By Yomna El-Saeed

Cairo will witness a small, yet unique business event on Wednesday 11 September. It is a Gamification business course hosted by the non-profit organisation icecairo. But what is Gamification?

It is ”Game-ification”, which means integrating game techniques into non-game environments. It explores what make gaming fun and compelling and use that in business-related technologies like websites, mobile applications and software developed for enterprises. It is a proven business discipline that combines psychology and technology to engage both customers and employees to all of the organisations’ digital touch points. It aims to increase customer loyalty and employee’s productivity and it succeeded in doing so all over the world.

When it comes to the customers for example, it is a great help in facilitating online registration for products, submitting comments, reviewing of products, sharing recommendations on social media websites, as well as submitting questions and receiving answers. When this new technique is applied businesses have seen a surge in repeated visits on their websites, ratings, reviews and shopping clicks. It has also helped organisations create and invigorate their reputations.

The event on Wednesday will be presented by The Gamifiers who are partnered with Badegeville, the number one global Gamification and behaviour management leader, who count among their clients giants like Samsung, American Airlines, Paypal, Ask.com, and many others.

“icecairo generally aims to introduce new business models in Egypt. We introduce the models we use, as we want them to be [widely] spread among the Egyptian businesses. We do not compete, we collaborate,” Muhammad Radwan, the Space Manager of icecairo, said. “And Gamification was proven to be a very successful method, especially with small businesses. They lead to reaching a wider audience and achieving higher sales,” he continued.

icecairo relied only on social media to market for the course, and they are expecting from 20-30 attendees. The event will take place in their headquarters in Downtown Cairo. “We are targeting Egyptian youth who are interested in Green technology, especially those who have yet to start up their businesses. We help them create their prototypes of the projects they want to start before they run their own businesses. This is our target in this event and every other event,” Radwan said.

icecairo is a social enterprise and part of the international icehubs network and is a community-powered green tech innovation hub.