The Full Story
Queen’s University Belfast is a Russell Group university with a strong global reputation, hosting a wide range of virtual, international and on-campus events each year. Before adopting Gecko, managing these events involved a high level of manual work and heavy reliance on internal development teams.
Event forms were built by CRM developers and written directly into Microsoft Dynamics, creating delays and backlogs. “We had no way for students to manage their own event bookings,” explains Gemma McAfee, CRM Manager in the digital marketing team. On event days, staff relied on printed registration lists and manual check-in, which was time consuming and inefficient.
As part of a wider push to improve automation and efficiency, the team looked for a system that would give staff more control. “We wanted a system that would empower more people at Queen’s,” says Gemma, including the ability to create and reuse forms, manage session capacity and allow students to book and manage their own attendance.
Queen’s adopted Gecko in April 2021. One of the biggest early wins was session management. Gecko allows the team to set capacity limits, monitor demand, close sessions when full and run waitlists that automatically promote attendees when spaces become available. This has made it easier to respond to demand in real time and maximise attendance.
The time savings have been significant. Gemma estimates that Gecko saves between two and five hours of admin per event, while also reducing the need for printed materials. When sessions are oversubscribed, the team can now increase capacity instead of turning students away. “Before, we wouldn’t have known how many people wanted to come,” Gemma explains.
Gecko also integrates seamlessly with Queen’s existing Microsoft Dynamics setup. Gecko is used for core event activity such as registration, confirmations, reminders and tickets, while content-led campaigns continue to run through Click Dimensions in Dynamics. As soon as someone registers in Gecko, their data syncs into Dynamics for follow-up communications.
SMS has become an important part of the workflow, particularly for last-minute reminders. “We know that wherever anyone is when they get an SMS message they open it straight away,” says Gemma. Gecko’s filtering also helps the team avoid sending SMS reminders to international students who will not be attending events in Belfast, protecting credits and improving relevance.
Gecko is also widely used for webinars. It manages registration, reminders, self-check-in and attendance tracking, removing the need for manual exports from third-party platforms. For evening events, this means staff arrive the next morning with clean attendance data ready to use.
Today, Gecko is used across central marketing, domestic and international recruitment teams, and faculties running their own events. Teams clone and adapt templates rather than starting from scratch, reducing reliance on IT and speeding up delivery.
Gecko’s reporting also helps Queen’s understand which events generate the strongest engagement and applications, informing how resources are allocated. For Gemma, the value is clear. “It will solve a lot of problems related to manual processes,” she says. “Gecko just runs in the background and does it all for you.”