For some companies, pulling off a successful event program is a coordinated effort among multiple teams: event marketing, marketing operations, design, development, sales … the list could go on.
When you’re part of a small or mid-sized business, you don’t always have the luxury of getting help from people who specialize in these areas. But that doesn’t mean building and running events has to be harder or less effective.
Although they’ve grown quite rapidly over the past few years, the lean (yet mighty) team at Founders Pledge knows firsthand that having these dedicated resources isn’t a prerequisite for amazing (and successful) events.
Managing the entire event marketing program at Founders Pledge are Raquel Abrantes, Programmes Director, and Tania Phipps, Events Manager. Their goal: to educate their members — philanthropic entrepreneurs committed to doing good in the world — on applying a strategic and outcomes-based framework to their charitable giving.
With more than 50 annual events worldwide and a mission deserving of global visibility, Raquel and Tania knew the best way to manage their programs was at scale. And now, they’re revealing the steps they took to get there.
Founders Pledge is a global community of entrepreneurs who are uniquely committed to giving. On joining, each member commits a chosen portion of their current or future personal wealth to charity. By providing members with rigorous charity research, streamlined giving infrastructure, and a global network of experts, Founders Pledge empowers its members to do immense good.
With only the two of them to manage their event programs, Raquel and Tania felt the challenges that often come with being a part of a small team: manual, time-consuming work and inefficient processes.
In other words, things that definitely don’t set event marketers up for scale.
“When I started at Founders Pledge, everything was done on spreadsheets,” said Tania. “We used them to track which invitations went out, who needed to get reminder emails, and attendee status — RSVPs, attended, no-show, etc.”
The other thing: They were sending all of those invitations and emails out from their email provider. And although they had a marketing professional with graphic design experience, their email provider’s limited functionality proved challenging.
“Our marketer created a template for us in our communication platform, but it really only allowed for a picture and standard text,” said Tania. “We didn’t have a good opportunity to brand our invitations.”
Raquel and Tania worked to nip these challenges in the bud early on. And they did that by searching for an event marketing platform that could support efficiency, consistency, and scalability.
“We really needed a platform that would enhance consistency across all events,” said Tania. “But at the same time, we needed the platform to allow us to create templates that would help us promote our brand in a more professional way.”
Although consistency and branding was crucial for them, there was one other piece that was non-negotiable for a lean team: self-serve functionality.
“We had someone well-versed in design, but we always needed someone with the technical skills to put event assets together,” said Tania. “So we really wanted a platform where we could create templates easily and quickly, and where everything would be pre-set.”
That platform was Splash.
Founders Pledge started seeing positive results as soon as they began using Splash — from increased efficiency to improved brand consistency.
“We’ve massively increased the efficiency of our event promotion,” said Tania. “It’s so much easier for us to actually see who was invited, who has already registered, and who has not. At the end of the day, that has saved us a ton of time. For each email, it used to take me a good hour to prepare the list alone, and now it takes me maybe 10 minutes.
“Plus, using our templates also saves so much time. We basically just have to update our content, add accompanying pictures, and our event assets are done.”
And of course, all of this newfound efficiency means Raquel and Tania can focus on the more critical, strategic parts of event marketing — like researching venues and vendors, and identifying what kinds of events to run.
Lastly, remember the basic emails they were sending? And the event assets that were branded inconsistently? Those are things of the past. According to Raquel, their events now look “very sophisticated and professional” — to the point where no one even knows they’re just a team of two.
“We are a young organization, so it’s important for us that our events look and feel elegant and professional,” said Raquel. “When we’re reaching out to members or potential members, it’s important the level of quality they get from our events helps build credibility and strengthen the relationship. And Splash helps with that.”
Like most other organizations, Founders Pledge had to adapt their plans for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID has obviously changed our plans. But when we talk about the shift to virtual, nothing has really changed in our process,” said Raquel. “The beautiful thing about all of this is that only the venue has changed from a meeting room or restaurant to a webinar platform.
“So we’re now experimenting with various kinds of events — from larger educational events with leading experts to more intimate conversations, and all virtual of course. Our members really appreciate the sense of intimacy and having a conversation rather than just sitting in front of a screen watching a webinar.
“We’re figuring out how we can make sure they all have an equally high-quality experience. So my day-to-day is really doing a lot of research to identify the best ways to present all of this knowledge.”
All of that research is paying off, because Founders Pledge has hosted a number of successful virtual events so far. And their first virtual event was nothing short of ironic: a collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security that was meant to be an in-person event on pandemic preparedness.
“They’d been a longtime partner of ours, and long before this crisis happened, we had been recommending them as a funding opportunity,” said Raquel. “Then with what happened in the world, it became more important than ever to actually host this event because figuring out how to best combat this is at the forefront. So we put that event together very quickly.
“In this new normal, where virtual events abound, Splash’s seamless registration experience and visual impact help set our events apart and really highlight both the quality of our content and the expertise of our speakers.”
