Successfully Rebranding the Global Tourism Summit
Paragon Events is a full-service strategic meetings management, association management, and marketing firm. Headquartered in Florida, the organisation is dedicated to conceiving, planning, and executing high calibre events around the world. The Events team has used Cvent since 2012 to push the technological boundaries of their clients’ events.
Taking over newly rebranded Global Tourism Summit from a previous organisation, they needed a strategic rollout plan to increase attendance by at least 33% for their client's event in Hawaii. “When we took over, they were using multi-products on a different platform,” notes Manager of Meetings and Events Katherine Stokoe. “We realised that in order to have a seamless integration and improve our attendee experience, putting it on one platform was not only going to make the summit more successful, but our team more successful.”
Creating a Modern Flex Registration Experience
To meet the demands of thousands of yearly registrations, the team added a Technology and Applications Coordinator. Braylon Bush now relishes his role building Cvent registration sites, particularly using Flex. “I’ve been able to curate my role into managing and building out anywhere between 30 and 50 registrations through the year,” he explains. “Having Flex makes it easier for me to help manage the team and the different programs we have going. I think Flex is going to be a premier option for us to move forward with responsive, design-oriented registration sites.”
The new website helped Paragon Events drive registration for the Global Tourism Summit. “Our Cvent site had over 105,000 views. This was very well done from a site that only had about 15,000 views the year before,” notes Katherine. Automated emails and social pushes helped target abandoned registrations. "It was something that we’ve never had before for this client," adds Katherine. These efforts increased revenue by $3,000 and increased registration by 46%.
Powering Paragon Events
With fear of long lines, multiple payments to process, and other nightmare-inducing onsite experiences, the team decided to adopt OnArrival. The staff was able to process check-ins quickly and attendees could self-serve using the kiosk mode. “For me, I feel so at ease having OnArrival,” notes Event Specialist Jalissa Sutton. “95% of attendees’ reactions were ‘That’s it? Am I done?’ It’s so easy that people are in awe.”
Using a truly integrated platform “creates a lot of ease and a lot less pressure on our side,” notes Katherine. “We’re able to work more cohesively together. Website updates went directly to CrowdCompass, which created more productivity within Paragon Events. OnArrival made it easier to give updated numbers ASAP to our stakeholders.”
Ensuring Sponsorship Opportunities with CrowdCompass
The team opted to use the CrowdCompass mobile app to communicate directly and efficiently with attendees. The Click Game and Social Wall feed encouraged engagement throughout the summit. “The year before we took over management, the app had about a 25% engagement rate. This year it went up to about 85%,” notes Katherine. “We also took different advertising options this year, and funneled that into sponsorship revenue.”
These new sponsorship opportunities created flexibility and increased the revenue stream for their client. “Something that I thought was very meaningful to a handful of our sponsors who came in late was that we were able to leverage push notifications and banners to sell, onsite, different sponsorships. We did this while still keeping the executive sponsors, exhibitors, and everyone else within their parameters of engagement and visibility,” explains Braylon.
Using Data to Power Summit Success
Using additional Cvent tools like Lead Capture and Appointments helped the team gather accurate data that integrated directly with the Cvent Event Management platform. Katherine explains, “It was seamless to have our attendees go from registering, to downloading the CrowdCompass app, to having their information captured by the lead retrieval system.” The team increased productivity, saw hyper-engagement on the mobile app, and empowered their attendees as a result. Katherine adds, “For us, the biggest thing was the post-event data that we received. Within our clients’ world, they need to be able to back up costs, which means we need to be able to back up costs. We always provide a very comprehensive report after an event that sums up all of the pros and opportunities. For this we turned to Cvent, which made it very seamless for us to pull all this data.”
Pushing the Boundaries of the Events Industry
Katherine and her team are quickly establishing themselves as industry leaders, constantly engaging with event technology in order to fully invest in the success of their clients. Most importantly, Katherine explains that her team feels that their voices matter in the development of new and exciting technology. “For us, Cvent’s our partner,” she explains. “If it makes our lives and jobs easier, that’s something that we’re going to want to keep investing in and therefore having our clients invest in.”
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