Andrew CheesemanSpeciality
Your event platform does not talk to anything else.
Registration sits in RainFocus. The attendee record sits in the CRM. Finance wants a number that reconciles with neither, and somebody rebuilds the reporting by hand after every event. I join those systems up, for companies running their own events and for the agencies delivering them.
Which of these is you
The picture only assembles weeks after the event
Registration, sessions, check-in, travel and spend each live in a different system. Nobody can answer a simple question during the event, and the post-event report is assembled by hand in a spreadsheet that no two people agree on.
One pipeline, running during the event rather than after it, so the numbers are the same wherever you look them up.
Every event is an integration project again
The platform is configured per event, so the feeds into finance, the CRM and the reporting get rebuilt or hand-patched each time. It works, but it costs you the same fortnight of engineering every cycle.
Integrations built once and driven by configuration, so a new event is set up rather than re-engineered.
The event platform is the system of record, and it should not be
Attendee data, consent and history end up living wherever the last event put them. That is awkward commercially and worse when someone asks a data protection question you have to answer properly.
A deliberate flow: the event platform runs the event, your CRM and warehouse hold the record, and the boundary between them is drawn on purpose.
Platforms
Registration systems
RainFocus, CventRainFocus is where the depth is: five years of Fortune 500 events, with registration and attendee data moving between RainFocus and the services around it, reconciled and monitored rather than exported once and hoped over. I have worked on Cvent as well. Whatever the platform, the problem is the same shape, because a system that owns registration has to talk to everything that is not registration.
CRM
Salesforce, DynamicsAttendee, account and activity data synchronised both ways, with the matching rules written down and the failure cases handled rather than silently dropped.
BI and reporting
Power BI, TableauDashboards fed by a modelled dataset instead of a spreadsheet export, so the definition of an attendee is the same in every report.
Warehouse and pipeline
Snowflake, BigQueryThe layer underneath all of it: event data landed, modelled and kept, so this year’s event can be compared with the last five.
What that looks like
- Integrations that are monitored and reconcile, so a failed sync is an alert rather than a discovery at the debrief
- Attendee and session data modelled once, so finance, marketing and the event team stop arguing about whose number is right
- Feeds that run live during an event, not a batch that lands the following week
- Data protection taken seriously: consent, retention and the boundary between the event platform and your system of record
- The integration handed over documented and in Terraform, so your team or your next agency can run it without me
Where this comes from
Five years, 2021 to 2026, as Chief Architect and lead engineer on the platform behind a Fortune 500 client’s flagship global recognition programme, delivered through Graffic Jam. Third-party integration was a large part of the job, RainFocus included.
- 8 of 8 events delivered on time in a single year, for 6,000+ attendees across Hawaii, the US West Coast, Europe and Australia
- 25,000 personal and 1,000 group bookings handled, reconciled across the systems that needed them
- 300,000+ photos and videos pushed live to on-site signage, and a 20-year archive of 1.5m+ items kept available
Who this is for
Event agencies
You deliver the event and the client expects the systems to join up. I work behind you, to your client and your timeline, and I am not trying to take the account.
In-house event and marketing teams
You run several events a year on a platform that was chosen for the event, not for the reporting. I make the reporting work without replacing the platform.
The technology team behind either
You have the platform and the CRM but nobody with the time to own the seam between them. That seam is the whole job, and it is the part I do.
Being straight about the platforms
RainFocus is where the depth is, from five years of shipped work. I have worked on Cvent. I have not shipped on every registration platform on the market, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The architecture, the reconciliation and the data modelling transfer between them, and the platform specifics are learning I do at my own cost rather than yours. If you need someone who has already lived in your exact platform for years, that is a fair thing to want, and better asked now than in week two.
Tell me where you are stuck.
A short conversation costs nothing and usually gets further than a written brief. If I am not the right person, I will say so and point you at someone who is.