August 25, 2020
By Brittany Estes

Please join us in congratulating the winners of the 2020 Cvent Excellence Awards! This year's winners were announced during the first-ever virtual ceremony, held during Cvent CONNECT Virtual on August 25.

Looking Towards the Future at the Cvent Excellence Awards

Now in its 8th year, the annual ceremony typically brings together the best in the industry at Cvent CONNECT in Las Vegas. While the virtual experience year may have looked a little different this year, we pulled out all the stops to honor our record number of finalists. 

The awards ceremony celebrates customers who are driving innovation in the meetings and events industries in new and inspiring ways. This year's awards showcased the incredible work done by our finalists as well as their contributions to shaping the path forward. Hosted by Brian Ludwig, Senior Vice President of Sales, and Stacey Fontenot, Senior Vice President of Marketing, the ceremony was packed full of incredible entertainment and surprises. We were treated to a tremendous, custom performance from the Eclipse Shadow Dancers and saw cameos from the true stars of the show: our finalists.

Celebrating the 2020 Cvent Excellence Awards Winners

This year saw a record number of finalists across ten unique categories, including three new categories. View all winners below and make sure to check out all of our finalists here.

Want to learn more? Don't miss our special podcast episode, where a few winning organizations discuss their award-winning event strategies. You can also watch the ceremony on-demand in the Cvent Virtual Attendee Hub. In the meantime, please join us in once again congratulating the 2020 Cvent Excellence Awards winners!

ACE OF SPACES: Outstanding Achievement in Venue Management & Relations

Deutsch Team photo Winner

Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits

Founded in 1981, Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits markets quality wine and spirits produced by prestigious families from major wine and spirits regions of the world. By conducting effective and clear meetings and events, they continue to create better relationships with both business partners and employees. Using Cvent Supplier Network and Passkey in conjunction with other Cvent solutions, the two-person team centralized their event management processes and created a formal events department. In just a few years with Cvent, the team sent hundreds of RFP’s and sourced over 2,000 venues. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in negotiated savings and room block management efficiencies, the Deutsch Family team leverages strong venue relationships to create memorable experiences.

SMM STAR: SMM Program of the Year

Boston Scientific winner photo

Boston Scientific

Boston Scientific is a global manufacturer of medical devices used in interventional medical specialties. There are a variety of meetings at Boston Scientific to support the development and distribution of new products, increase brand awareness, facilitate training and education, and drive engagement. Using Cvent’s Strategic Meetings Management solution in conjunction with the full Cvent platform helped Boston Scientific gain visibility into overall spend and support their formal meeting policy. They saw a dramatic increase in program adoption and doubled their meetings cost avoidance in just two years. With their SMM program in place, the team is improving customer experiences, eliminating manual processes, and reducing risk for the company and their attendees.

ONSITE ORCHESTRATOR: Best Onsite Attendee Experience

Insperity winner photo

Insperity

Insperity, a trusted advisor to America’s best businesses for more than thirty years, provides an array of human resources and business solutions designed to help improve business performance. Insperity business performance solutions support more than 100,000 businesses with over two million employees. Using Cvent’s Onsite Solutions and other tools to manage their annual Sales and Marketing convention eliminated long lines and wait time for registration. Session scanning and customizable surveys based on attendee data tracked attendee engagement, and CrowdCompass offered a powerful mobile experience with live Q&A, gamification, push notifications, and more. They reduced check-in time to  less than one minute and eliminated hundreds of hours of manual labor. The team tracked tens of thousands engagement points in the mobile app and captured incredible savings using Cvent solutions in 2019.

MOBILE MAVERICK: Best Use of Mobile Event Technology

S&P Team winner photo

S&P Global Market Intelligence

S&P Global Market Intelligence, a division of S&P Global, provides essential insights for their clients through powerful business intelligence solutions that combine comprehensive data, actionable analytics, and deep sector news and research. In 2019, they managed hundreds of events across 60 global cities for thousands of attendees, generating thousands of new leads and subscription trials. They used Cvent’s Appointment tool and CrowdCompass app to foster networking, and tailored programming with data from session scanning and feedback surveys. They used live Q&A, polling, and the activity feed with social pushes to ensure engagement. The robust reporting was vital when debriefing senior executives to evaluate event ROI, especially since the event feedback form was conducted via the app. For the 2021 sophomore conference, marketers are currently analyzing engagement patterns of attendees across the event lifecycle through Cvent. 

THE ACHIEVER: Best Return on Event

NNOHA team photo winners

National Network for Oral Health Access

The National Network for Oral Health Access (NNOHA) is a nationwide network of dental providers who care for patients in safety-net systems. The annual conference is their signature event each year which draws providers from across the nation to provide educational content, networking opportunities, and Continuing Dental Education credits. By using a host a Cvent solutions starting in 2016, NNOHA streamlined registration with a modern registration site, improved their dataflow with a Salesforce integration, and modernized the onsite experience. Since 2016, active membership has more than doubled, and conference revenue and attendance has increased by impressive margins. NNOHA was a finalist for the 2019 Cvent Excellence Awards.

