The Club of IT Marketing and Communications organizes about 30 events per year. To optimize its organization, Romuald Ribault, the club’s secretary general, offers new tools to the association’s different working groups. In particular, he has suggested that they use Evenium solutions. Here he shares his feedback and experience.
Can you present the CMIT?
The CMIT regroups over a hundred members and 3,000 partners and aspiring members. The club’s role is to enrich and promote marketing and communication positions within the IT sector, by encouraging exchanges and sharing among its members. To accomplish this the association organizes, among other things, about 30 conferences per year and one major gathering: the CMIT Forum.
What is your role within the association?
I am the Secretary General of the association and a CMIT member of the Bureau. I participate in the organization of conferences, exchanges and different tasks, alongside other volunteers. My missions with the CMIT are really cross-functional: I implement useful tools for all of our missions, especially to improve our members’ experience. If I had to choose a famous character to describe myself, I would pick MacGyver, as he’s a jack-of-all-trades! For organizing events, a member of the association told me about Evenium’s solutions. We used them and since then, I have even adopted them for my own company!
What are some of the main issues that you have to address while organizing an event?
The main issue is managing enrollment and the guests’ presence on the spot. We also have to appropriately contact those who have not replied to our invitation yet. This is not necessarily an easy task! Personally, it’s happened that I have received 30 reminders to participate in one single event, to which I was already signed up by the way. This is way too many! This really showcases the difficulty that event organizers face: how to wisely spark your guests’ interest again without spamming them.
And how do you best manage your invitations and contacting those who have not yet replied?
At the CMIT, we now use the Evenium Net online invitation management solution for all of our events. It’s a user-friendly platform. I really like this tool. It’s extremely easy to create an event, manage invitations as well as guest hospitality at the event itself, and all this is possible in collaborative mode, working together.
What feature have you most appreciated?
I especially enjoyed the ease with which I can manage guest lists, send out emails and contact guests that have not yet responded. When you discover this platform, you really think about working differently! For example, you can begin using Evenium Net to manage bookings, and then you discover that this tool enables you to create a web site for the event very easily, and that it’s not necessarily required to create another one yourself anymore.
Had you already had the opportunity to use this kind of tool before?
I actually had the opportunity to try out a competitor’s solution, and Evenium’s great value really made the difference! I have since been using two Evenium solutions in my company, Ecologic, to manage bookings for events: Evenium Facility and Evenium Net. We choose one or the other platform depending on our needs (number of invitations to send out, etc.).
As a frequent organizer of events, what is the biggest progression that you have seen in this sector ?
There is a true desire to organize interactive events, to allow guests to participate. In this way, at the CMIT Forum’s latest edition this past April 1st, we organized votes and used the interaction and networking app Evenium ConnexMe. We are thinking about using this type of tool more often in our future gatherings, to keep on bringing even greater value to our members.
