Time stands still for no man, with every passing moment bringing the potential for change, challenge and, of course, for opportunity. An ancient institution, the University of St. Andre University of St Andrews ws has witnessed the passing of the ages, all while serving as a beacon of knowledge, one which has for centuries attracted students and academics from across the globe. Renowned as a seat of learning, it’s natural that the University of St. Andrews plays host to a huge variety of conferences and events throughout the course of any single academic year. Given this, it's likewise natural that the university would seek to fully utilise a tool that offers the flexibility needed to manage these many events, one that can be adapted from occasion to occasion, from moment to moment.

But some things are timeless; indeed, the Eventsforce platform has proven to be the university’s lasting solution to meeting not just the demands of its varied roster of events, but — as we’ll see — is demonstrating again and again to be a platform whose agility enables the institution to meet the demands of an ever-changing world.

For the Good of All: Deploying the System for the Benefit of the Whole Institution

Back in 2013, the University of St. Andrews engaged with Eventsforce as part of a wider move to develop its conference services and, most specifically, its Professional Conference Organiser (PCO) offering. Today, its event activities fall within the remit of the Accommodation, Conference and Events (ACE) team. As team lead Marianne MacKinnon explains, ACE’s remit is wide and varied.

“We look after events throughout term time, [as well as] graduation, food, and beverage … we have cafés that we manage throughout the campus and also any other conferences or events that happen … [for example] academic, external conferences, weddings, dinners, etc.,” she says, adding that, during the summer months, ACE is able to utilise the campus itself as a wider venue to host summer schools and even leisure and golfing groups.

Having joined the university in 2012, Marianne was initially contracted with the delivery of a single event. But as time moved forward, that single event suddenly turned into three and Marianne sought to find a longer-term solution, a system that would allow for the easy management of abstract submissions and, most importantly, provide a flexible registration process for delegates. Fast forward to today and Marianne is now Deputy Director for the university’s Residential and Business Services — encompassing its ACE unit — and Eventsforce has for years been the organisation’s platform of choice for all of its event activities. Speaking of the decision to partner with Eventsforce, Marianne reflects back on her first year at the university, recalling, “ … the first conference I was employed to do was a chemistry event, then it was maths and physics, then it was a medical one … they're all so different and how they do abstracts, how they want different delegate packages … so what I found was that Eventsforce was flexible.”

But times change and so do challenges and — more than a decade on from its initial adoption by the University of St. Andrews — the task is now to utilise the agility of Eventsforce as a comprehensive platform to allow ACE to roll out its PCO offering to the wider university.

One Simple Goal

As a long time user of Eventsforce, St. Andrews’s goal is very simple, explains Sales and Marketing Manager Kerry Watson. “We want to carry on getting more conferences,” she says. This overarching aim, adds Events Manager Kirstie Elliot, has seen the organisation create and expand its events offering, all while using the Eventsforce platform as the university’s solution for building events internally. From major academic conferences to student-led activities, more events equals more revenue for the university.

Eventsforce: Agility and Functionality in a Single Solution

As Marianne explains, the inherent flexibility of Eventsforce is the solution that has not only enabled ACE to meet the needs of every event over the years, but — as we’ll soon see — has ensured that the team is also ready to meet the demands imposed by an ever-changing world. As Marianne puts it, no matter the occasion.

Marianne MacKinnon v2 — Marianne MacKinnon, Deputy Director, Residential & Business Services at University of St Andrews

In addition to this agility, the functionality of the platform has helped the ACE team to make a true success of their event operations at every turn. For example, the Eventsforce payment gateway integrates neatly with the university’s own in-house finance system, a point that ensures that every transaction is frictionless. Ticketing is another benefit of the Eventsforce platform, one that enables the university to sell tickets and manage every occasion with ease.

Finally, the platform’s abstracts function is especially beneficial in allowing many of its academic users to amend and edit event content, as needed. As an aside on this particular point, Kerry explains that the usability of the platform is helping the ACE team to keep event organising activities in-house, something that serves to further its aim of increasing event revenue earned by the university. “The academics are using it more and more. I think it's a good reputation for us, as Eventsforce gives us the ability to do events internally,” she explains. In the day-to-day sense, these features help the ACE team to offer comprehensive support to colleagues and departments throughout the wider university.

Creative Engagement, Striking Results: How Eventsforce Helped St. Andrews Navigate the COVID-19 Pandemic

While the ACE team has certainly made comprehensive use of the Eventsforce platform over the years, it’s their creative engagement with the system that has perhaps yielded the most striking results.

The onset of COVID-19 is a case in point. As Marianne recalls, the pandemic hit during the spring of 2020, when the university’s students were on vacation and many were away from the campus area. With a strict lockdown enforced, it soon became apparent that students would somehow need to return to their halls of residence to retrieve their personal effects in a safe and socially distanced manner.

To comply with restrictions, says Marianne, the ACE team used Eventsforce to create collection slots. “So the students would go online and book that they would be coming on, for example, the 2nd of June at ten o'clock and then — once we got so many people in that slot — it would then close. That then allowed us to know who's coming when,” she explains, adding that Eventsforce was “instrumental during COVID”.

Moving through the period of the pandemic, the team also utilised Eventsforce as a bespoke track-and-trace system to monitor the flow of students moving into and out of their classrooms. Using the QR code data generated by the individual registrations of thousands students on the platform, the team was then able to provide colleagues within the wider university administration with anonymised records of student movements during this period. “Reporting was a huge thing … and without Eventsforce, we couldn't have provided that information,” says Marianne, adding, “We were able to do so much for our students and staff.”

What’s more, the ACE team also sought to utilise the Eventsforce platform as a way to build social connectivity and interaction during this period. Flipping a time filled with so many restrictions on its head, ACE organised what became known as the ‘Can-Do’ programme because, as Marianne explains, “ … we were telling the students what they can't do, so we decided to let them know what they can do. And so we had a big marquee that was sectioned off into different rooms that had different activities in each section.” From yoga classes and pizza nights to book clubs and movie screenings, the ACE team managed these social activities via Eventsforce’s ticketing function.

A Positive Legacy of a Long-Standing Collaboration

The pandemic did not diminish the prestige with which St. Andrews is held and so — all throughout this period — students continued to flock to the institution. In fact, it was during these years that the ever-pragmatic ACE team deployed Eventsforce as a kind of transport booking form to ensure that inbound students could, as Marianne succinctly explained, get, “ … from the airport to the bedroom safely.” In fact, the result of this is that, to this day, the ACE team now use the platform as their go-to system to manage the arrival of students to the university campus each September.

While the team’s ingenious use of the Eventsforce system has created a legacy all its own, its deployment of the platform has served to enhance ACE’s reputation as a department within the university. As Kerry explains, academic users of the platform have been key in recommending ACE and its services to peers and colleagues. “It's word of mouth … They’ll recommend us, they'll say, ‘go to ACE and get them to manage your conference for you’,” she says, adding that what the ACE team is able to deliver internally via the platform for the university represents true value for money.

For Marianne, keeping conferences internal is undoubtedly the biggest benefit to be reaped from ACE’s partnership with Eventsforce.

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