Events System Audit

Pepperdine University's Digital Marketing and CRM team is engaging in a strategic initiative to re-evaluate the University's event management tool. The University's current event management tool, Fonteva, provides event creators with a solution to handle all types of events, including multi-day, multi-session with complex pricing events to a simple event announcement.

Pepperdine University relies heavily on events to support engagement and fundraising.  An enterprise event management system is crucial to the overall support and administration of an array of events offered. This system must provide a customer-focused solution optimized for mobile registration, an efficient and scalable resource, integrate with our Salesforce CRM while being easily upgradeable, provide metrics and reporting, and be financially sustainable. Pepperdine University's Digital Marketing and CRM team is currently researching alternative solutions to determine a viable enterprise solution that will resolve the difficulty of upgrades and improve timely system support to be able to provide the best customer experience available for the event registrants.

With the new event system our team’s goals are:

• Provide an intuitive user interface, quality end user experience, and maintain consistency with university branding initiatives.
• Align communications systems to reduce redundancies (staff and information).
• Provide an intuitive user interface, quality end user experience, and maintain consistency with university branding initiatives.
• Empower staff with accessibility and remove technology barriers to creating, managing and reporting on their events.
• Address the growing number of customized event registration development requests.
• Ensure that system upgrades are easy to perform and maintained properly.

The project will be split into two phases. The first phase is event discovery and audit where IMC, working with a cross section of the CRM Governance Committee, will lead the evaluation and selection of an event management system that will integrate with the Salesforce platform at the University. The second phase is event system implementation.