Event leaders today are fighting against all odds: tighter deadlines, smaller budgets, waning audience attention, and less tolerance for any hiccups that could go viral. As marketing teams face growing demands for near-flawless execution without any additional support or resources, they are struggling to do more with less.
This building pressure means planners need to execute more efficiently, but also ensure the attendee experience remains thoughtful, personal, and worth their time. This is where technology can drive the most impact and efficiency. Not only can it add more capabilities to an event team’s toolkit, but it can remove repetitive, administrative work to give planners more time to focus on relationship-building, and designing memorable experiences that keeps attendees coming back year after year.
For event teams operating under increasing pressure, here’s what’s becoming essential: creating repeatable systems that reduce tedious processes, accelerating routine tasks, and most importantly, boosting the customer journey by connecting attendee information. This is exactly what Event Leaders Exchange (ELX) sought out to do.
How Manual Processes Are Constraining Planners
Some of the most time-consuming work behind an event is invisible to attendees. When it comes to building pages, tracking tasks, and managing travel information, these steps can take months to achieve. Individually, these tasks may seem small. But when dealing with hundreds or thousands of attendees, they build up quickly.
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ELX, the invitation-only community for senior event leaders, was managing critical setup tasks like these for its Annual Congress using manual processes. The Annual Congress is where senior corporate event leaders gather to share ideas and learn from one another, meaning a smooth set-up and registration process was critical. ELX knew that they couldn’t claim to be the authority on event best practices, and then not implement those practices themselves.
Not only did the team want to find a way to eliminate their current timely processes, but like many event leaders, they wanted to create a better experience for attendees, and maximize efficiency.
Accelerating Event Set-Up with Ease
Time-saving is crucial in the world of event planning. And while being detail-oriented is necessary, there’s also opportunity to create repeatable processes. By utilizing templates, the ELX team was able to apply branding across a multi-page microsite in a single day. The site included a homepage, speaker page, session catalog, and FAQ page. For the rest of the registration build process, the checklist also served as a guardrail to surface tasks as needed and ensure all were completed.
Not only did this save time in keeping track of progress and next steps, but registration itself became a breeze, and numbers were boosted exponentially when ELX adopted RainFocus’ event marketing platform. Within the same week of launching, total registration surpassed numbers from the year prior, and the team saw a 50% conversion rate from pre-registered attendees.
With a marketing team of just three people, time is a valuable asset at ELX. Reducing the manual work around registration and attendee management meant the team could spend less time on logistics and more on strategy, thinking about how to better engage the community, strengthen the attendee journey, and ultimately create a better experience for members.
Driving the Customer Journey Beyond the Event
At the end of the day (or event, in this case), what matters most is what the attendee took away from the interaction. By simplifying tasks, it creates more room for planners to focus on community, content, and meaningful attendee connection that leaves a lasting impression.
Read More: It’s All About Engagement!
Beyond boosting registration numbers through the unified platform, the ELX team saw an increase in operational wins too. Because the automatic task reminders within the attendee portal surfaced outstanding travel and hotel bookings, the team wasn’t forced to dig through each attendee profile to conduct manual outreach, which could take days. As a result of automating the process, just over three-quarters (77%) of attendees had promptly booked their hotel.
Overall, the top benefit of easing these administrative burdens is what planners can do with the time and data they get back. Registration isn’t the finish line, but rather the starting point. With the administrative foundation taken care of, planners were able to shift their attention from getting attendees through the door to considering how they engage once they are there. For ELX, this meant putting greater emphasis on community, including opportunities for attendees to connect in person with peers facing similar challenges.
Looking Ahead
As expectations for event planners continue to rise, more budget and time isn’t always an option (and most likely won’t be). Teams will have to find ways to make the resources they already have go further.
When equipped with the right tools, planners have more capacity to focus on strategy, and attendees benefit from a more seamless, thoughtful journey. The ELX Annual Congress event showed that the value of simplifying event operations isn’t just faster registration or fewer manual tasks, but rather creating a space for planners to focus on the people and experiences behind it.
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Rodney Hart is the vice president of events at RainFocus, defining the company’s event portfolio while showcasing the power of the RainFocus event platform. He is focused on using event data to comprehensively measure event ROI across event types and specific event behaviors.
Hannah Elston is senior manager of partnerships, marketing and communications at Event Leaders Exchange (ELX), where she leads work across partnerships, brand, communications and community engagement for an invitation-only network of senior corporate event leaders.
