EMC MEETINGS & EVENTS

EMC Meetings & Events is a certified woman‑owned meetings and events agency with more than 23 years of experience delivering corporate, association, and incentive programs worldwide. As a long‑time Cvent Platinum Agency Partner, EMC has built its reputation on pairing white‑glove service with a digital‑first approach. EMC prides itself on designing experiences that are both memorable and measurable, helping to prove event impact for their clients. 

BACKGROUND & GOALS

Scaling complex client programs with legacy processes

From its beginnings as a venue-sourcing firm to its evolution into a full-service agency, EMC has always focused on eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks so planners and marketers can stay focused on strategy. Before Cvent, they relied on spreadsheets, back-and-forth emails, and phone calls to manage everything from registration and venue sourcing to day-of execution. Their clients faced similar issues with fragmented tools and manual workflows. Registration was often built on basic web forms or internal sites, name badges were pre-printed and sorted by hand, and reporting lived in ad-hoc spreadsheets — making it difficult to see true event performance. The result was an exhausted staff, under-served sponsors, and marketers left without the data they needed to demonstrate event impact.

In 2005, Founder and CEO Jody Wallace began searching for a technology partner that could scale alongside the agency and meet rising client expectations. That search led to Cvent, resulting in a 20+ year partnership that now underpins EMC’s entire delivery model.

As their offerings and tech stack expanded, EMC saw a growing need to help clients build event strategies that drive meaningful pipeline and sustained attendee engagement — all while growing the business. That meant designing deeply personalized attendee journeys while empowering speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors with intuitive self-service tools. Event managers and marketers also needed real-time visibility into registration pace, audience mix, and session interest, plus clean attribution for ticketing, sponsorship, and pipeline influence.

To meet these expectations at scale — without sacrificing margin — EMC turned to Cvent as their unified platform for marketers, planners, sponsors, and sales teams. To grow strategically with a lean team, they focused on standardizing and automating repeatable processes so they could support more than 150,000 registrations annually across hundreds of events, including those in client-owned Cvent instances. “EMC supports our clients by being a true extension of their team,” notes Megan Martin, Vice President of Marketing and Innovation. “We want to make sure every dollar our clients spend on events is invested in the most impactful way to deliver against their objectives — whether that’s pipeline growth, brand recognition, lead generation, or other goals.”

APPROACH

Standardizing a digital‑first attendee journey with Cvent 

EMC standardized its delivery model on a broad suite of Cvent Event Marketing & Management tools, layered with process playbooks and deep services expertise. Over the last two decades, that partnership has evolved to scale EMC’s services with an average 20% cost savings for their clients. Their Cvent tech stack now includes solutions such as: 

• Cvent Registration for branded, fully automated experiences that give clients clean, real‑time attendee data.
• Cvent Supplier Network for centralizing venue sourcing and enabling better rate negotiation and measurable cost savings.
• Passkey for automated room block management to improve inventory control and drive additional cost savings.
• Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) tools for standardizing approvals, sourcing, and spend tracking across programs to drive cost savings and stronger governance for clients.
• Content, speaker, and exhibitor management tools for streamlining abstract intake, speaker deliverables, and sponsor logistics while giving exhibitors reliable lead capture and ROI reporting.
• Onsite Solutions for frictionless check‑in and badging that eliminates lines with real-time attendance data for stakeholders.
• Attendee Hub to unify in‑person and digital experiences in one destination for agenda management, engagement, and networking across the event lifecycle.
• Surveys for capturing attendee and stakeholder feedback at scale to quantify satisfaction, surface improvements, and prove event impact.

To support content and sponsor value, EMC standardizes on a suite of Cvent tools that centralize deliverables, streamline logistics, and give sponsors measurable ROI:

• Abstract Management to entralize session submissions so content teams can track, review, and accept proposals in one place.
• Speaker Resource Center to consolidate speaker tasks and deliverables, reducing back-and-forth coordination.
• Exhibitor Management & LeadCapture to gives exhibitors a self-service hub to manage tasks, staff badges, and reliably capture and report on leads, directly improving sponsor ROI and post-event follow-up.

They also rely on Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) tools like the Meeting Request Form (MRF) to standardize how meetings are requested and approved, ensuring every qualifying event flows through a consistent intake and review process. “Using the Strategic Meetings Management tool is really important for a lot of our clients, especially the ones with large event portfolios run by different teams across the organization,” says Megan. “Simply from a negotiation standpoint, we can have a really good understanding of the whole picture and then streamline processes, making sure events are running more smoothly and they’re working from the same playbook.”

This includes implementing strict sourcing guidelines through Cvent solutions. “Obviously, the negotiation power that gives us is critical,” Megan adds. “When we know the full breadth of everything from an event portfolio, we have much bigger conversations.”

EMC also relies on Passkey to manage room blocks, monitor pickup and attrition in real time, and provide clear visibility into housing performance across complex programs. By moving this work out of inboxes and spreadsheets, the team can respond faster to sourcing and housing requests, reduce risk around inventory and rate integrity, and give clients a more reliable, centralized view of their room block performance.

Megan noted that EMC is focused on consistently implementing key CRM and MAP integrations — such as HubSpot and Salesforce — for their clients, along with analytics tools like Power BI. “We have to tell that journey from marketing to sales to events, and those data sets all speak different languages,” she elaborates. “So using a centralized solution with Cvent, integrated with those platforms, helps standardize and clean a lot of data so we can get some really good insights about pipeline impacts, intent data, and how we can further drive business goals.”

