Situation

Kristin Huerth, Associate Director of UCI's Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences organizes many alumni related events throughout the calendar year, including semi-annual meetings of the Leadership Council. Kristin had been using email to announce and track responses for upcoming meetings the Leadership Council, an advisory board of executive-level leaders who help advance UCI's research, teaching and public service goals by strengthening the School's ties to industry and the community. This method was time consuming, however, as it required reading through each email response individually, and recording attendance on a separate spreadsheet.

Solution

As a member of the Leadership Council, David Wood introduced Eventene to Kristin and explained the benefits that a specialized event planning system could bring to organizing events at UCI. The solution involved helping UCI set up their first Leadership Council event in the system, as well as importing the list of Council members. Once setup, Eventene handled sending out the Meeting invitations by email, including all the detailed logistic notes and links to pre-reading materials in PDF format. Eventene automatically tracked all the responses and made it easy to send reminders to any members who had not yet responded prior to the meeting.

Results

Due to the efficiencies within Eventene, Kristin was able to achieve a 100% response rate for all members of the Leadership Council. Overall using Eventene saved Kristin and her staff 4-5 hours of planning time for a single Leadership Council meeting. After realizing those savings, it was easy to justify using Eventene to help plan other events at UCI throughout the year.

"UCI hosts hundreds of events per year, and we are always looking for more efficient ways to streamline the planning. We use Eventene to organize our board meetings, and it’s been a major time-saver."