Leading Real Estate
Strengthening the tech stack to help prove the value of events.
Reinventing the Conference Week Experience
Leading Real Estate Companies of the World (Leading RE) is the center for the world’s market-leading independent residential brokerages in over sixty countries. Their Events department plans more than forty member-based events per year globally, as well as thirty internal events. For their annual flagship Conference Week, the Events team needed to better prove return on investment for their executive stakeholders. “It’s definitely a high stakes event every single year. We want to make sure our members get the best education within the network, but also that we’re getting good ROI,” explains Events Coordinator Lauren Humbarger.
With a small team of five, planning a successful Conference Week for 2,500 attendees required twelve hour days and weekends. “We realized our own technology that we built in-house wasn’t accommodating everything that we needed,” explains Lauren. “It was chaos. We lost revenue, we struggled to make event improvements due to incomplete data, and our spend was inaccurate as a result.” Mobile app adoption was low due to a confusing number of separate apps. Congested check-in lines from manual badge stuffing and inaccurate data frustrated attendees. Meeting executive expectations was a challenge. “The C-suite wanted reports within just a couple of hours, and it was hard to get that because of all of the changes onsite,” Lauren adds.
Building the Tech Stack for an Elevated Event
Using Cvent’s OnArrival 360, the team saw their Cvent Event Management registration data seamlessly integrate with the Conference Week onsite experience. Badge-printing was a breeze and check-in lines sped through 300% more quickly. Lauren’s team saved over 250 hours of manual labor. Session scanning helped streamline onsite staff requirements and accurately track data. These improvements even caught the eye of the executive team. Notes Lauren, “Our C-suite needs to have all of this information for the event at a moment’s notice. With OnArrival and session scanning, they can have it all at their fingertips.”
The mobile experience was vastly improved by combining five different events into a single, Conference Week app through CrowdCompass. The team collaborated with other departments to create a concrete attendee engagement plan. They increased networking opportunities, provided invite-only content, included gamification, and enabled social sharing. As a result, they saw a 92% adoption rate and 30% increase in engagement. Implementing a Virtual Gift Bag contest increased sponsorship opportunities, and paperless Speed Networking helped attendees connect in new ways. The event was 100% paperless as a result, with an impressive $26,000 in cost savings.
Giving Executives Data Visibility
By integrating with Salesforce, her team has been able to track and use key data points to prove the value of the event to the C-suite. “I think it’s very important that all of these technologies speak to each other,” notes Lauren. “The integration has been great because our C-suite has direct visibility into the data that we capture from Cvent to Salesforce.”
The team also saw 100% increase in session attendance data, allowing them to accurately plan future onsite experiences. With increased flexibility from Cvent technology, they left registration open nearly two weeks longer than usual. The result? “We’ve had over $60,000 generated by keeping our events longer,” Lauren says. “Our C-suite has been exponentially excited about all of the event tech that we’ve added as a result.”
Leading the Events Space at Leading RE
Lauren’s team is pioneering new ways to use Cvent in strengthening the Leading RE tech stack. With high expectations from attendees and internal stakeholders, her team assists other departments in creating flawless events. “Event tech has definitely helped across departments,” she insists. “For example, we can do parked reports if the marketing team needs to look at attendee lists for campaign emails. We can also build our own registration site with Flex, so we don’t have to rely on IT every single day because they're busy with their own world.”
With a small staff, the Events team at Leading RE are experts at maximizing their resources to achieve impressive results. “As an event planner, you have a lot of different hats you put on just to make sure everything goes seamlessly,” says Lauren. “I definitely think event tech has completely streamlined and assisted everyone’s role within the event field. It’s elevated it to a new level.” With results that speak for themselves, her team has been able to impress even their most demanding stakeholders. She adds, “Our C-suite is very excited about event tech and us meeting our ROI. Every year we’re slowly implementing new technology because they’re so excited about what they see.”
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