Stephen Cutchins:

I've been to a lot of events now, I've talked to a lot of planners. Planners really, really want to do the right thing. I say it jokingly, but we want to throw a good party. We do. We want it to be happy. We don't want to see at a party, somebody in the background sipping their drink, having a bad time. That's one of your attendees. That could be an attendee with a disability. They can't participate. So they just want to throw a good party. And I really, absolutely, with all my heart of hearts, I'm seeing this, that people are so excited about, I really want to do this right.

Alyssa:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Felicia Asiedu:

Hi everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Felicia and I am your host for this week's episode. So, we are recording this episode because we are thinking about Global Accessibility Day on the 16th of May, and we know that that's just coming up tomorrow, and so we asked our favorite accessibility representative in Cvent -- and he'll be blushing, because he's like, really? But yes, really -- Stephen Cutchins, our Senior Manager of Accessibility to join us. So Stephen, please say hello to our audience.

Stephen Cutchins:

Sure. So hey, everybody. Happy day before Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Stephen Cutchins, our Senior Manager of Accessibility. I've been doing accessibility for... I think I'm at about 22 years now. People always ask, "How'd you get into this?" I was on a project, I'm in the Washington DC area, so I was on a project for the federal government, and people didn't know what to do on a project and they said, "You figure this out." And that was probably three or four years of that. And then I'm like, I think this is going to be my career. So now, knock wood, 20 plus years doing it, and still all I do and I still like it just as much.

Felicia Asiedu:

I say you are our favorite accessibility person at Cvent, because I mean, A, you talk about it a lot, which is great. It's always good to sort of beat the drum of something, but also you're super passionate. Every conversation I've had with you isn't, "Okay, the business should be doing this," or, "These are the statutory rules." You really do come at it from a, "Why would we not be thinking about this for every single human?" So I love that. But just for our audience, in case this is their first foray into this subject, which I'm sure it's not, but just in case, let's just go over why accessibility is important.

Stephen Cutchins:

Actually, what accessibility is. So, accessibility is making our digital content work for people with disabilities. It's as simple as that. We know about the physical stuff. Everybody's... You know, you go to the bank and they have to have... Or any facility or a hotel or event venue. You can't just have a tiny little rotating door. I'm lucky my legs work. I'm not in a wheelchair. I don't have a service animal. I can see. I can hear. I don't have a white cane. So I can get through that little rotating door, no biggie.

My colleague who is in a wheelchair can't. My colleague who is blind can't. Or they can, but it's now difficult, especially with the cane. So you have to do things like there's size requirements for wheelchairs. You have to have doors that auto open. Everybody understands that. They kind of get it. Braille in the elevator. Captions on a YouTube video. For somebody who can't hear the video, they can still read the content.

Accessibility is... Oh actually, sorry. Digital accessibility captions are under accessibility. But accessibility is making the digital content work for them. If somebody is colorblind and they can't tell the difference between a green success message and a red error message, we have to make it so there's something other besides color. Somebody has a physical disability and can't use a mouse, or just simply getting older. I mean, we're all getting older. You know, holding up a mouse here, but as we get older, we might get tremors and our hand shakes. We might have a physical disability where we can't use a mouse. We have to make content work for those people.

And for me, it's the right thing to do. My mother was an amputee. I have a disability, a neurological disorder. I had two cousins in wheelchairs. But outside of that personal reason, it makes business sense. They're twenty-plus percent of the people in the world, who want to come to our events, who want to participate, want to be speakers, want to give us money to come to these great events. If we don't [inaudible 00:04:20], they're not going to come. And it just makes business sense to me also.

Felicia Asiedu:

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I've been talking about diversity for a few years now. I kind of fell into that, talking about diversity. It was one of those weird things that happened. It was the whole George Floyd thing and everyone was like, "Oh, you look like you can speak about diversity." And I was like, "Do I? Really? It's not my area. It's not my expertise. What's this?" And I always tell that joke because it opened up a door for me. It opened up something where I got to understand more than my own diversity. So I got to talk to people that were talking about making things accessible for everybody. Now that is a diversity in itself. It's not a racial thing, but I think coming at it, I remember sitting on stage with you once and you were kind of like, "What's the cost of being racist here? So who are we excluding?"

Stephen Cutchins:

That was [inaudible 00:05:07]. You actually... You mentioned that later. We were very lucky that I was at CONNECT UK and got to talk to Felicia, and she was asking about isn't this expensive? How much it costs. And I said, "When is it okay to be racist? At what point?" Is it okay if it adds 10%? And I can say, "I'm sorry, you're Black. You can't use it." Is it 20%? Is it one? Never.

