The programme is planned to the minute. The hallway track is not planned at all.

The gap

A conference is the most thoroughly planned event in business. Rooms are allocated to the quarter hour, speakers are briefed, the AV is tested, catering is counted. And then eight hundred people are released into a foyer for forty minutes and the most valuable part of the day is run by nobody.

Delegates feel this acutely. Ask them a month later what they got out of it and very few will name a session. They will name a person, or they will say it was fine but they did not really meet anyone, and that second answer is the one that decides whether they come back next year.

Most conference platforms have noticed, which is why almost all of them now have a networking tab. It is usually a directory of attendees with a message button, switched on when the doors open and switched off when they close. That is the whole window: a list nobody has time to read, available exactly when everyone is busy.

What The Gantry does instead

It opens 14 days before the first session. Delegates read who is going while they still have time to do something about it. They shortlist, and the ones they want to meet get a nudge that names its intent before the conference starts, so the first exchange on the day is not an introduction.

Each profile leads with the useful part. Not a job title and a company, but what that person is working on right now and the topics they will happily be asked about. That is the information you would actually want thirty seconds before walking up to someone, and a delegate directory almost never has it.

It stays open for 7 days afterwards. The follow-up window is where conference value is won or lost, and it is precisely when most event apps have already been archived. Delegates send post-event connection requests to the people they actually met, and the relationship survives without depending on your platform.

The cap is the feature. 2 nudges per delegate, one per person. In a room of two thousand, unlimited messaging turns into a volume exercise within an hour and everyone stops reading. A small allowance means each approach is considered and receiving one is not an imposition.

It sits alongside what you already run

This is not a platform migration and there is nothing to switch off. Your registration system produces a CSV of names and email addresses; that is the whole integration. Upload it, grant every delegate the full room in one action, and they get access that runs across the fortnight either side rather than the two days in the middle.

Up to 5,000 rows per upload. Duplicates, invalid addresses and people already on the platform are classified and handled rather than double-invited, and you get a result table showing what happened to every row.

What you can put in front of a sponsor

Sponsors have stopped accepting door numbers, and "1,400 delegates" has never answered the question they are actually asking. The analytics measure outcomes rather than attendance: verified check-ins, nudges sent and the proportion accepted, relationships formed, unique reach across your programme, and how many delegates came back from last time.

That last one is the measure a per-event platform structurally cannot give you, because it has no memory of your previous conference. Delegate accounts on The Gantry persist, so returning attendance across a programme is simply visible. Work out your cost per connection if you want the number in pounds.

Everything in those views is aggregate. No attendee email addresses, no message bodies, no exportable lead list. That is a deliberate limit and it is the reason delegates are willing to put real information in their profiles.

Where it is not the answer

If your problem is the agenda, the floor plan, session feedback or badge printing, this is the wrong product and you should buy a conference platform. The Gantry does one part of a conference, and if that part is already working for you then you do not need it.

Common questions

Does The Gantry replace our conference app?

No, and it is not trying to. If you need an agenda with parallel tracks, a venue map, session feedback and a push notification to two thousand people, keep the platform that does that. The Gantry does the part those products treat as a networking tab, and it runs from two weeks before the conference to a week after rather than only on the days.

Can we run it alongside our existing platform?

Yes. The delegate list is a CSV of names and email addresses, so whatever is holding your registrations can produce it. Nothing has to be migrated and nothing has to be switched off.

What can we show a sponsor afterwards?

Verified attendance from QR check-in rather than a door estimate, how many nudges were sent and what proportion were accepted, relationships formed, and unique reach across your programme. All aggregate: no attendee email addresses and no message contents are ever visible to an organiser.

What does it cost for a conference of 2,000?

Nothing. There is no per-delegate fee and no banding by attendee count, which is unusual in this market and is the point. See what the alternatives publish on our comparison page.

Next: what the conference platforms publish about their pricing, what to put in a sponsor report, or the other kinds of room we work with.