With more than 60 shows to manage each year, the staff of Diversified Business Communications-Canada is always looking for the most efficient tools available. Three years ago, the team, which includes professionals with significant experience in registration, decided they could cut costs and provide better service by handling registration and lead retrieval in-house, rather than outsourcing these tasks. All they needed was an integrated software program that offered show managers the capability to manage all back-office operations themselves.

The team selected show integration software from eTouches, which integrates with DBC-Canada’s existing cloud-based attendee database and allows existing staff to handle event registration online and on site. While the company used to outsource online registration to one vendor and on-site registration to another, integrated show management software eliminates the need for outsourcing those tasks. “We went from two registration providers to one,” says Mike Morton, CIO and vice president of e-media at DBC-Canada. “We are now able to manage the full life cycle of an event, on our own, with little or no assistance from [the vendor’s] support staff. We have our own registration and lead retrieval staff in house and manage the entire process, including on-site operations.”

In the past, DBC-Canada’s registration vendor also handled lead retrieval, but by managing event registration in-house and selling their own lead scanners, the former registration expense has been transformed into a revenue item. In addition to saving costs and turning registration into a revenue division, Morton says adopting integrated software has allowed the company to provide better service to its attendees and exhibitors. “By doing registration in house, we know intimately who the exhibitors are and what they’ve ordered, and we can work with them to bundle contracts and provide other services,” Morton says.

Along with registration and lead retrieval, the integrated software provides simple and consolidated historical data collection. When attendees and exhibitors log into the system to register for an event, the software captures event-specific information such as which sessions a person will attend or which white papers he or she downloaded. That information is updated in the company’s existing cloud record and available to be used for targeted marketing campaigns. “We are able to make smarter, more accurate decisions based on the data collected,” Morton says. “Our marketing staff can go straight to our attendee database and see who’s registered for different shows. They can see who watched a particular Webinar, read a certain white paper or went to a certain session. Then they can send them a targeted marketing message.”

Best of all, adopting the integrated software was an easy task. Morton says it only took a couple of days to train his staff to use the program and staff members quickly appreciated how the integrated program provided easy access to information and a simplified process and procedures.

While integrating back-office operations into one system has been a smooth and rewarding process for DBC-Canada, it hasn’t been completely without challenges. “Integrated projects require a more in-depth process for gathering requirements,” Morton says. “Extra time has to be allocated to allow for more testing time. And backups need to be in place just in case the integration link goes down.”