So I think it's the exact same thing with digital accessibility. And again, that's that because there's two, there's for me, it really is. I mean this is personal. It's the right thing to do. But also for business sense. And there's numbers to prove it. Both ways, cost-wise it only adds about 2%. US federal government did a big study. There I wish I remembered the name of the organization, but it was like some whatever that said it was like 1.8% I think to within... I think they did a six-year study. Over six years, it's like, let's say 2% more expensive to make your products accessible. Longterm, it's essentially zero. It's the same as with like security. Now we just get it, we have to make our digital products secure. Well, we have to make them accessible. So longterm, the cost is essentially zero.

And companies that are more inclusive, this was a big Accenture study that they did with an organization called Disability:IN. Companies, please pay attention. Companies that are more accessible make significantly more money. I think it was 60% more revenue than companies that are not inclusive to people with disabilities. The numbers were staggering how much more money you make by being inclusive. And if we go back to that, at least in the US, it was over 20% of people have a disability. 20% of people, I don't care about you at all. I don't care. I don't care if you come to my event. You're in a wheelchair, you're deaf, you're blind, you're colorblind, you have limited vision, you're in a wheelchair, you have a service animal, I don't care, I don't want you to come. 20% of your users. I wouldn't go to any planner out there and go, "You can increase your revenue by 20%. Increase the number of people if you did 2% additional cost." They would take that all day long.

Felicia Asiedu:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I'm going to get us onto that topic of how we can help planners to think about what to do, physically do, to make their events more accessible. And that is both physical and digital. I'm going to give a perspective based on what I heard. So let's think about large organizations, some who may be listening to this, when they're down 5% on their revenue or their forecast, everybody starts rallying, because they're like, "Oh my gosh, we're off by 5%." If you take that to the millions of dollars or pounds or euros and you're down 5%, think about how much 5% represents of half... call it 500 million.

Then tell me, "No, we're not down. We can actually make 20% more." Or 60% more, because that was the figure that you actually gave. I'm suddenly kind of like, okay, not only is this important for it's the right thing to do, but come on, where are you getting those 5% gains from? When someone's telling you to cut your budget, you're like, "Actually, do you know what? Let's not cut the budget. Let's make more money." Doesn't that just make more sense?

Stephen Cutchins:

Yeah, spend 2% and get 20 back. Yeah, a hundred percent. It just-

Felicia Asiedu:

Right. Yeah. So let's take that and help us to go down that path of, okay, so what should event planners and organizers actually be doing? And we can talk, like I said, about physical, physically or digitally. What should they be asking venues or suppliers there just to make their events more accessible?

Stephen Cutchins:

Tomorrow we're doing on Global Accessibility Awareness Day a two-hour webinar. The first hour is kind of a panel. We have somebody who's in a wheelchair, we have me, and then we have somebody who has hearing disability. We're going to talk just kind of an open panel. The second hour we're going to show some of our products, and then we're going to launch a thing called the Big Book of Event Accessibility. It's free. It's huge. I think 80 pages right now. It's growing. I'm saying this because a lot of the stuff I'm going to say now is going to be in the Big Book. I'm so excited. We've been working on this thing for so long, like many, many, many months. Finally ready. Actually, you've done some of the reviews on them, and I'm pretty excited.

So, the biggest thing is ask your attendees. And there's really two different things, and we talk about this in the Big Book. There's two things you can do. You can go into detail and say, "Will you be accompanied by a personal care assistant? Do you need captions? Do you need sign language interpreters? What language for sign language? Will you come with a service animal?" Well, there are so many questions you can ask, and that's great.

Or, if you are unsure of the questions or if you're simply afraid, like, "I don't want to ask somebody if they're in a wheelchair." Or if they use a mobility device, is really what people would say. And that's important because you have to know not just the physical stuff about like ramps. When you're setting up tables for dining, when you're setting up just the tables to go in your opening plenary, you need a place reserved for them with a chair gone because they're in a wheelchair. Their chair comes with them. And I mentioned if they have a service animal, that's really two spaces, because you don't want the dog out in the aisle because somebody could step on its tail, they could kick it, they could whatever.

And actually to follow up on that, if they said they also come with a personal care assistant, you have to know things like, well, that's now they have a service animal, so that's one space. They have them in a wheelchair. That's two spaces. And we reserve the chair next to them for their personal care assistant. And we don't charge that PCA. They're a nurse. They're someone that's there to take care of health and welfare of that person. You don't charge them. You can charge them a nominal fee for the food. Normally we don't.

