A LEADING North East business networking organisation has created a state-of-the-art app to allow their 8000 members to interact more effectively.
The Mussel Club was set up nine years ago to help business people meet up at informal events and has been one of the region’s fastest growing networking groups.
And now the organisation is planning to help its members create even stronger contacts, with the launch of its app on September 30.
The app has been in development for nine months and allows people to book events online as well as seeing who else is attending and looking at their profiles.
Managing Director Jeni Banks said, “We are so excited to introduce the app to the business community to help them get even more from The Mussel Club. Rather than shy away from technology we wanted to embrace it and come up with creative new ways for people to network.”
The app also gives members the option to send out “let’s meet” requests to anyone they want to talk to at a particular event.
“This will help people to more effectively target their networking activities and essentially pre-arrange meetings before they even arrive,” said Jeni.
“People can also check-in through the app once they arrive at event, this not only alerts any people users have pre-arrange to meet that they’ve arrived, it also adds them on to an electronic delegates list which is sent out via the app after the event is over so even more networking can take place.”
David Cook Director of Sunderland-based ACA Financial Services, who founded The Mussel Club over a glass of wine and a bowl of mussels, said the app was a logical progression.
“We have worked long and hard to create an app which is perfect for our members and not only gives them the opportunity to target who they might want to interact with an event but also has a number of other invaluable features,” he said.
These additional features include the ability to poll other members with live results, giving businesses access to instant market research opportunities.
“Businesses will have the opportunity to put their own questions with a selection of answers out to The Mussel Club members, and based on the results get instant market research,” said Jeni.
“This will provide valuable information to members on a range of different subject to help them.”
The application will also be used at Mussel Club events to gauge business opinion on a range of relevant subjects.
“The Mussel Club has always been about bringing people together face to face to build lasting business relationships, and this is still the case,” said Jeni.
“The introduction of additional technology is not to take away from that, it is to enhance it and help the business community to take advantage of more effective and efficient networking tools.”
Anyone wanting to find out more can contact The Mussel Club on www.themusselclub.com