Inspiring Performance

Women Inspiring Women is a New Hampshire-based organization that brings "super cool chicks" together for inspiration, motivation, professional development, networking, education, and fun. Leslie Sturgeon, a small business owner from New Hampton, N.H., founded the group to bring together women who were trying to create a better life both personally and professionally.

Leslie felt the central New Hampshire area was lacking a professional outlet for women, and after mulling over the idea, she finally established Women Inspiring Women in May 2007. "I wanted a place where women could share the challenges and journey we are on," Leslie explains.

Challenge: Keeping costs down

Today, Women Inspiring Women is a statewide organization with 160 paid members and more than 3,300 people on its contact list. It hosts monthly gatherings featuring various business and personal development topics, which both members and non-members can attend. "It's a challenge to address all the needs for women," Leslie says of each event. "It's like putting a wedding on every time I do an event."

Adding to the hurdles is New Hampshire's "extremely small" business community and the downtrodden economy. "We've had to offer the programs at bare-bones prices just to get people there," Leslie says, adding that what is charged for an event barely covers expenses. "We just want to get people there. It's important for us to grow."

Leslie adds that each event is designed to treat attendees like queens the moment they walk in the door, and to be fun, festive experiences. Typically, events range anywhere from 35 to 100 attendees, and prior to using Event Marketing, all registration was handled manually. PayPal payment confirmation emails were used to build an Excel spreadsheet to track registration. Leslie also had to individually email those attendees she didn't know personally for their proper name and title, since PayPal only shares limited information.

Solution: Event back office automation

As a Constant Contact customer since July 2007, Leslie jumped at the opportunity to try the company's new Event Marketing tool to help with her promotional and registration efforts. She and her small team were hoping to be able to ease some of the back office functions and try to circumvent the cumbersome process for updating the Women Inspiring Women website with new event information.

Event Marketing has been a godsend. So far, Event Marketing has been a "godsend" to Leslie and Women Inspiring Women. "We can build the Constant Contact event links into our website and, instead of going to a PDF page that was our event flier, it goes to the registration page," Leslie says. "It handles all the back office stuff all the way through payment."

Leslie is now able to capture all the name badge information herself and build post-show attendee reports for exhibitors much quicker. As an added bonus, the event home page is now indexable by search engines since it is no longer just a PDF file.

Results: Time and effort saved

For Leslie, the immediate return on her investment has come from the time saved by automating the event registration process. "It's more seamless for people and easier for everyone. For people signing up for events, they don't have to bounce from a newsletter, to our website, to PayPal, and back - it's so flawless and easy."

It also helps Leslie and her web team by cutting out 60 percent of the work they previously had to do get an event promoted and registration links posted. "We can do it once now and it goes through our entire site," Leslie says.

Leslie is even getting days of her own time back: Using the manual registration tracking method, it sometimes took her three days to get information out to exhibitors after one of her events. Now, she can turn the information around the night of the event. "We can be done with the event and away we go onto the next big project," Leslie says.

When Leslie started with Event Marketing, she was hoping it would provide her with the ability to plan an event from soup to nuts. "What we were hoping for is what we got and so much more," she reports.