While preparing for my presentation for Solver’s annual customer and partner conference, ASCEND 2024, I realized that I've used Solver in such diverse ways that it would be impossible to cover them all adequately in one presentation. This realization sparked the idea of delving into the nuances of each scenario in depth.
Since ASCEND has been at the top of my mind, I want to start there. Specifically, how I use Solver to track key measures to help successfully organize and execute events.
History of ASCEND
ASCEND, previously known as “Focus”, started as a short, two-day, conference in 2013. The first “Focus” event was held in Santa Monica. It has since expanded to include two days of training, a partner summit, meetings with Solver international offices, fun activities, and more. The primary goal of the conference: improve user’s skills, experience, and help them accelerate better decisions by leveraging all that Solver can offer them.
In the past decade, ASCEND has undergone significant growth. Employees regularly sought me out for a wide array of conference data. They'd want to know if specific customers or partners had registered, how our event budget looked, which training classes were nearly at capacity, attendee counts broken down by ERP, and more. These queries flooded my inbox daily, especially in the months leading up to ASCEND. It was a steady stream of data requests that kept me busy.
Creating Visibility with Solver Reporting
In 2015 I established a series of reports that could satisfy all these requests and built them into a custom reporting module titled “ASCEND”. I included dimensions for the salesperson, customer, ERP, and date of registration. It also included financial reporting attributes, attendee name, title, confirmation number, how they heard about our event, sessions they planned to attend, and our training classes. For example, the ASCEND planning team could identify percentages of customer or partner registrations, or which of our partners are invested in driving attendance. They could determine this by the volume of registrations tied to each partner, return on investment, and attendance year over year.
Currently, the process starts by downloading the data into Excel from Cvent, our event information and registration tool. Next, the data is mapped to dimension codes, then manually imported approximately once a week. Once complete, these reports are available to all Solver employees to access and review:
- Dashboard: high-level dashboard highlighting KPIs
- Overview: graph of attendees by week, as well as other trending KPI graphs
- Details: details about which partners and customer attendees
- Pricing: attendees by ticket price point
- Salesperson Summary: summary of attendees by their assigned salesperson
- Trainees: list of attendees that have registered for each training class
- Partner Comparison: year over year comparison of ASCEND attendance
- Revenue Analysis: product revenue and renewals per ASCEND attendee
- Attendees by Year: attendees who come back year over year, or declined after a single year
- Gift Drawing: attendees at random, to choose from for ASCEND giveaway drawings.
Implementing this reporting module reduced the number of email requests and facilitated comprehensive analysis. With the entire Solver team equipped with access to these reports, we've optimized pricing strategies to bolster attendance, prioritized training topics, and elevated on-site experiences.