pattern here is consistent across BW’s work: identify where human effort is being used to compensate for a technical gap, and ask whether the technology can absorb that task instead.
Malcham is a careful thinker about what event technology adoption actually looks like versus what the industry talks about in the abstract. The example she returns to most readily is wallet passes.
Digital passes on a mobile device are not new technology. They have become the standard and natural mechanism used for flights, concerts, and sports events; however, they are almost entirely absent from conference and corporate events.
BW is currently developing Wallet Pass for ShowUp™ for a client running a week-long activation programme where attendees will move in and out of a venue across multiple days. Physical badges are not a suitable mechanism for this type of event. A new app would be disproportionate. A wallet pass, already familiar, scannable, updatable via push notification, fits the need without requiring the attendee to adopt anything unfamiliar.
The question of whether physical badges will eventually disappear is one Malcham engages with pragmatically rather than ideologically. She does not think they are going away any time soon. Lanyard sponsorship, visual security, lead capture, and plain human habit will keep them in place for most large events for years. But she suspects the question of what the badge is intended for is one more organisers will have to answer explicitly as alternatives become more capable.
We anticipate needing to answer this question more in the coming years: “What’s the purpose of the badge at this programme? Because if we’re honest about that, sometimes the answer will be: we can do this differently.”
BW describes itself as platform agnostic. In agency positioning, this phrase is sometimes used loosely to mean we will work with whatever you give us. BW means something more specific: the agency makes no commercial margin from the platforms it recommends, has trained staff across more than 30 partner technologies, and takes a genuinely comparative view when evaluating which tool fits a client’s unique requirements.
The commercial reality is that most event technology vendors offer services alongside their platforms. BW sometimes finds itself in the same conversation as a vendor’s own services team. Malcham is candid about this tension but clear on the logic.
“When partners see us as a value add to join and support the client, even if we’re providing the services they also offer, we’re partners supporting the same end goal for our client.”
The payoff she points to is retention. Clients who feel their technology actually work and can evolve with their organisation, who are not constantly hitting limitations or escalating problems, tend to stay on their platforms longer. The agency’s presence, rather than undermining vendor relationships, often reinforces them.
There can be structural frustrations, however. Malcham raises the issue of agency access costs, which often adds an additional financial burden to a client when hiring an agency to help them. In her view, platforms that have thought carefully about agency roles and built access models that account for them tend to generate stronger client outcomes and, ultimately, greater platform loyalty.
The ones that have not are inadvertently creating friction for the very teams most invested in making their product work well.
There is a line in BW’s own company materials that captures their positioning more honestly than most agency copy manages: If they were up for an Oscar, it would be for Best Supporting Actor. They are there to support the client, not to take the stage.
In an industry that tends to reward visible innovation, this is a deliberately understated stance. But it reflects something real about how event technology actually works in practice. The platforms that attendees love are rarely the ones they notice. The integrations that save the operations team hours of work on the day are invisible to everyone except the people who built them. The session that runs smoothly is not a story anyone tells.
The lunch that filled every table and loaded 200 guests in six minutes is, to most people in the room, simply a nice lunch they are glad they went to.
BW’s argument is that this invisibility is the point. Technology that announces itself is technology that has interrupted the experience. Technology that does not is technology that has delivered it.
There are enough examples in BW’s portfolio, across clients of the scale of Google, DocuSign, Intuit, Databricks, and others, to suggest this approach holds up beyond a single case study. The question for the wider event technology industry is whether the obsession with what is new is obscuring just how much value remains in using what already exists, and doing it considerably better.
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