Use Registration Data to Personalize On-Site Moments

[00:00:00] Nigel Reeves: So, what we've found is it's really difficult to surprise and delight our members with content. And so we're looking at networking and personalization as that way to touch and add better value for our members. And looking at that touch to feel special, personal, and get that experience.

[00:00:16] 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.

[00:00:28] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:29] Kelly Cheng: I'm Kelly.

[00:00:29] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:31] Alyssa Peltier: And you're listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

[00:00:39] Stephanie Sweetland: Hi, everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Stephanie Sweetland, and I am your host for this week's session. Today we're going to be delving into how we can have events that balance efficiency while also retaining a strong membership experience. I'm joined today by Nigel Reeves. He is the Senior Director of Event Operations at YPO. He oversees a $60 million portfolio and also runs over 500 events per year. I think just before we start, I would love if you could share a little bit more about your role at YPO and just a little bit more info about your events.

[00:01:13] Nigel Reeves: Sure. So, I've been at YPO for over 15 years, surprisingly, and I have actually operated in almost every position in the organization. My hope now is that I have an opportunity to bring that expertise to help us shape solutions that help the whole team and our events grow. It's been focused on technology, operations, and efficiency.

[00:01:32] Stephanie Sweetland: Tell us more about what YPO does.

[00:01:34] Nigel Reeves: YPO is a member-based organization. We have 37,000 members worldwide, and it's focused on creating better leaders and then better peers. Everything that we do is focused on providing networking opportunities for our members, so they're happiest when they're connecting with each other. Obviously, events become a central part of that value proposition.

[00:01:53] Stephanie Sweetland: Absolutely. And I was interested when I was doing my research on YPO about how many global events you have and how diverse your membership is. Out of those 500 events that are running per year, where are those located?

[00:02:04] Nigel Reeves: They are all over the world. I think we're unique in that, while being a business organization, we serve the whole family. We serve the member in their business role, in their personal lives in terms of professional development, personal interests, but also their families, so their spouse/partner, their children. And we do programs for every single one of those audiences, and it's all over the world. It's focused on everything from business education, executive education, experiential, parent-child bonding trips, and everything in between.

[00:02:31] Stephanie Sweetland: Okay. As event portfolios grow, oftentimes it can be really hard to retain that individual experience and that membership experience at events. What are some of the ways that you guys are tackling that?

[00:02:41] Nigel Reeves: A big shift happened during COVID. Everything went online, and that was a challenging time for us, but what we got out of it was amazing virtual content delivery. There's amazing content everywhere. So what we've found is it's really difficult to surprise and delight our members with content. We're looking at networking and personalization as that way to touch and add better value for our members. And looking at that touch to feel special, personal, and get that experience.

[00:03:08] Stephanie Sweetland: What are some of the ways that you're integrating personalization into your events?

[00:03:12] Nigel Reeves: I think it starts with data. It's looking at our member profile and trying to get as much information as we can to plan and prepare for them. Our members often come to multiple events, so getting one touchpoint and building on that profile over time. We're focused now on something we're calling an intelligent profile that can build their interests, their specializations, what they can offer, what they're looking for, and then try and build that into the event design so that we're trying to meet their needs on-site.

[00:03:38] Stephanie Sweetland: Are you collecting a lot of that information ahead of your events that are event-specific, or is it more profile-based? I'm just curious.

[00:03:44] Nigel Reeves: It's a bit of both. I think with CEOs, it's very difficult for them to take the time to complete this. What our focus is is trying to build that profile information that follows them event to event, and then if there's a specific topic or interest, like we do a Global Business Summit, which is the only opportunity where they can do business with each other, asking specific data points to allow us to better connect them.

[00:04:04] Stephanie Sweetland: So, one question I wanted to ask you is, how do you know when your event program has outgrown some of its processes?

[00:04:11] Nigel Reeves: We're feeling like we've outgrown the processes now in terms of our ability to access the information that we have for our members. With our Global Business Summit, our goal was to create meaningful connections intentionally through data connection, spontaneously through that way we're pairing and allowing us to adapt over time. I think right now the standard basic information, load them, is not working, and so we have to put a lot more thought and design into how we're curating events, how we're structuring our socials, how we're structuring even loading the bus and putting the right people there to create those spontaneous experiences.