To go back to my original point is just please ask. And if you're not sure what to ask, and this actually came up with... A Cvent employee sent me a thing. I love this. It was their alma mater did a thing for the ten-year reunion, I think it was, for graduates, and it said, "Do you require ADA," Americans with Disabilities Act. "Do you require ADA accommodations?" And then it said, "If you put yes, we will contact you within a couple of weeks to discuss how we can best accommodate you." That is brilliant. I'm not sure what to ask. I don't know, but you do. So we're going to contact you and say and find out like, oh, you're in a wheelchair. Okay, great. Oh, you also have a service animal. Oh, great. Okay. Oh, and you also have a personal care assistant. Well, then I know a lot of stuff I have to do to make that person enabled. The biggest thing is just ask. That's for starters. Please ask your attendees.

And I think the more questions you ask, the more people are going to want to come. Because if you don't ask, and somebody said this, "Don't reduce my experience to a checkbox." So on a website, don't just put a little box and say, "Do you require accommodations?" I could be deaf. I could be blind. I could have a physical disability service animal, personal care assistant, all those things. And if I just put yes, that's not enough. I thought that was such a great saying of my experience shouldn't just be one little checkbox that says yes, you have a disability. There's an awful lot of types out there. And we can accommodate all of them, you just have to know how.

Felicia Asiedu:

I really love to hear that because we often do talk about diversities and accessibilities being these checkbox exercises even, where people are saying, "Oh, look, I did it. I got people to come to my event that ticked this box." And actually it's like, yeah, but did they feel welcome? Did they feel that they were able? Could they do all the things that other people could do? How did you make it inclusive? Not just that you got them in the door. So I think that is a wonderful saying.

And this kind of goes back to... I remember there was a school of thought where people were like, "Don't ask. You shouldn't ask me. You should just be accommodating." And I'm like, look, I'm not a planner, I'm a marketer, but I've been planning events now for a long time and working alongside other planners. And we all plan based on our information. So what you said to me makes sense.

But what do you think... We're talking about responsibility here. I think you started the podcast by saying some venues, most venues, every venue should just do a particular standard. So there's a responsibility on venues to have some standards. Then the organizer, it sounds like what you're saying, needs to ask. But I think the attendee, there are some that would say, "Don't ask me." There are some that say, "It should be a standard. I'm not going to tell you. You should just get some sign language people." What do you think? What should we be doing here? Is it as big of a minefield as I'm making it sound or is it, let's just ask, you just tell me, and I'll get it done?

Stephen Cutchins:

We've had so many cool conversations about this internally, is for certain things you don't ask. Like the website itself, it has to be accessible. It has to meet web content accessibility guidelines. Because you just don't know. But to go down a tangent of I should just make it work for everybody. Think about there are so many different types of dietary restrictions. Some people are allergic to strawberries. Some people love strawberries. Some people might be halal or vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian. Should I really have every option in sufficient quantities that considering maybe 10 people are vegetarian, I'm sorry, 10% of my 2,000 attendee audience could be vegetarian. So I'm going to have hundreds of vegetarian meals. And really it turns out nobody is. And I just wasted all that time and that money.

So I think it's the exact same thing. And I'm going to give you a great... And this is a real... Matter of fact, I mentioned tomorrow the two-hour webinar, the guy on the first hour, this is his story. This is not mine. He's in a wheelchair. Disability where he cannot physically lift himself. He has to take a wheelchair in the shower, in the bathroom. To get into bed, he uses a thing called a Hoyer lift, where essentially it picks him up and sets him in the bed. So I'm using my fingers here, sorry, but a Hoyer lift is kind of shaped like this.

Felicia Asiedu:

A C, for everyone that can't see.

Stephen Cutchins:

Yeah, a C. Well, the bottom of the C has to go under the bed, otherwise it would just tip over when it picks him up to put him in the bed. He specified an ADA, or Americans with Disabilities Act, accessible room. And it had a shower that he could roll into. I think he mentioned it had a lip or it was difficult. The telephone had a light on it. But it had a bed that was on a solid base and he couldn't get his Hoyer lift close enough to get in the bed. So he had to have [inaudible 00:15:03] pick him up and put him into bed. One, it's not a great experience. And is that really how you want your attendee to remember your event, is yeah, I had to have people pick me up and put me into bed? And the next morning get me out. Or do you want to ask specific questions about not just do you need an accessible room? It's a little bit rare, but you've got to plan for that.

And when you contact the attendee to ask, like that one with the university did with the alumni, or you just say, "Do you require a mobility device?" And have some kind of text deal to say, "I'm in a wheelchair. Very limited mobility. I require a Hoyer lift and therefore a bed that I can get underneath," you'll do it. The hotel will do it for free. All you have to do is go, "Oh, I need that. Hotel, do it."