EVENT MARKETING MASTERMIND: Best Event Marketing Strategy

FIS winner team photo

FIS

FIS is the world's largest global provider dedicated to financial technology solutions. The FIS InFocus conference brings the FIS team together with business acquaintances and industry analysts. The Events team’s 2019 goals included proving the ROI of FIS’ conferences, mapping the attendee journey onsite, and using data to show attendee insights. They elevated the attendee experience with Cvent’s Onsite Solutions and CrowdCompass. On the backend, they used a Marketo integration to track event attendance and evaluate campaign performance through link clicks, layouts, and email testing. This resulted in a significant increase in lead generation, influencing hundreds of millions of dollars in existing TCV and driving a measurable increase in new deals created. They also nearly doubled sponsorship revenue. Stakeholders were impressed with the enhanced look and feel of the technology-driven conference.

THE ROOKIE: Cvent Rookie of the Year

As a leading provider of cloud-based SIS, CRM, and ERP solutions and services to the higher education sector, the CampusInsight annual user conference offers customers training, best practice sharing, road map review, and networking. For its 20th anniversary, the conference moved to a centralized platform with Cvent to enhance the customer experience, streamline processes, more easily recognize revenue, and enhance trade show revenue and deliverables. Campus Management relies on Cvent to deliver ease of reg

Campus Management

As a leading provider of cloud-based SIS, CRM, and ERP solutions and services to the higher education sector, the CampusInsight annual user conference offers customers training, best practice sharing, road map review, and networking. For its 20th anniversary, the conference moved to a centralized platform with Cvent to enhance the customer experience, streamline processes, more easily recognize revenue, and enhance trade show revenue and deliverables. Campus Management relies on Cvent to deliver ease of registration, access to training documentation, networking, attendee experience and improved customer satisfaction surveys. Together, these directly impact high-level executive reporting metrics. In their first year with Cvent, they converted tens of thousands of training credits with hundreds of unique codes to just a few thousand unique discount codes. They saved hundreds of hours with automated processes, expanded one general conference survey to hundreds of session-specific surveys, and saw a huge increase in engagement levels with the mobile app. By moving to the Cvent Appointments tool, they enabled hundreds appointments for their conference.

PIVOTAL PARTNER: Cvent Partner of the Year

BCD winner team photo

BCD Meetings & Events

BCD Meetings & Events works in a preferred partnership with Cvent across the globe to support their clients’ meeting technology strategies and needs. Their teams have expertise across the Cvent platform to meet those varying needs as they work as trusted consultants in the tool on those clients’ behalf.  For one key client, a dedicated team sourcing managers source and contract around 1,000 meetings per year. They currently use the Meeting Request Form with Cvent Supplier Network and Budget modules. They also leverage an SSO integration for the MRF form and API to the client’s intranet and calendar functionality. As each sourcing manager manages hundreds of venues at one time, Cvent is integral in streamlining information. For reporting, they designed Macros with Cvent’s assistance and added status triggers to their MRF based on RFP active or awarded status. They drive significant average savings on every meeting they manage with an impressive workflow completion rate for 2019. BCD Meetings & Events is a former finalist for the 2019 Cvent Excellence Awards.

POWER OF THE PLATFORM: Outstanding Achievement Across the Cvent Platform

Penn State University winner photo

Penn State University

Founded in 1855, Penn State is one of America’s oldest public land-grant universities. As a land-grant institution, Penn State has a federally mandated requirement to extend its agricultural research and education to the citizens of the state. To fulfill this mission, the university offers extension programs across the entire state, allowing people to register for conferences, events, and non-credit programs. Thanks to its partnership with Cvent, they experienced astounding year-over-year growth across all programs in terms of number of registrants for events, total income, and income paid to internal clients. The department experienced an average 50% increase in registrations and enrollments year-over-year. With targeted marketing tactics and data tracking through Cvent, they can now measure impact, reach, and ROI. Eight other functional units across the university now leverage Cvent, bringing total registrations to 100,000 across university programs. They now manage 10 distinct Cvent accounts across departments. The streamlined system expanded the number of programs by a factor of six and increased income by a factor of ten.  

CVENT SUPERSTAR: Cvent Advocate of the Year

Kyle Flinn winner headshot

Kyle Flinn, University of Missouri Extension

Kyle has not only been a key proponent of the Cvent platform at the University of Missouri Extension office, but he has also continued to oversee the expansion and implementation of their enterprise solution. Kyle worked with his team to enable the adoption of the end-to-end tech stack at the University of Missouri. Kyle is a member of Cvent’s Higher Ed CAB, and over the course of the last year has advocated for Cvent through webinars, case studies, and speaking engagements at industry events. These include Cvent CONNECT 2019, multiple webinars, direct mail testimonials, EDUCAUSE 2019, and Event Tech Higher Ed Trends Report. He also presented at Cvent CONNECT 2019.

Want to be a 2021 Cvent Excellence Awards Winner? 

Don't miss your chance to be recognized during next year's award ceremony at Cvent CONNECT in Las Vegas. Check out more information about the Cvent Excellence Awards and make sure to submit when the 2021 submissions open this fall. We're looking forward to exciting entertainment, new virtual event categories, and the chance to celebrate together once again. All finalists receive two free Cvent CONNECT registrations, so don't miss out! 

Please email excellenceawards@cvent.com with any questions.

Brittany Estes Headshot

Brittany Estes

After completing graduate school at Vanderbilt University, I spent over a decade writing in the nonprofit, education, and creative fields.

In my free time, I enjoy rummaging through old book shops for a rare find, traveling, and learning photography. 

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