Delivering high-touch, data‑rich onsite experiences

Onsite, EMC has made OnArrival a core component of most programs. “We use OnArrival quite a bit, even in our smaller programs, because attendees want that personable, high-touch experience that is still streamlined and very efficient," Megan explains. This includes on‑demand badge printing via QR code check‑in to eliminate long lines and late‑night badge stuffing. It also means clients benefit from real‑time check‑in and session scan data powers dynamic staffing, room management, and post‑event ROI analysis. 

IMPACT

Turning events into always-on content engines 

EMC is also helping clients treat every event as a long‑tail content engine using theAttendee Huband integrated tools like theEvents+ Video Hub. “Events are such a powerhouse of content and data that don’t always get utilized,” Megan explains. “So we’re going into every event with a very clear content plan to ensure high‑value, high‑touch personalization at scale, as that’s what we’re always trying to deliver.”

These tools help marketers turn event content and data into fuel for the entire go‑to‑market motion. By aligning on content goals — and using AI‑powered Cvent data to understand who engaged with what — EMC helps clients route sessions and assets to the right personas, turning engagement and insights into multi‑touch journeys that extend the life and impact of every event. “Events aren’t just about one day,” Megan emphasizes. “They are content machines.” For marketing leaders and revenue teams, this closed‑loop approach turns events into a repeatable, attributable channel rather than a one‑off cost center.

EMC uses this perspective to help clients define content goals by audience and intent, then design sessions and formats that can be easily sliced for different journeys. “If you have a plan in place before you even start the event, you know how to repurpose it for months and then you have this year‑round cycle you can take advantage of,” Megan says. To make that possible, EMC works with clients upfront to map a content strategy for each session so every asset can be repurposed into engaging, evergreen content and nurture streams long after the event.

They also lean into data‑rich engagement tactics and AI‑enabled workflows to power meaningful experiences. Megan believes embedded engagement features like polls and Q&A offer “great pieces of data that you can then push into data tools” to validate leadership viewpoints or fuel post‑event thought leadership. She says the potential she sees in AI also frees marketers and planners to focus on higher‑value storytelling and human connection, instead of manual production. Using Cvent’s AI‑powered tools, includingCventIQ, EMC’s clients can automatically transform session recordings, chats, and engagement signals into targeted assets — like summaries, clips, and recommendations — so they can quickly repurpose event content across channels without heavy manual work. By using AI to surface what audiences care about most and recommend next‑best content or sessions, marketers can extend the life of every event and keep attendees engaged well before and long after it ends.

Driving growth, efficiency, and measurable results with Cvent

EMC has achieved impressive scale by standardizing on Cvent and building repeatable processes around the centralized platform. “We’ve had significant growth using the Cvent tools because we are bringing on more clients — which is always exciting from an agency standpoint — but we’ve also seen our clients have success with attendance increases and overall event growth,” Megan shares. By the numbers, EMC’s Cvent‑powered programs now deliver:

• 150,000+ registrations annually and 1,200+ lifetime events powered by Cvent
• 130% average year‑over‑year registration growth across EMC’s portfolio
• 10% more events and 21% more unique clients served year‑over‑year

They’ve also been able to scale the business without adding headcount. “Because EMC Meetings & Events is able to offer a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for our clients, we’ve been able to serve more events and more unique clients compared to the previous year—all with a leaner team,” Megan notes. Their Cvent-powered programs translate directly into measurable impact for clients as well. One recent client saw a 13% increase in exhibitor participation and captured nearly 800 leads at a single flagship conference, while higher overall engagement and satisfaction scores highlight how Cvent helps streamline and elevate the attendee experience. In addition, Strategic Meetings Management clients have realized up to 22% cost savings on meetings and events through centralized venue sourcing and standardized processes.

Most importantly, automation across systems, communications, and reporting frees EMC and client teams to focus on higher‑value work, not manual logistics. As Jody says, “EMC Meetings & Events is always on top of new technology to help manage its business successfully.” Megan agrees, emphasizing the value Cvent provides their clients. “Cvent’s been able to help us deliver more value to our clients because our team has become so specialized in the tool and because having the integrated solutions helps deliver a better experience at our clients’ events,” she shares. “And our team has been able to work collaboratively with our clients to have really clean data from that full suite of tools to track that full attendee journey back for marketing and sales to be able to act on.” 

A strategic partnership at the forefront of innovation

EMC’s partnership with Cvent continues to deepen as both organizations invest in AI, content, and ecosystem collaboration. Megan sees AI as an accelerant — not a replacement — for human‑centered experiences. “AI is streamlining a lot of the processes, “she says. “While I think it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to this industry, people are going to be craving more human‑to‑human interaction – and I think that underscores the continued importance of our jobs as event managers and marketers.”

As a longstanding participant in Cvent’s Partner Program, EMC works closely with Cvent to shape what’s next for their clients. “Being a Cvent partner is invaluable,” Megan explains. “We get to talk with experts about the best ways to apply the full suite of tools to our business and enjoy meaningful conversations with others in our industry to strengthen collaboration.” She adds that the alignment between Cvent and EMC is as strong as ever. “It has been great for our business to be able to align our brand with an iconic brand like Cvent, and being a Platinum Partner gives us a lot of credibility while helping us stay at the forefront of innovation.”

As they look forward to the future, EMC continues to focus on empowering their clients with the tools and data they need to foster business success. “Events are becoming such a critical component of business growth, so we’re really looking at the impact of events with our clients and driving those business objectives,” Megan shares. With a proven track record of registration growth, client expansion, and award‑winning engagement, EMC Meetings & Events is well‑positioned to continue helping their clients scale event‑led growth programs, modernize attendee and sponsor experiences, and prove the full impact of their meetings and events with Cvent as a strategic hub.