"Gladly. Done."

But you have to know.

But to go back to the thing about should we just do it, does that mean every hotel has to have these beds that aren't on the posts instead of platforms? No. So super long-winded story, but I prefer the for certain things, like the website has to be accessible, period. But for certain things like dietary restrictions, you need accommodations, you fully should ask. Yeah. And it's also going to make me feel more comfortable because ADHD, PTSD, certain things like that, if you ask these questions to know, given enough responses, we need to have a low sensory room or a quiet room. We need to have a place where people can just get away.

This is another true story. I was at a conference and I was speaking, so I sat all the way in the back. And everybody's up front and I'm kind of on my phone and reading through my speech and get ready what I'm going to say. And this guy comes next to me and says, "Can I sit here?"

And I said, "Sure." And I asked. I mean, we were all literally in the back of this giant room, there's five or six or seven rows empty, and then all the 400, 500 people up front. And I said, "Are you speaking?" I just assumed he was speaking.

He says, "No, I'm here as an attendee. I have PTSD. I was former military. I get extremely uncomfortable with sounds behind me." And we were all the way in the corner, in the very far corner with no doors or anything behind him. And I bet if hopefully he let the planners know that and then they could have in some way in rooms either let the speakers know or... Because what they don't want to do is, "Hey, you in the back. Come on up here."

Felicia Asiedu:

Right. Exactly.

Stephen Cutchins:

He would probably do it and he would be a nervous wreck. He would be scared. He would be looking around. So something like that, if you know it's going to help your attendee. And if speakers do do that, he's probably going to leave your event, because he's going to think that everybody else is going to be calling me up front. Or let's all come up front and do some bonding routine or some silly dance [inaudible 00:17:40] activity that everybody else is like, "Hey, this is awesome. I love this," and he's terrified.

Felicia Asiedu:

Do you know, that just made me think about language. There are moments where planners, and particular types of people. So I know I'm a type of person that'd be like, "Yay, an activity." So I am like, "Woo-hoo." But it made me think that maybe with that language, when we're at church, we say, "If you're comfortable and you can, please stand." That's what we say, because I'm at church on the Sunday. I lead the worship. So we say, "If you can and you're comfortable to do so, please stand."

So if we are going to do that as event planners, maybe something is like, "If you can and you're comfortable, or you're able or you want to, please feel free to come forward." It's just a slight shift in language rather than, "Right, everybody."

Stephen Cutchins:

Yes. Exactly. "Come on, stand up. Come up." Yeah. And also when you think about coming up to the front, we need to train our planners who then need to train their speakers, but let them know if somebody's in the back, let them stay in the back. I don't want to talk too producty, but we've got this feedback before from events where people who are neuro-atypical, they're not comfortable raising their hand and speaking up in public. They might have autism. That's just not their thing. They need a way to communicate and to chat and to ask questions without, I'm going to stand up and hand me the mic, because for them, their brain is... It just can't do that.

So have a mobile app that can, I want to ask a question. I want to vote on a poll. I want to essentially raise my hand and stand up and ask my question without ever actually having to do that because that terrifies me. And that's again, things that the more we think about this and ask questions and learn more, we just do it.

Felicia Asiedu:

Yeah, it's a standard. I love that. So thinking about standards, I hear there's different laws coming in. This is how these things happen where we think it's a good thing to do, we should try and do it, and then suddenly it becomes mandatory anyway. Which I think is actually the right way to go. So what can you tell us about some of the new laws that are coming in in Europe, and I hear... Are there any in US?

Stephen Cutchins:

Government sites have to do this. US, just a couple of weeks ago, passed one for the Americans with Disabilities Act that says state and local government, their services, their websites, have to be accessible to people with disabilities. Doesn't cover businesses yet. Yet. It'll happen. UK doesn't have it, but European Union does for all member states in the European Union, it's called the European Accessibility Act. That actually was enacted in like 2019. They started enforcing it June 2025. And that does cover businesses of, I think it's 10 or more employees or 2 million euro a year or more revenue. So all you planners out there, this will impact you if you're either within an EU member state or doing business with. So even if a US organization wants to do business with a country in the EU or business in the EU, your products have to be accessible. It'll be web content accessibility guidelines. They're letting each country choose their own. It's probably going to be their 2.1 or 2.2. 2.2 is the newest one. That was like October last year. Our products we design and this to 2.2.

If you remember GDPR. What is it? General Data Privacy whatever, from six or seven years ago. This is like the GDPR for accessibility.

