Cvent - Engaged Community of the Year

Company: Cvent, McLean, VA
Company Description: Cvent is a leading meetings, events, & hospitality technology provider with more than 4,000 employees, 25,000 customers, and 300,000 users worldwide. Found in 1999, the Cvent Event and Hospitality Clouds offer software solutions to event professionals, marketers, and hospitality professionals that optimize the entire event management value chain. It is a privately held company based in McLean, VA.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Engaged Community of the Year

Nomination Title: Cvent Celebrity

Cvent Celebrity, Cvent’s customer advocacy community, was formally launched on July 3, 2018, but the advocacy program has existed at Cvent since 2015 when we launched the program as Cvent Advocates. Cvent Advocates was a great success back in 2015, but over the years, it lost its luster. In February 2018, we brought on a team of marketers to focus on how we could revive our advocate community. The team of three put their heads together to build a new community that would leverage the benefits of the old community while also offering new benefits to Cvent users.

The team started the community transformation by establishing a new overall vision for the group. The new overarching vision and guiding principle of the program became to create a personalized network of engaged advocates that actively champion Cvent, feel appreciated, and are recognized for their loyalty. To help execute this new vision, the advocate team defined three strategic pillars which are engagement, recruitment, and infrastructure. Each pillar is comprised of several strategic initiatives and tactics to increase community engagement and adoption of the program while also ensuring resources and processes are in place internally to support them. Another key element of the new advocate community strategy became data. We wanted to leverage customer data to make informed, data-driven decisions about the various features offered in the advocate community. For example, we created advocate personas to determine what type of content Cvent customers are most interested in, which type of activities they were most likely to participate in, and what they hoped to get out being a part of the community. This type of data-based information ensured us that we were providing the right content and activities to advocates to keep them engaged with Cvent Celebrity.

With a new strategy in place, Cvent relaunched the advocate community as Cvent Celebrity last July. The new Celebrity community completely transformed the concept of advocacy at Cvent, both internally as well as externally with our customers. We chose the name Cvent Celebrity because we wanted to convey to our customers that this program was all about them. We turned the spotlight back on our customers to help them become Cvent platform experts, to recognize them for their career achievements, and reward them for their dedication to Cvent.

Since launching Cvent Celebrity in July, we have seen increased levels of influence and impact. We increased the overall community engagement from 15% in 2017 to 40% in 2018. We were recognized with Influitive’s BAMMIES award for the Most Engaged Advocate Community in 2018, with stiff competition from IBM and Marketo. The advocate community grew from 2,818 members to 4,661, an increase of over 65%. Additionally, Celebrities wrote 730 product reviews on G2Crowd, Capterra, and TrustRadius in 2018. Moreover, the number of people in the community who were interested in being a reference for prospects grew from 9 to 169. The Net Promotor Score (NPS) of advocate community members reached 71. The Celebrity community has also served as a conduit for harvesting customer success stories, testimonials, and case studies. We collected 155 success story clips in 2018 and, of those, more than 60 of them were used to develop content in the form of testimonials videos, case studies, and success stories showcased on Cvent’s social media channels, Cvent.com, internal conferences, and more.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and results of the nominated campaign or project (up to 150 words):

-Rebranded the community as well as restructured it to be more intuitive and user friendly. Results included:
-Increased community engagement – 15% in 2017 to 40% in 2018.
-Expanded member base – 2,818 members to 4,661.
-Received Influitive’s BAMMIES Award for the https://influitive.com/advocate-marketing-awards/2018-bammies-winners/">Most Engaged Advocate Community of 2018.
-Refreshed community rewards by surveying customers about which rewards they would be most interested in receiving for community engagement.
-Offered community members more opportunities to share their success stories with others.
-Created 60+ content pieces (case studies, video and written testimonials, success stories) for our marketing teams to use in internal or external collateral and campaigns.
-Rewarded advocate community members for high return activities. For example, a $5 or $25 Amazon gift card for members who wrote a product review.
-Leveraged members to write product reviews on G2Crowd, Capterra, and TrustRadius, resulting in 730 net new product reviews.