Transcript of Video
Customer Success Story
Project: Event Management
Solution: Andar i-Attend
Customer: United Way Elgin Middlesex, London, ON
Featuring: Aness Symons, Associate Director, Communications & Donor Experience
My name is Aness, I work for United Way Elgin Middlesex, and I have been here for about eight years now; and I’ve had a number of different roles since I’ve been here. I started out-in Fund Development, I did that for three years, and then we actually had purchased Andar and they wanted somebody with a fundraising background who kind of understood the tool to move into a full-time Andar position for a couple of years to really look at maximizing and how we were using it. So, I did a two-year secondment, which turned into a fulltime long-term position; and then most recently last year I became Associate Director of Communications.
How do you manage your events?
We do it all through i-Attend. It’s so nice, we send out our invites through Andar, the link is there, they register, it’s in Andar. We don’t have to go reinvent things. We don’t have to look people up, we don’t have to transfer that into our system, it’s all right in one spot; and it works really well. We have free events, we have events where people pay to register; recently we had our labour appreciation event, and we have numerous coupon codes. So, we have sponsors who get a table of ten included with their sponsorship, they have one coupon code, the register their ten people, there’s no fee. We had guest speakers, who we have a different coupon code for because it’s a different – so we can look back at our data and say, “These hundred people paid for registration, these hundred people were guests of award recipients, these people were sponsors,” it’s all setup on the back end – we don’t have to be picking through that every time somebody registers. They put in the coupon code and it does it for them online.
Can you share an example of how you use i-Attend?
We had an event that happened last night, and today we’re sending out a follow up email announcing how much has been raised to-date, and doing one final solicitation. So, we’re actually sending that out to everybody. Everybody who was at the event, everybody who has donated to the event; and again, because it’s in Andar we can just say, in our data mining operation, who attended, who has a gift against this event and it drops them into a mailing list for us, and we send it out and it connects back to the event again. We don’t have to pick through multiple lists to decide who we’re sending to. It’s already pre-populated in the system.
It’s really nice too, a couple of years ago we were having issues with people registering for events that we were covering the cost for, and then not showing up. So, we’ve been pretty diligent about keeping track of who actually shows up day off, and in the system we can track ‘registered did not attend,’ or ‘registered attended.’ If somebody is consistently registering and not showing up, then we find a way to not invite them because they’re costing us money and taking a spot somebody else could enjoy. It just makes those things really easy to manage, and because we host the tool ourselves, we can be a lot more nimble as well. You know, if anything changes with the event, we can pop on and change that online, we don’t have to wait for somebody else to do it or get access to another tool to fix it. We just do it on the fly.