Event management platform EventGeek relaunched under the new name Circa. Initially designed to help event marketers coordinate mulitple in-person events, Circa adds capabilities for virtual event management, allowing event planners and sales teams to combine data across all events, whether in-person, virtual or hybrid.
Since the advent of COVID-19 in March, Circa has helped event marketing teams transfer more than 40,000 live events to virtual events and webinars, according to a company press release.
New features announced by Circa include:
- Ability to manage in-person, virtual and hybrid events in one place
- Ability to manage hosted and sponsored events in one place—including conferences, exhibit booths, workshops, webinars, roundtables and meetings
- Support for thousands of events and meetings within an enterprise
- Support for marketing teams to enable them to measure engagement for events the same way they do for other digital marketing programs—for instance, measuring conversion from attendees to sales opportunities
- Ability to integrate with virtually every well-known video conferencing tool, such as Zoom and On24, as well as databases, such as Salesforce and Marketo, so marketers can use engagement data in strategy and event planning.
“The move away from in-person to 100 percent virtual events has thrown off many marketers who traditionally relied on in-person events to fill their pipeline,” said Alex Patriquin, founder of Circa. “Circa turns this sea change into an opportunity for marketers, by giving them the tools they need to successfully engage customers in virtual events, better integrate data, and measure and manage these events as they would any other digital marketing program.”
He continued: “With Circa, they can see all their event data in one place, and use that information to craft and execute more effective events that move prospects through the pipeline more quickly.”
One Place to Track It All
Liz Kokoska, senior director of demand generation for North America at Okta, a San Francisco-based identity and access management company, said that the company is seeing more demand for content from the community now than before the shelter in place orders went into effect. Oktane20 Live Virtual Identity Conference in April that traditionally drew 6,000 people to Moscone Center had 20,000 registrations and streamed using the Intrado platform. “We have a captive audience now and we are seeing a lot less attrition,” she said.
For the developer workshops, lunch and learns and roundtable discussions Kokoska’s team manages for the sales organization, they have seen an evolution since the virtual shift occurred in March. “At first we were doing experiential things like happy hours with ingredients shipped to people’s homes, but now it is much more about the content,” she said. They keep the presentations short, an hour and a half max, include contests, and polls to keep people engaged. “Zoom fatigue is real,” she attested.
Kokoska’s team can manage their 400+ events a quarter because they use Circa. “Circa gives us one place to track all the details,” she said.
