Queen’s University Belfast’s beautiful campus is situated within the capital city of Northern Ireland. The 9th oldest university in the UK with a distinguished global reputation, Queen’s is a member of the Russell Group of UK research intensive universities, combining excellence in research and education with a student-centred ethos.
We sat down with Gemma McAfee, the CRM Manager in the digital marketing team at Queen’s University Belfast, to discuss what a difference Gecko has made to the university’s event management processes.
We began by asking her how events were run before Gecko was introduced. “We were using Microsoft Dynamics and we used a custom form builder built by our CRM developers that wrote into Dynamics. It was just data capture for building up a list of registrations and every time we needed a new form for an event we had to ask someone to create one for us, which gave us a resource issue,” says Gemma.
“With our in-house team building all the forms, there was always a backlog of work and we had no way for students to manage their own event bookings. Plus, when people arrived at events, we were using printed lists and looking for people’s names in alphabetical order. It was very manual.”
Moving up a gear from manual to automatic
As part of their drive to become more automated and efficient, the Digital Marketing Manager, Paul Ferguson, and the team began looking at software options that would give staff more control over their communications. “We wanted a system that would empower more people at Queen’s. We wanted to be able to develop a template that would allow us to create our own forms,” says Gemma. “And, in terms of managing events, we wanted a much better way of letting staff and students manage session bookings.”
The team quickly saw that Gecko would allow it to do all of this and more. “What we loved about Gecko was its ability to set capacities for sessions, to keep an eye on registrations, close sessions off when full and the facility to create waitlists, so that when people cancel a booking those on the waiting list can take their place,” says Gemma.
The university adopted Gecko in April 2021 and has no regrets. Gemma estimates that Gecko’s automated registrations save her between two and five hours per event and, as student recruitment teams no longer have to print out paper registration lists, this helps the university reduce its environmental impact too.
Being able to respond and increase capacity for sessions when they can see the demand is there, is another benefit of Gecko that the team appreciate. “In September, we had some campus tours for new students that were over-subscribed with long waiting lists and, as Gecko notified us of this, we were able to increase capacity to meet the demand,” reveals Gemma. “Before, we wouldn’t have known how many people wanted to come, we would have just closed off the form and unwittingly taken away the opportunity for some people to come.”
Gecko successfully syncs with Microsoft Dynamics
The fact that Gecko integrates with the university’s Microsoft Dynamics platform has also proved useful. “We use Gecko for all our main forms across the website and our in-market recruitment teams use the Gecko app when they are out meeting students at events,” Gemma explains. “Gecko is used for event confirmation emails, event reminder emails, to send out tickets and so on, but when we want to send out more content-led emails we use Click Dimensions in Dynamics and it’s great that Gecko is in sync with this.
“As soon as someone registers in Gecko they go straight through to Dynamics where we build up the registration list we use for follow-up post-event emails and regular newsletters. If we had the Gecko Promote package we could do all of this with that, but we didn’t go with the Promote package because we already had this functionality with Microsoft.”
Gecko is also great for Queen’s when it comes to managing event workflow. This starts with registration forms being emailed out, followed by confirmation emails and then reminder emails and SMS messages. During large campus events, attendees receive reminders to visit one of the check-in desks.
The immediacy of SMS helps boost registration numbers
“We find Gecko’s SMS facility a great way to give students a last-minute push to attend events because we know that wherever anyone is when they get an SMS message they open it straight away, whereas emails can sometimes get lost. So, for certain events, we will take an export from CRM of pre-applicants or offer holders and put them into Gecko as an SMS broadcast for that final push,” Gemma says, adding that she appreciates Gecko’s additional filter that sorts out international students from national students. “There are always some international students who register for events in Belfast because they see the ads, but Gecko alerts us to this so that we don’t send them any pre-event SMS reminders. This means we don’t waste our credits on students that we know aren’t going to be in Belfast. It’s good to have that functionality.”
Gecko is great for webinars too, says Gemma. “We use Gecko to set up the registration form, set up the event and for self-check-in. People then get emails reminding them that the event is about to start and Gecko records who has and hasn’t attended too, which is a great improvement on our old system where we would have to export this data from a third-party webinar platform, like Teams or Webinar Jam, into an Excel file, which would then need to be integrated with our CRM.”
As most of these virtual events take place in the evening, Gemma says it’s great to come into work the next morning and have the attendee list waiting for you, without any manual inputs.
Gecko reaches across campus and beyond
Three years on from launching Gecko, the platform is now used by Queen’s central digital marketing team, local and international recruitment staff, and faculty recruitment teams. “Different faculty recruitment teams run a lot of events and whereas before they would all have been making requests for event support to our central IT team, now they can run their own events through Gecko,” says Gemma.
Queens runs about ten central campus events a year and with each faculty also running multiple smaller in-person events, plus virtual events, there’s a lot going on. Each business area has been given templates for creating events and forms in Gecko and guidance on how to customise them to make them relevant to their needs.
“Now that everyone has had Gecko for over two years, they can go back and clone a form from last year’s event and tweak it, there is no need to start from scratch with anything now,” says Gemma.
Gecko has also been a game changer for the international recruitment team, for whom the Gecko app is particularly useful. “International staff tell us which events they plan on visiting. It might be a fair anywhere from Nigeria to Canada, then when they are there, we can see the registrations of interest coming in from these events and can use the data to see which events generate the most leads and, further down the line, how many of these expressions of interest go on to apply and take up places here,” says Gemma.
Gecko’s data analysis gets results
Queen’s now uses insights from Gecko’s data analysis of virtual and in-person events on campus and abroad to allocate resources to where it sees the most results. And, Gecko helps the university make better use of its staff time too. “In terms of events, Gecko’s removed a lot of the tedious morning-after-event manual tasks. For each online event, I’d be sent a spreadsheet of all the people who attended and before Gecko that would take me at least an hour to go through and after big open days, that spreadsheet would be at least half a day’s work. So it’s a big time saver there.
“And, it’s minimised the time we take to create forms because we’ve built up a good bank of event and form templates and anyone with Gecko access can get a form up and running within minutes, whereas before we were reliant on our IT team, which could take days. It’s given IT a lot of time back too.”
When asked whether she would recommend other universities adopt Gecko, Gemma doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely,” she says. “It will solve a lot of problems that you probably have related to manual processes that take up a lot of your time. Gecko just runs in the background and does it all for you and it also lets students manage their event bookings themselves, which is fantastic.”
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