Banking

The Client
Colonial First State is one of Australia’s leading wealth management groups, with more than A$149 billion under management. They provide a wide range of investment, superannuation and retirement products to individuals as well as to corporate and superannuation fund investors. Their investment management expertise spans Australian and global shares, property, fixed interest, credit, hedge funds, infrastructure and private equity.

Colonial First State organise a number of national and regional road shows throughout the year, as well as other smaller events aiming to launch new products and services, build relationships with advisers and investors and raise brand awareness.

The Pain
To launch their new Generation Global Sustainability Fund, Colonial First State planned to host a high profile road show in various capital cities in Australia, featuring the co-founders of the fund, former US Vice-President Al Gore and former global CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood. Due to the prestige of the speakers and uniqueness of this new fund, Colonial First State was expecting the events to attract a large audience. For this reason Colonial First State wanted to have a registration process that was easy to adopt and use from an administrative point of view, as well as seamless and simple from a delegate registration perspective.

Colonial First State’s traditional event marketing process involved sending basic emails and hard copy posted invitations. Registrations were received through many different channels, including fax, email and telephone, and so event managers would need to download and update a spreadsheet of responses several times a day. This created a lot of administration work for the events team.

From the recipients’ perspective, the process was complicated too - hard copy invitations required phoning or faxing back of registration confirmations, and the simple email invitations had very brief event information. This long-winded process resulted in a lower number of completed registrations.

The Solution
Colonial First State outsourced their entire registration process for the Generation Global Sustainability Fund road shows to Concep to provide a full email and event registration management solution.

Using Concep Event, Concep’s professional event registration management tool, all the registration forms were built and incorporated into a professionally designed and branded microsite. Concep Campaigner was used to deliver email invitations, and administrative, bespoke reports compiled from both systems. An integrated and seamless procedure meant that Colonial First State were able to:

• Send ‘save the date’ emails
• Send registration invitations
• Use tracking facilities to resend invites to people who hadn’t yet opened the email
• Send reminder emails to registered delegates
• Send SMS reminders on the morning of the event.

On the days of the events, approximately 20 laptops were set up to register attendees as they arrived – the ease of use of the system meant that Colonial First State staff were able to run this process with minimal training. The information captured at the time of registration was automatically processed back into the central event management system.

The Results
Colonial First State were able to track individuals through the registration process - from receiving the initial ‘save the date’ emails, to registering, through to attending the event itself – meaning they could easily plan and target event communications. The event planning process was both easier and quicker in the lead up to the event due to online, real-time data management. As information is updated and shared in one place online, registration details remained up to date and could not be double-handled. Furthermore, the ability to access the event registration details meant that the processes were transparent and aided ease of communication with internal stakeholders many of which were located interstate around Australia.

The number of advisers attending the events more than satisfied Colonial First State’s expectations. They attributed this to the ease of the registration process for delegates, combined with the ability to send email and SMS reminders.

Colonial First State sent 9,000 invitations throughout the year for their various road shows, with 5,142 attendees – a 57% response rate. This figure increased from 1,782 recorded attendees to their road shows in the previous year. The number of no-shows on the day declined by up to 10% compared to previous events held by Colonial, which has been specifically attributed to the morning SMS reminders.

The Concep Event microsite built for these events houses post-event online surveys in order to monitor the success of the events and assist in future planning of events. The system also provided the ability to issue Certificates of Attendance.

Remaining with the sustainability theme of the fund, it was also important that the procedure provided by Concep was completely paperless and thus carbon neutral.