[00:04:46] Stephanie Sweetland: Everybody's leveraging AI in different ways for their event portfolio. What are some of the ways that your team is leveraging AI then?

[00:04:52] Nigel Reeves: We're doing a couple. With the Global Business Summit, we are pushing AI photos, but taking it a step further. Being a member-based organization, we're taking that profile and pushing 15 years of old archived photos and starting to trigger that nostalgia of the events. Being able to do a personal anniversary for a year and celebrate with personal photos from all the different...

[00:05:11] Stephanie Sweetland: Oh, wow.

[00:05:12] Nigel Reeves: ... events that they've experienced. We're doing several things like that to try and resurrect old information. We're very focused on amplifying the team, trying to remove the administrative burden for the planning process so that they can focus on the event design, on the member experience, and on the member champions that we're working with. And looking at initiatives that we can scale across the organization to do a week at a glance in minutes instead of weeks, get a marketing package out very quickly.

And then the last is trying to get that event data to follow event to event. A lot of information dies in that individual event, and for us, if we can carry that from event to event. So I met you at this event, next time I register, I can see you're already there. I can have the context of what we discussed in that, and we're starting to build those relationships cumulatively over time.

[00:05:59] Stephanie Sweetland: Oh, that's great. So, the member can access those notes?

[00:06:01] Nigel Reeves: Yes. Yeah.

[00:06:01] Stephanie Sweetland: Oh, wow. That's great. Where do they access them?

[00:06:05] Nigel Reeves: Right now, it's a combination of taking the information that we've collected from Cvent or the experience. We're actually pushing it into our CRM and then into Salesforce. The real holy grail for us at this point is actually moving to a data lake so that we can get all the information there and then start to access that. Obviously, we're in the early days of that, but we have a vision for what we'd like to accomplish.

[00:06:25] Stephanie Sweetland: That helps so much with personalization.

[00:06:26] Nigel Reeves: Yeah.

[00:06:27] Stephanie Sweetland: Big fan of data lakes.

[00:06:28] Nigel Reeves: Yeah.

[00:06:28] Stephanie Sweetland: So, there are a lot of different success metrics for events, obviously. What are some of the ones that are most important for you and your team?

[00:06:35] Nigel Reeves: Obviously, the event evaluations and ratings are one that we track very closely. It's the audience growth in reach. Our members are very busy, and they are very selective of where they spend their time, so making sure that we're serving all of the audiences. We have members from 18 to 80 and then everything in between, so making sure that we're serving all of those demographics. We're tracking that very closely. And then I think there's soft skills, looking at all our valuation and sentiments and pulling all of that. And then that gives us areas of focus that we can do, so, "Here's the five things we're doing really well. Here's the five areas that we need to focus on and are coming up across portfolios."

[00:07:10] Stephanie Sweetland: So interesting. How are you tying your event success to your pipeline?

[00:07:15] Nigel Reeves: We have member committees that lead our large flagship events. So it's taking all of that information, feeding it back to the committees to help revamp and structure what we're going to do next. The Global Business Summit's a good example of an event that kept coming up. Being a peer organization, we're not allowed to solicit to each other, but our members want to do business with each other. So, we created an event specifically to allow them that one opportunity a year to, no holds barred, go out, market to each other and that. It's just giving them the information to adapt to the changes. I think a big one for us that we're going to need to focus on right now is changing demographics. As that younger audience is coming in, are we really meeting the needs for them? And so tracking that closely.

[00:07:54] Stephanie Sweetland: That's interesting. As you have a younger audience coming in, what are some of the changes that you're making for your event program?

[00:07:59] Nigel Reeves: I think much more tech-focused, tech-first. They want information in a different way. They are very capable of learning a tool very quickly. The different formats, that standard education session is not necessarily relevant. They want more experiential. They want more out of the conference room, and so it's really trying to cater to those changing demands.

[00:08:18] Stephanie Sweetland: From your perspective, how do AI and automations fit into managing a large event portfolio?

