Since deploying Gecko to automate and manage its large-scale events, the University of Dundee has seen open-day bookings surge by 220%. The implementation has increased check-in rates from 50% to over 80% whilst reducing event setup time from 2 days to 30 minutes, meaning staff now have much more time to focus on putting on the best events.
The University of Dundee on Scotland’s east coast is one of the top 200 universities in the world for graduate employment. So, it’s no surprise that thousands of undergraduate and postgraduate students apply to study there each year.
To highlight the range and depth of its courses and extracurricular activities, Dundee puts on several open days a year. However, booking prospective students on to these events and making sure that they got a place on the sessions promoting the courses they were interested in used to be incredibly time-consuming and tedious. But, thanks to Gecko, the uni’s event management is now a relatively simple and even enjoyable process.
Rob, Deputy Head of Web Services and Product Owner at the University of Dundee, explains why. “Before we began using Gecko, we relied on Eventbrite to organize events and we were running Excel exports from it to do manual check-ins. It was fine when we were doing a single event with maybe two types of tickets – one for the general public and one for students – but it was when we wanted to book people on to individual sessions within those day events that things started to get complicated. I’d say it took about two days to set up each event to ensure that visitors didn’t book sessions or tours that had timetable clashes and that events didn’t get overbooked, meaning people would turn up and there wouldn’t be capacity in the room to hold them all.”
When it was discovered that people had booked onto events that were running simultaneously, Rob and his team had to send individual emails to those people explaining there was a problem with their booking. But, this didn’t always fix the problem as there were people who turned up without checking their emails.
“We’d get these people turning up with their parents and saying, ‘why have we been able to book two things at 10am and why didn’t you let us know there was a problem?’ It wasn’t just an awful admin experience for us, it was a bad user experience for our guests. What we really wanted to do was to be able to text people, because we knew that our young audience respond well to text messaging, but our old system had no text integration facility, so we started looking around for a solution that did.”
Rob was aware that Gecko had a text message offering, but as he knew that this system change would involve a fairly large investment, he wanted to ensure that he got the best solution out there. So, he began assessing all the products on the market. Not only did this proposed new events booking system have to be easy to use, it also had to seamlessly integrate with the university’s website and work well with its new CRM.
Rob wanted to ease the team into Gecko, so it was first trialled on smaller open-days for the medicine and dentistry departments, which attracted between 100 and 150 attendees and only had two sessions. “We used these as a test case,” he explains. “I wanted to see how easy Gecko made it to set up sessions and workflows. I wanted to see what its comms were like.
“So, we set it all up and then myself and a couple of other people from our team went to both open-days and stood at the check-in desks and we were so surprised that all these people had already been checked in automatically. Then I started asking people, ‘what do you think of the emails and the texts that we sent?’ The few comments centred around telling people about parking. So, those were the tweaks we made the next time we used Gecko. Honestly, I couldn’t believe just how seamless and how simple it all was.”
When it came to the larger September open-day, Rob was amazed that it only took him about half a day to input the 70-plus sessions available for booking, plus their room capacities, into Gecko. “Since that point,” says Rob. “I’ve just cloned that first one, time traveled it and added in or removed sessions that aren’t running in the open-day I’m working on. Now, we only have to do a few updates, move a couple of rooms around and we can have an open-day booking system up and running in less than an hour. From two days to 30 minutes is pretty decent.”
Rob is also finding that the Gecko messaging facility is working well too. “We text our attendees during open-days to remind them about the individual sessions that they’ve booked onto. So, you’re on campus, you’re wandering around, you forget to look at your watch and then ten minutes before the session opens you get a text message to say, remember you’ve got the computing talk booked at 2:00 p.m.
“It’s made check-in rates for sessions a lot higher. With Eventbrite, our booking to check-in rate was about 50%, where 50% of people that booked never turned up, or, if they did, they hadn’t checked in because we had to manually scan every single QR code. With Gecko’s automated check-in, we’d said, if we can get up to 60%, that’d be great. And for our September open-day, we got 74%. For October, it was 80 something percent. Next, we’re pushing to see if we can get 85%. The Gecko comms make such a difference to the turn-up rate and it also makes it easier to cancel and switch sessions, which a lot of people do,” says Rob.
Gecko doesn’t just handle the uni’s in-person events either. It also effectively manages international engagement webinars for different territories in local languages, covering everything from what it is like to live in Dundee to accepting your offer and getting your visa.
“The international team use Gecko to run about 20 webinar events a month,” explains Rob. “These change from month to month, so we’ve set up template events, so there’s a template for engagement online and engagement in person, all the workflows are there already and the date is set to 2030, so it always appears at the top of the list. All you need to do is clone one of these, pop in your date, time, title and description, press save and sync it to our CRM.”
The university uses Microsoft Dynamics, which is one of the CRMs that Gecko fully synchs with. Microsoft Dynamics does offer an event-booking facility, but it doesn’t offer the detailed specifics that most universities need to allow effective scheduling and rescheduling and it also requires expensive licences.
“Gecko gives us the enhanced user experience and features that we need and it integrates very well with our CRM,” says Rob. “Once an applicant receives a thank you email for attending an open-day, they then get transferred over into the CRM and begin getting marketing emails.”
By seamlessly integrating with the university’s existing solutions and workflows and being easily personalized to the team’s specific requirements, Gecko has revolutionized how the University of Dundee manages its events. And, the data backs this up. Gecko has increased open-day bookings this year by 220%, compared to 2023. Rob concludes: “Nobody else replicates the UX for the end user the way Gecko does.”
Whether you’re running open days, international webinars, or campus tours, we’ll show you how to make your events as successful as the University of Dundee’s.