Felicia Asiedu:

It's the right thing to do. I mean, I always say, if you want to create a shift, like we talk about sustainability all the time. Until someone in government or someone regulates it, people are doing what they can do and saying, "Oh, well, I'm trying. I did my best." But your best is probably not good enough. You do need standards to adhere to so that we can make sure it is what we spoke about earlier. There's a benchmark. Venues doing what they need to do. Digital providers and suppliers are doing what they can do. Because we recognize that not everyone can come in and code their website with exactly the right things that need to do. So that's why here I know at Cvent, I know you've been working hard alongside the team to make sure that those standards are already being met ahead of time without someone telling us what we need to do. So I think that's fantastic.

Stephen Cutchins:

Because our planners aren't software engineers. They're not sitting down and writing JavaScript or .NET or whatever the technology is. I'm not smart enough to even know. But they don't do that. They use our products to create sites. Those sites have to meet these requirements. Luckily, we've been... What, over two years now, we've been working on this. Actually, they had been working on it longer. When I joined January about two and a half years ago, that's when we really started, and we're getting our products documented. Something called a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It's kind of the only way to really legally state that this is where we stand. Independently audited third-party accessibility firm. I believe we're the only event software company in the world that's actually independently audited. I think a couple of them have VPATs, but they're done internally. Ours, if the company says, "Hey, you have 50 defects," we have 50 defects.

And actually, I could even add that not only do they write our VPATs, they write our defects and put them in a big Excel spreadsheet, and then we upload them one-to-one in our defect tracking system and give them what's called SLAs or Service Level Agreements that say like, "That's a high, you have to fix it in 60 days. That's a medium, it's 90." I don't know what the numbers are. But all that is completely independently audited and then we just start fixing.

Felicia Asiedu:

I love that. I love to hear it. So I'm going to just sort of wrap us up and ask, are there any tools that people can start to use and implement right away so they can just do better today? If you had to recommend any.

Stephen Cutchins:

For the digital space, there's a bunch, but with the caveat that a lot of what it will fail is going to be on the software itself. There's kind of three things that a planner needs to do. When you're adding images, you need to add alt text to describe it. So here I have on the wall a picture of the Isle of Man TT poster. If you're going to include that image on your website, it would say whatever text is in there, it describes it. So somebody who can't see it can understand it through assistive technology of their braille screen reader, their audible screen reader, whatever. So you have to do image alt text, you have to do proper color contrast, and do proper heading structure. For the color contrast and alt text, when you're creating a registration site, alt text is mandatory.

In attendee hub, we did a demo where if your colors are bad, we actually will let you know. There's a thing called safe color mode. We'll let you know the color's bad, and if safe color mode is on, it'll actually tweak your colors automatically. It's not red yet, but we're working on it. But that's pretty cool. So if you want red text on a white background, it's kind of too pink, we'll actually darken the red a little bit. It's pretty cool. Yeah, actually, we'll do a demo of it. That's I think one of the things we're going to demo tomorrow. But it's pretty cool.

The biggest thing to think about probably is not so much tools outside of our Big Book of Event Accessibility, which launches tomorrow, but just make sure the software you're using enables you to create accessible content. Because if it doesn't, I pick something that's not going to create an accessible site, there's virtually nothing you can do. Unless you're like a software engineer and can go through and write HTML code or JavaScript or whatever it is. You just can't do it. You can't make [inaudible 00:24:40] accessible unless the product allows you to.

Felicia Asiedu:

Right. Got it. Thank you so much, Stephen. This has been a phenomenal chat. As always, I'm secretly hoping I get you to CONNECT Europe again. I'm sure I will. I'm going to put that request in because I have to have you talking about this. I just think the more we talk, the more educated A, I am, but our audiences. And this is something that we're all trying to navigate.

And I keep hearing you talk about this wonderful webinar that's happening tomorrow. I believe it's called No Attendee Left Behind, which I think is a great title. Just in a snippet, just tell us what it's going to be about. Who are you speaking with?

Stephen Cutchins:

Yeah. So the first hour is three of us, it's just a panel with a moderator just asking questions. It's kind of hopefully more good than bad, but good and bad stories about events that we've been to. Matthew, he's in a wheelchair, he actually owns a consulting company that will go into venues, hospitality events, and libraries, public spaces, banks, and kind of audit them for physical accessibility. It's called 6 Wheels Consulting. Matthew Shapiro is his name. He's doing that.

And then for the second hour, we're going to launch the Big Book, which I'm so excited about. Launching the Big Book of Event Accessibility. Free download. And then that'll be 10, 15 minutes. And then we're going to have a guy, Ron Justice, a friend of mine in sales, he's actually going to demo our products, create some accessible sites, do things like adding alt text, proper color contrast, play around with color safe mode, to show you planners how to actually create an accessible registration site. Should be fun.

