Achievers Boosts Event Attendance by 5% and Streamlines Internal Processes customer success

The Challenge: As the Associate Marketing Director of Events at Achievers, Timothy Calder leads a team that orchestrates a diverse portfolio of events, including virtual conferences and large-scale trade shows. Recognizing the complexities of managing such a broad range of events, the team proactively sought ways to enhance their processes.

In 2020, as Achievers transitioned many in-person events to virtual formats, the team quickly identified gaps in their existing virtual platform’s calendaring features, challenging their ability to ensure participant attendance. Determined to overcome these limitations, they began exploring more efficient tools to streamline event invitations and boost engagement.

Internally, the team recognized the opportunity for better methods to keep all stakeholders informed since traditional tools like Excel sheets and intranet posts can fall short.

The Solution: AddEvent provided Achievers with a seamless, multi-use solution that helped solve their external attendance and streamline internal communication. 

Implementing AddEvent’s add to calendar solution for webinars, field events, and other initiatives helped ensure that events were reliably added to participants’ calendars, significantly reducing no-shows by 5%.

For their internal teams, Achievers created a subscription-based internal events calendar, allowing all employees to access an up-to-date view of all upcoming events. This calendar, hosted on the company’s intranet, included detailed event information, providing everything internal stakeholders needed in one place, reducing questions to event owners, and empowering their stakeholders.

The Results: By integrating AddEvent into their virtual and field event workflows, Achievers saw an improvement in event attendance rates. Achievers know that getting their event onto their customer’s calendars is a key action towards attendance. These add to calendar links worked seamlessly across all devices and calendar platforms, proving critical in getting users to commit to attending events.

Achievers now manages 10 to 20 monthly events using AddEvent, generating approximately 1,000 add to calendar actions each month. 

Achievers’ new internal subscription calendar also reduced the back-and-forth inquiries around events. With all event details in one place, team members could effortlessly access the needed information, reducing miscommunication, repetitive questions, and freeing up time for the events team. It has doubled to over 81 active subscribers in just two years and regularly grows as the team grows. 

The internal calendar not only provided visibility for current events, but also allowed the team to schedule pre-event prompts, such as registration reminders a month in advance and leading up to the events. This strategic planning helped Achievers increase early registrations and ensure that upcoming events were always front-of-mind for their teams. 

Here’s precisely how it happened:

Achievers, a leader in employee recognition software, empowers organizations by creating peer-to-peer social and financial recognition tools. With over 20 years in business, Achievers relies on events as a core strategy to engage clients, prospects, and internal teams. 

During Achievers’ 2020 virtual user conference, Timothy Calder and his team proactively tackled a significant challenge: ensuring strong event attendance in an all-virtual format. 2020 brought an onslaught of learning as the entire in-person event industry was forced to pivot overnight. 

With quick thinking and awareness, Timothy and his team could recognize the limitations of their existing tools. Where the team had manually sent calendar invitations to attendees to boost participation, they realized there was room for optimization. This experience highlighted the opportunity to adopt a more reliable, user-friendly solution to streamline the process and improve efficiency.

As many of us have experienced, internal communication with traditional tools like Excel sheets and intranet posts presented opportunities for improvement. Achievers sought out a more formalized solution that would give them an easy to find and use source of truth to inform internal teams about events and training sessions.

Timothy discovered AddEvent while attending a virtual event hosted by Pathfactory, which used AddEvent’s Add to Calendar (ATC) functionality. Impressed by its seamless integration and ease of use, he quickly implemented the tool at Achievers to strengthen their event marketing efforts.

How Achievers Currently Uses AddEvent
Achievers leverage AddEvent to improve both internal and external event engagement:

Internal and external embedded calendars: Achievers embeds event calendars on their public-facing website, making it easier for customers and prospects to stay updated on upcoming events. Internally, they have their own internal version embedded on their intranet to keep employees in the loop.

Add to calendar links: The team now automates the invitation process by including add to calendar invite links in their email campaigns, helping to boost virtual attendance significantly.

Improved internal engagement with subscription calendars: The Achiever’s team has fully subscribed to the internal event calendar, leading to better awareness of the event schedule and less room for miscommunication. Now, if they are on the go, they can easily pop over to the subscription calendar layered in their calendar of choice instead of needing to check the intranet.

The Impact
After implementing AddEvent, Achievers saw immediate improvements:

Consistency & ease of use: AddEvent’s reliability and ease of use meant internal and external users were more likely to engage with event invitations. The platform’s consistency, particularly in how events are added to calendars, allowed Achievers to maintain a streamlined experience even when using various event management tools. 

Increased Engagement: The Achievers events team saves valuable time with fewer manual processes, giving them more time to push the envelope. In turn, the sales team is using the subscription calendars regularly and is able to find answers independently without needing to stop what they are working on. Lastly, their attendees find it easy to keep track, learn about upcoming events, and stay engaged with Achievers.

What’s Ahead for Achievers?

Achievers is building on their success and plans to expand their use of AddEvent to other programs like the Achievers Workforce Institute webinars. By offering calendar subscriptions for these webinars, they hope to make things easier for regular attendees—no more constant registration! This simple approach could help drive up attendance even more.

With AddEvent in their event workflow, Achievers has seen firsthand how add to calendar and subscription calendar tools can streamline processes, promote increased attendance, and keep internal communication succinct. 

As Achievers continues to grow their event offerings, AddEvent stays a key partner in their mission to deliver a smooth, accessible experience for all their attendees.