DOCEBO

Docebo is dedicated to enhancing enterprise learning by providing scalable, hyper-personalized educational experiences that have a tangible business impact. Established in 2005, the global organization now has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Dubai, and Italy. Docebo leverages a diverse team of over 900 people worldwide dedicated to fostering an inclusive community where learning is accessible to everyone.

The Global Events Team plays a crucial role in crafting events and experiences that are both meaningful and impactful. With a focus on human connection, they deliver in-person and virtual events that engage a wide range of audiences, including customers, partners, internal employees, and the broader learning industry. Docebo manages more than 100 events and webinars annually, including their flagship conference, Inspire. They work to ensure each event aligns with clearly defined KPIs to support brand and revenue goals, underscoring their dedication to impact and accountability.

BACKGROUND & GOALS

Finding event tech inspiration for Docebo Inspire

Docebo’s marquee conference, Inspire, brings together partners, thought leaders, customers, and Docebo experts to drive insights, knowledge-sharing, and skill development. The challenge lies in creating a seamless hybrid experience for hundreds of global attendees by providing the latest tools, thought leadership, and opportunities to grow connections. 

Before adopting Cvent, the Docebo team were challenged to execute the multiday hybrid event in a short timeline with a small team. “We were essentially starting at ground zero,” explains Richelle Westhafer, Director of Global Events. “We were starting from scratch, with no playbook, no venue, and no tools.” 

Despite these challenges, Richelle notes it did give her team the opportunity to shape Inspire from the ground up. Choosing their event management platform was one of the first crucial steps in this process. “We didn’t have the luxury of time to make any errors, “ Richelle explains. “We needed to choose quickly and choose wisely – the entire event experience was riding on this.” 

Inspire includes a welcome reception, Docebo University, over a dozen demo stations, live support, a Docebo Champions Program with VIP lounge, a sponsor expo, awards programs, and a broad mix of session content. In addition, the conference includes evening events, private meetings and dinners, invite-only programming, and a Partner Day. With such a robust offering, Richelle’s team wasn’t content to rest on their laurels. “Despite the challenges and constraints, we still had very ambitious goals to take the Inspire event to new heights,” she says. 

They wanted to better engage attendees throughout the event lifecycle, from pre-event marketing to post-event engagement – ensuring the event was so memorable it would become the foundation of a multi-year growth plan. For this, they needed to capture substantive data to provide the business proof of qualitative wins and quantitative ROI. “Ticket sales and sponsorship would be the key drivers of cost recovery on this program, so it was critical we had a tool that was sophisticated enough to manage the entire financial backend without added strain on my team,” Richelle adds.

APPROACH

Partnering with Cvent Professional Services for speed and risk reduction

As they started to search for an event management solution, Richelle notes she had previously used another tool in a different position. This allowed her to determine where the platform fell short while helping her identify non-negotiable requirements. “As soon as I put Cvent through my barrage of questions, I knew it was the path I needed to go down,” she says. 

The flexible site allows Docebo to manage multiple registration types for a more personalized experience. “We’re really able to tailor the registrations on the backend so we can have a ton of intelligence that tells us who is registering, tailor discount codes, and things like that,” Richelle says. 

Her team can also track registrations using code snippets and reference IDs to know where registrants are coming from and which marketing tactics are most successful. They were able to send invite, registration confirmation, and reminder emails directly from Cvent as a valuable time saver. Richelle says real-time reporting helps her team pivot and adapt their marketing strategy quickly to drive impressive results.

Streamlining speaker and exhibitor management with comprehensive tools

Docebo also uses a number of Cvent solutions to help manage content, speakers, and exhibitors more efficiently across their small team. These include using:

• Abstract Management to centralize submission collection, review, scoring, and communications for their conference and their awards program.
• Speaker Resource Center to empower speakers to self-serve task management and uploading assets, all with automated reminders.
• Exhibitor Management for task completion, documentation uploads, staff registration, and viewing floor plans, as well as on-demand reporting to validate ROI.

Similarly, the Speaker Resource Center centralizes all speaker activities within a single portal, allowing speakers to self-serve tasks like updating their headshots or biographies. Automated reminders eliminate manual back-and-forth. The Exhibitor Management tool also enables exhibitors to manage tasks, access reports, and oversee requirements within a centralized Exhibitor Portal. Stakeholders can access floor plans with their booths, see booth allotments, register staff, upload documentation, and manage appointments as admins. Automated reminders ensure exhibitors stay on target with deadlines and deliverables. Importantly, they can access comprehensive on-demand reports to easily track lead generation to better prove event ROI.

Richelle notes being able to streamline content and exhibitor management has been invaluable, providing automated workflows to accelerate her team's timelines. “We’re a small team and we don’t have departments upon departments that can manage these pieces, so having the right tools is absolutely essential,” she says. “I’ve yet to find a situation where I’ve asked, ‘Can we do this?’ and the answer was no – and as collaborative partners, that’s what’s been amazing.” 

Importantly, Docebo used Attendee Hub as their singular resource for housing all content post-event, with over 40 hours of recorded content made available to paid ticket holders. “Having the on-demand content, especially with it being our first year, really helped establish a benchmark for the years following - showing people the quality of the content, the type of speakers they’ll see, and adding credibility and validity to the event,” Richelle says. 

RESULTS

Prioritizing data-driven decisions for future Inspire events

Richelle’s team can also embed event and session-level surveys in Attendee Hub to gauge attendee feedback and insights in real time, with quantitative metrics helping to assess event impact and performance. In addition, they can send post-event surveys out of Cvent, as well as sponsor and speaker surveys to understand each group of stakeholder’s experiences and build on their feedback for the next year’s event. When combined with engagement scoring from Attendee Hub, all of this data gives Docebo valuable insights into attendee sentiments and behaviors for actionable decision-making. “The data is everything, so being able to look at reports really allows us to tailor our strategy for next year,” Richelle adds. “Being empowered to have our own data and run our own reports without relying on other teams is incredible.” 

In fact, having a single source of truth for all event and attendee data means Docebo can use Cvent reporting to prove event impact to company stakeholders. This includes everything from event check-in to session data, overall registration trends, survey reporting, and more. Leveraging this data helped prove the clear success of Inspire. “To say this event was a resounding success would be an understatement,” Richelle smiles. “The event exceeded expectations both internally and externally, and has established so much credibility for my team.” 

LOOKING FORWARD

Setting sights high for the future of Inspire 

Richelle is grateful for the close relationship her team now has with Cvent and is excited for the opportunity to become more self-sufficient within the platform. “For that first year, whenever we needed help, someone was always there,” she shares. “That said, we wanted to make sure that in the second year and beyond, we would be able to be more self-sufficient, which is absolutely where we are now.” 

In looking towards the future, Richelle is setting even higher targets – including doubling the number of attendees and increasing revenue goals. She says the data, insights, and learnings from Inspire have helped her team better plan for the future. They were able to extend their planning timelines for upcoming events, which has fostered positive relationships with other teams like finance, design, and legal. In addition, they’ve been able to give more enablement time to their sales teams to help drive additional registrations and sponsorships. 

She notes the success of Inspire ultimately gave her team the full trust of their leadership, to the point they are expanding the event internationally. “It’s exciting to know that because of everything we established in year one, we can now confidently continue to raise the bar and evolve this program to new heights,” Richelle shares.