Felicia Asiedu:

I mean, more than fun. I'm so excited for that. I'm like, ooh, I've got to put that on my LinkedIn. Because I think people are really just dying to hear, what can I do? What can I do? So I think that's going to be great.

Stephen Cutchins:

I've been to a lot of events now. Talked to a lot of planners. Planners really, really want to do the right thing. I say it jokingly, but we want to throw a good party. We do. We want it to be happy. We don't want to see at a party somebody in the background sipping their drink, having a bad time. That's one of your attendees. That could be an attendee with a disability. They can't participate. So they just want to throw a good party. And I really, absolutely, with all my heart of hearts I'm seeing this that people are so excited about, I really want to do this right. I don't see people in wheelchair and I realize that's probably my fault. But it's not that people in wheelchairs don't want to come to my conference. I don't make it so they want to come. And they really want to do that. They want to do it for the right reasons. Plus, they realize those people in wheelchairs have money. They want to spend it at your conference. Do you want to let them? Do you want to take it? You probably do.

Felicia Asiedu:

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you Stephen so much. I'm going to finish by saying thank you and I love your T-shirt. For everybody that's listening to this podcast and cannot see Stephen's T-shirt, you are missing out. Could you just explain, give us an audio explanation of what is on your T-shirt?

Stephen Cutchins:

It's ours. Pretty Cvent blue color. It's Cvent spelled out in sign language. And then I'm going to turn around here. On the back. Can you see it?

Felicia Asiedu:

I can see it. It's got some dots. What do those dots mean?

Stephen Cutchins:

Cvent spelled out in braille with the word Cvent underneath. So it's sign language at the front, braille in the back. Yeah, I think we ordered 50 of them or something like that and we're just handing them out. We have an accessibility guild. It's within technology here at Cvent. So it's me, it's some folks in testers, quality engineering, software engineers, user experience folks. And we're in the accessibility guild. And we gave them that. And we just started a new employee resource group for employees with disabilities called Enable. And we're going to come out with more T-shirts, but we'll have a little Enable logo on it. But big hit. Yeah, pretty big hit. So yeah. Proud of our shirts. Yeah.

Felicia Asiedu:

Well, I'm jealous, but I'm loving it at the same time, so thank you.

Stephen Cutchins:

Yep. Bring one over to London next year.

Felicia Asiedu:

Thank you. See you next time.

Stephen Cutchins:

Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Alyssa:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel:

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu:

Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel:

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM, or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.

Carisa Bartelt:

People then get more excited when you are involving them and you're sharing that information and that impact. Then kind of just keep asking and keep justifying for their support, right. You're making them a part of the process and you're making that data work for you because you understand what they care about and what it means.

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Hello, everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Alyssa, and I will be your host for this week's episode of the Great Events podcast, a podcast by Cvent. Carisa, I would like to welcome you back to the show. We're going to be talking about some really fun stuff today. For those of you who have been previous listeners, Carisa has been a repeat contributor to the Great Events podcast. So we're excited to see what she's been working on in her product marketing role here at Cvent. Carisa, what's been going on?

Carisa Bartelt:

Hey, everybody. Happy to be back. Always good to talk to everyone. I think it's been kind of a wild year. It's been a couple months since I've been here. Think over the last ... We're about halfway through the year now. There's been this really intense focus on what are we doing and why are we doing it and how do we prove or justify impact or resources or anything going forward because I think there was such a fear at the beginning of the year. And now there's this opportunity to kind of reinvent, but there's still a little bit of caution of how much can we spend? What are cutbacks looking at? What's the economy going to do? So I've been doing a lot of work involving kind of understanding what the needs of event and marketing teams are to kind of survive and still execute decently and host great events within this current landscape.

Alyssa Peltier:

And I think we're here to discuss acutely what we need in terms of data, right. What data do we need to prove the impact of our programs? I know we talk loosely about that usually on every single episode in some capacity, right. But I think what's interesting about the work that you've been doing, and I'll let the cat out of the bag here, is that Carisa and her team and our larger marketing group have been working on a KPI framework that can help event managers, event organizers, event planners, event marketers all better calculate the value of their event programs in a more standard way, right.

We've seen kind of a lack of maturity in this space when it comes to data and proof of impact. And so I think the opportunity to have something that's a little bit more consistent in the form of a framework is advantageous to this profession specifically. So Carisa, let's dive into this KPI framework. I guess starting off with what are event KPIs? What are we even actually talking about? I think KPI is relatively widely known term, but there are organizations, associations, nonprofits that use different terms. So when we say KPI, what are we talking about?

