Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
I feel like some other companies/HubSpot users must have encountered this same issue that we are currently facing, and I'm curious to hear what solutions some of you may have come up with.
Here's out problem in a nutshell. Come 2023, we need to find a more elegant, streamlined, and minimalist solution for recording event attendance. (e.g. if and when a contact was present at an event.) Sometimes the event might be a lead source, and sometimes the lead predates the event but we note that they were present there.
At the moment, Events are set up as a property. Each unique event is a property value. The problem with this approach is that as a company we attend HUNDREDS of events each year. Then factor in that each year the same event is being entered in as a new property value: e.g. 'Trade Show X 2020, Trade Show X 2021, Trade Show X 2022, Trade Show Y 2020, Trade Show Y 2021, Trade Show Y 2022, etc, etc.
If we keep at this another year then we will literally be dealing with THOUSANDS of property values for the event property. So, we need to find a more elegant solution, while maintaining the ability to Create/filter lists based on event and the event year. For example, we would still want to create a list for every contact who was at 'Trade Show X, 2021', and another list for every contact who attended the same Trade Show X in 2022, but without having to create a new property every that an event is reattended and repeats itself.
Is anyone else having to deal with this? Any solutions that have worked for you? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
Hey @JMayhew6 great! So glad to hear that. There is one way I have handled this in the past that worked for me.
I created a custom contact property for each year "2022 Event Attendance", "2021 Event Attendance", ETC and it have it as a drop-down select with multiple options. I clone the contact property each year with events and add any that are new for that year.
Every time I attend an event I have my list of contacts and add them to HubSpot. I have a workflow setup for each event to automatically assign the property to my imports when I bring them in. This allows me to cleanly report on event attendance by year and even by specific event per year due to how I am grouping them. This helps me reduce my overall number of contact properties as well to just one per year.
I hope this helps, happy to help brainstorming if this specific solution isn't tenable for you.
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
We had the same issue as we run several webinars and events each month and needed a way to keep track of who registered, who attended, who engaged, etc.
The answer I came up with was to utilize Custom Objects and Association Labels. Now that you can easily create a custom object, I created one called Events with the various pieces of information we wanted to track for each event as fields. Then once an event has taken place, we upload the lists for attendees, demo requests, etc. and each one has it's own association label, so most contacts end up with a couple labels.
What you end up with is an easy list on your contact with all of the events they registered for or attended with your custom Events object holding the details about the event itself if anyone needs more information about it's content or purpose!
Hope this helps and happy to share further if you need any help getting this set up.
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
We had the same issue as we run several webinars and events each month and needed a way to keep track of who registered, who attended, who engaged, etc.
The answer I came up with was to utilize Custom Objects and Association Labels. Now that you can easily create a custom object, I created one called Events with the various pieces of information we wanted to track for each event as fields. Then once an event has taken place, we upload the lists for attendees, demo requests, etc. and each one has it's own association label, so most contacts end up with a couple labels.
What you end up with is an easy list on your contact with all of the events they registered for or attended with your custom Events object holding the details about the event itself if anyone needs more information about it's content or purpose!
Hope this helps and happy to share further if you need any help getting this set up.
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
Hey @JMayhew6 great! So glad to hear that. There is one way I have handled this in the past that worked for me.
I created a custom contact property for each year "2022 Event Attendance", "2021 Event Attendance", ETC and it have it as a drop-down select with multiple options. I clone the contact property each year with events and add any that are new for that year.
Every time I attend an event I have my list of contacts and add them to HubSpot. I have a workflow setup for each event to automatically assign the property to my imports when I bring them in. This allows me to cleanly report on event attendance by year and even by specific event per year due to how I am grouping them. This helps me reduce my overall number of contact properties as well to just one per year.
I hope this helps, happy to help brainstorming if this specific solution isn't tenable for you.
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
Can you see all of this data in attribution reporting to see which particular events contributed to the deal and revenue, by proportion across all the marketing touchpoints?
Events are a big part of our marketing expense, but we want to be able to see all of the marketing touchpoints in an attribution to revenue report, to know which touches are worth investing more in. Apples to apples. So event details along with web visits, emails, and other channels, to see what moved the needle. But I haven't seen this work with custom objects or properties. Any attibution solution?
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
Hi Sean,
This actually sounds like a fantastic, and veyr elegant solution! Kudos and thanks! I certainly can't think of a more minimalist solution.
My only thought is that creating a workflow for each individual event sounds like a lot of work. In some sense, it means you have minimized the number of contact properties, but you've sort of exported that clutter over into workflows. (at least this would be the case for my company. We attend 100s of events, so this would mean 100s of unique workflows.) Perhaps a quicker way to deal with that is to just include a column in all lead lists from events that includes the event name, and assign it to update that year's event attendance property when the list is imported. Thoughts?
Looking for a better way to record event attendance
SOLVE
@JMayhew6 That sounds like a great idea! We only attended around 3-4 events a year so it was no problem for us to do it the way I described. I can certainly see the problems that would create for you. I love the idea of just adding the column in the import, skips a step entirely!
