New South Wales Secondary Principals Council Success Story
An Exercise in Inefficiency
The NSWSPC regularly hosted professional development events designed to help its members develop leadership skills. But the council’s most important event was its annual conference that brought in more than 400 attendees.
Every year, a different team was tasked with the responsibility of handling their annual conference and other events. “And every time a new team took over, we had to re-invent the wheel,” says Director of Professional Learning Geoff Hastings. Year on year, there was no consistency in how they delivered their events. The council sought the help of professional conference organisers and various event technology point solutions, but none of them produced the desired results to compel NSWSPC to stick with them for the next event. “So with the start of the new year, everyone had to relearn new systems from scratch. Things would often not work as they should,” adds Hastings. They still lacked a central hub for event information, had no standard process for execution and each event was marred with problems.
Though the council did maintain a contact database, it comprised excel spreadsheets that had to be manually updated, which meant there were errors galore. Overall, they were very unhappy with the inefficiencies in their event management process and the impact it had on their event experience. The council was also interested in scaling up their professional learning offerings and this was impossible without an event information and organisation hub.
Success on the First Try
The NSWSPC team had been looking for an event technology provider to partner with for quite some time. They chanced upon Cvent and decided to test it out. They were pleasantly surprised with the results from the trial, as they found the new platform highly conducive for efficiently handling all the event processes. Their minds made up, NSWSPC signed on Cvent as their event tech partner in mid-2017.
With a comprehensive and intuitive event management solution at their disposal, the NSWSPC team was able to streamline the planning processes involved in their annual conference. Having the registration, mobile app and lead capture tools under the same platform gave the team the control and visibility they were seeking.
Their new technology helped ensure attendees were registering quickly and with no complications. And by leveraging a mobile event app, NSWSPC could also give their attendees the ability to network with each other and better engage with the event content.
“The content in the app was easily customisable, which meant attendees could have their very own personal guide for the day,” says Hastings. NSWSPC was also able to help exhibitors derive more value from their events.
Meaningful Events
Leveraging Cvent’s comprehensive reporting tool, they are in the process of setting up dashboards to ensure they have greater visibility into their event reports across the organisation. “We expect these dashboards will also help us save time and, since they are in one centralised location, ensure everyone will get visibility into the event metrics. These results are very important to the business and, hopefully, will help us make our future events more meaningful,” concludes Hastings. Since they’ve had a more than satisfactory experience with Cvent so far, the NSWSPC team is looking forward to explore other Cvent solutions to manage their events better.