Carisa Bartelt:

Data, KPI, these are all buzz terms that we all like right now. And I think the capability to understand what the heck they mean and how do I activate them is really something that we found as just a gap that a lot of us don't have. So I like to think of it in the sea of data, we can report on anything. Anything is reportable. I can give you numbers on anything that you want. And those things, what those are is really ... Those are metrics. Those are one single data point, right. It tells you something really specific, but it doesn't tell you something on its own, right. I can give you a number, 82 for this one thing that we tried to do, and you're like, "Well, great. What does that mean? What do I do with it? How do I improve it?" Right. And a KPI becomes then a combination of metrics or a single metric that you get a deeper analysis of that provides an insight to performance that matters to your business goals or your overall strategic objectives, right.

Alyssa Peltier:

So why does this matter now? I know we touched on this in the opening here. I have assumptions here related to the economic environment that we're in. But why now? Why KPIs for events in 2024?

Carisa Bartelt:

I hate to harken back to the last couple years, but events especially have been this untrackable thing that we just know works. We all do events because our customers like them and our prospects like them and they're great, and face-to-face connections are great, but now with so much of the digitization of just even in-person interactions and the ability to track things, all of a sudden now I've got all this data that I can report on. And my programs are getting cut or my events are getting cut. And I can't cut back on the experience at events because that is something that people in your audience tangibly feels. I think from a marketing standpoint, if I cut back on my Google Ad spend, my customers aren't going to notice, right. They're not going to feel that cut. But if I cut back on the food and beverage on my events or the types of events and the quality of the events I'm doing, they really, really feel it.

So for marketers and people in the event space in general, there's this pressure to ... You still have to deliver great events, but also, we want to give you less. And they need to find a way to justify, one, their impact, and two, the full scope of really the experience that they want to create. And now they have all this data everywhere, right, that's like, "Oh, I can report on how many people attended this particular session and what time everybody checked in. And did they have a great time? And did they like that particular activation that I did?" Are very, very granular. And events teams aren't used to dealing with that much data or dealing with them, that kind of granular nitty-gritty.

Alyssa Peltier:

But let's talk about dealing with the data and what this framework aims to provide, which is a little bit more consistency, a little bit more structure around how to organize that information. Because like you said, it is a sea of information. And part of what we've been lacking historically is a means to make sense of it and categorize it, right. So what are some of these kind of specific examples of these KPIs or even categories of data and KPIs that we're organizing to help event managers improve their programs, to make sense of their programs, to make sense of the data that's part of their programs?

Carisa Bartelt:

Yeah. From a really basic level, getting really simple, because I think data is such a complicated topic and it's very, very intimidating to put your arms around, we're trying to build this framework for us to understand what, who, when, and where each data point kind of fits. We've seen a lot of people out there and they're like, "Here's 200 things that you can measure." And you're like, "Great. But why? What do I do with that? Where does it fit within my understanding of it?" So we've got the what, right, which is what you're trying to accomplish. And we're trying to assign a what to each data point that you might potentially get from an event. Is it to help with brand awareness? Is it measuring the participation and engagement of the people on site? Is it really just a direct revenue financial kind of piece?

Those are all different things of the objective themes, the what that we're measuring. Then we have who. Who cares about it? A lot of different data points are relevant to the event execution team, right. The nitty-gritty tactical. Or the sales team. I want to know about pipeline. I want to know about lead conversion. Or even the financial team, right. And for me, when I have all these things I can now measure, I want to know who cares about what so I can have better conversations with my stakeholders. And then we have it broken down into when, which are these maturity stages, right. When can I start measuring this? You can start measuring it right away. Or you need the foundation of data. Before you can start measuring this, you need this baseline. And then after you start measuring that, you can start looking at year-over-year information or cross event information. And that's that maturity of your data kind of approach. And then where. I think-

Alyssa Peltier:

You beat me to it. I was like, "Am I going to get her? Can I give her the where question?" But you're good. You're on top of your stuff today.

Carisa Bartelt:

Where? Where? Well, I think that's the really important part, right. Okay. I can pull this data. And there's this kind of growth of events as a part of the marketing organization as a whole where we understand not all of these data points are tracked or able to be ... Live in just my event management program or my event software, right.

Alyssa Peltier:

I think that's an important distinction, right. Because oftentimes we get ... There's a lot of event data within a platform like Cvent, right. There's tons of that. But we started this conversation where KPIs are often dependent on multiple data points. And sometimes those data points come with multiple data sources. And so I think the where is very important because we often take a very myopic view within our event planning profession, which is, "I'll just go to my event technology provider," but oftentimes the scavenger hunt exists beyond the tool that you are actively in every day.