[00:08:23] Nigel Reeves: It's a great opportunity for us to access data and distill information a lot quicker than we were able to. So that we're using it to be able to distill large datasets and gain insights from it. The other huge opportunity for us has been the ability to connect data between different platforms, so that ability to, with a smaller team, develop integrations or even custom maps to be able to unify that information. As an example, for the Global Business Summit, we took all of our registration data, all of our deal data, all of the click badge networking data. All of those fit into a dashboard that we can then put on the screen and show to our attendees the deals that were happening. Get full-on excitement about that. Who are the central connectors there? And then try and drive some encouragement through that.

[00:09:07] Stephanie Sweetland: That's cool. You're sharing the data back with the attendees. That's what's going on.

[00:09:09] Nigel Reeves: Back with the attendees in real time. Yeah.

[00:09:11] Stephanie Sweetland: Wow. Do you experience any challenges showing that in real time?

[00:09:15] Nigel Reeves: One hundred percent. Again, there's the pro of building custom on-site, but, again, it's bootstrapped. Things are moving very quickly, so it's a small team. There's a lot of troubleshooting on-site, but the opportunity now is a very small team can create some huge impact, custom features, and bridge those gaps. I guess our strategy now is build AI fluency across the team, focus on some operational efficiencies that we can implement across the whole team, but then I have a small innovation team that I'm trying to give a wide berth. Encourage them to go, encourage them to build, and just see what we come up with, and that's been working very well. This team helped us support that.

[00:09:52] Stephanie Sweetland: That's great. I'm always fascinated about how different teams are structured. Tell me about your innovation team. Are they IT experts, event experts? What's their background?

[00:10:02] Nigel Reeves: My approach to building a team is rounding out skills. I've brought Cvent expertise in here to help us complement it, MarTech, but then right now with the last two positions, it's also focused on AI. So then being a Cvent expert, but also a passion and curiosity for coding, developing. And then each of those skills will complement each other, and over time we're building that. The small innovation team is young, smart, keen people that are really just passionate about events and what we're doing, and they're just helping us build some very innovative ideas. I'm very fortunate to have this team.

[00:10:36] Stephanie Sweetland: That's awesome. You've got some technical folks. How do you get systems adopted across your wider event team?

[00:10:42] Nigel Reeves: This is one I think, if we're being fully honest, is a challenge. Any new system, it's a bit of a challenge. Our focus is top-down encouragement, modeling, giving them a shield to experiment. Saying, "It's okay. We're not going to get everything right. Get in and experience." Trying to find those early adopters on the bottom. Who are the people that are doing it already? Invest in them first, and then help them push the value-add to the rest of the team. And then there's a general push. The rest is just moving them willingly or unwillingly in the direction of, "These are tools that'll add value."

I think our focus for this year is if I could have 5 to 10 things that would make an event planner's life easy, that would be a win for us. And so that hopefully will drive adoption. That's one focus for us.

[00:11:27] Stephanie Sweetland: So, Nigel, what advice would you give for our listeners?

[00:11:31] Nigel Reeves: I think be curious and be patient. I can't understate how fast things are evolving and changing. Giving yourself the time to experiment but also pause and assess what we're doing. Is it adding value? I think we've been rushing, and now is this moment of self-reflection, like, "What's actually adding value? What's not?" And then focusing on that. But also, don't be afraid. No one can keep up, so we're all doing our best. And it's evolving every day, so just try.

[00:12:01] Stephanie Sweetland: I'd say, key takeaways that I have from this conversation: the first one is the importance of data, of course, at the event. But also understanding: what are people telling you, but what are they doing? And then tracking that as well at scale, and making sure that it's feeding into your different systems in a connected way. The second takeaway is really to retain that member experience at scale. It's all about consistency across events, but then working with members as well to make sure that you're providing that experience, you're getting regular feedback from them, and then you're actioning that feedback. Well, thank you so much for joining, Nigel.

[00:12:31] Nigel Reeves: My pleasure.

[00:12:31] Stephanie Sweetland: Such a pleasure having you here.

[00:12:32] Nigel Reeves: Great.

[00:12:33] Stephanie Sweetland: Thank you.

[00:12:36] Alyssa Peltier: 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.

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[00:13:13] 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.

[00:13:23] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.