Carisa Bartelt:

As we try to grow, I think everybody right now, you want to grow your event impact, you want to grow your personal career, you want to grow the contribution that you have to your organization. That doesn't just live in your specific data segment, right. I want to show impact to the org as a whole. I need to look at data points across the organization or across marketing channel. And that's where you start pulling data from your marketing automation platforms or your CRM or any of your data sources, right, to really get the full picture of what's going on. Not just to optimize the execution of an event, but to really optimize and show the impact that it has on organizational goals and [inaudible 00:09:59].

Alyssa Peltier:

And I also think also when you're looking at the tools and the ecosystem of data that supports your event program, the who actually is oftentimes intrinsically tied to the tool. So for example, use CRM as an example. CRM is a tool that's most commonly leveraged by your sales organization, your financial organization, your marketing organization, those that are responsible for the growth and revenue for your company, your organization, what have you. And so it starts to become clearer what stories you need to tell with those KPIs, with those data points when you know what tools are being leveraged for those particular KPIs. And sometimes the path forward becomes a little bit more transparent as opposed to this kind of opaque situation that we've been in for a really long time.

Carisa Bartelt:

Well, I think too, when you talk about the path forward, I really like the concept too of you need more of these other teams to make what you're trying to do a success, especially because resources are getting tighter. You want them to care about the things that you're trying to produce just as much as you do. And you need to make their involvement easier. And if the data is in a way that they can understand and you're speaking their language, and then also you're pushing information to them so they can see it in their own kind of system of truth or their tool, that helps them feel more bought into the process and creates kind of more organizational alignment.

Alyssa Peltier:

Organizational alignment and opportunity for scalability, for growth of the event program. I think so often we're in a position of defense, right, to defend the program, to justify the spend. But how nice would it be for event professionals to be on the offensive? For them to be able to say, "Look at all the good that we're doing as opposed to look at all the spend that we're trying to defend," right. And so again, KPIs are really the secret behind that. But knowing who you're talking to, where to find that information, what KPIs are of importance not only to you, but also to others, I think, is where the industry is headed.

Carisa Bartelt:

And then you can also help measure how they are impacting what you're doing. And that's kind of that proactive offensiveness of you're giving everybody a nudge because they're all contributing to selfishly your own goal, right, but they feel like a part of the process and they feel ... They can see their own impact of if you participate or if we help activate the sales team here to help drive registration. Or we want better conversion at the end, how can we get better about our nurture programs? People then get more excited when you are involving them and you're sharing that information and that impact. Then kind of just keep asking and keep justifying for their support, right. You're making them a part of the process and you're making that data work for you because you understand what they care about and what it means.

Alyssa Peltier:

No, I think that's great. I think that's perfect. Okay. So I don't want to gatekeep on this framework here. So I know I heard really positive praise from a session that was conducted at Cvent CONNECT just over a month ago now that was related to developing a KPI framework for your own organization. And I do believe, Carisa, there is either an upcoming webinar or a webinar that was just done that might be available on demand. Can you talk about some of these assets that we have for people to learn more about developing a KPI framework and tapping into the KPI framework that Cvent is developing?

Carisa Bartelt:

Yeah. Absolutely. So we've got a webinar coming up, I think it's the first week of August, so two, three weeks, that we're hosting, outlining the framework and what they are, what all the different categories are, what we've identified as the way to categorize your data. We just did a really nice presentation with AMA at their analytics marketing conference. So we've got that also on demand. And then we're working on putting together an asset or a resource for people so they can see individual metrics and how we're tagging them to fit within these themes, these categories, these stages, right, and then where they can find it as a starting point, right. Here's how you can start thinking about it, and here's how we're thinking through where this point fits. But it's really all about the framework of the categorization so that you can learn how to take a metric and fit it in within how we are organizing and teaching you to understand your metrics.

Alyssa Peltier:

I love that. I remember seeing kind of in the chat from the session that happened at Cvent CONNECT. Obviously, this webinar will be an accompaniment to that, and also this conversation that we're having here today. But I think I noticed in the chat this is the best session and the most practical information at Cvent CONNECT this year. So when we see stuff like that, we're like, "All right. We need to continue this conversation." So listeners, I hope you dig in more, dig in a little bit deeper on the data conversation and the data goldmine that is within your event programs to develop those KPIs, to justify the spend, but more importantly, to grow your programs more than ever before. With that, I want to say thank you to Carisa, our repeat contributor on the podcast. We will be happy to invite you again, Carisa, as always, but thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today. So we will see you next week, listeners. Have a great rest of the week.

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews:

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Felicia Asiedu:

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Rachel Andrews:

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Felicia Asiedu:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.