Eventsforce and The British Council
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. With operations in over 100 countries, the organisation connects millions of people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK. One of the ways it does this is by hosting hundreds of events across the world, including the Going Global annual conference and the finals of the FameLab international science competition.
Challenge: The British Council had no dedicated event management system to support its global event operations. Teams across different countries used a variety of different tools for processing attendee registrations. Data management was also an issue as it often involved the manual tracking of data using disparate spreadsheets across different teams, departments and countries. The system was not very efficient and the organisation felt it had little control on how each of the individual country operations were running their events.
Solution: With these challenges in mind, the British Council decided to work with Eventsforce to provide a new web-based system that would centralise its global event management processes. The technology makes it much easier for events staff around the world to launch new online event registration sites, which can be supported in more than 30 different languages. Attendees can select event sessions, process registrations, arrange meetings with other attendees and make payments. All attendee information is automatically stored in Eventsforce, which can be accessed to create up to date reports on attendance and revenue, by country or event.
“Our decision to work with Eventsforce was based on our need to automate our event processes and bring together all our in-country event activities using one standardised platform. Their onboarding team worked very closely with us in developing a system that met our security standards and allowed us to effectively manage all the different types of events we have globally. The technology has a broad range of features that helps us create the style, look and language that’s right for each individual event.”
Why Eventsforce?
- A centralised view of all British Council events activity around the globe – hosted in the UK
- Improved staff efficiency and lower global expenditure
- Integration with British Council’s bespoke payment gateway, which will allow online payments in up to 80 countries by the end of 2017
- Real-time access to in-country event data; no errors or duplications
- Mobile responsive technology, supporting 30+ languages
- Reporting tools provide insight on attendees, session selections and revenue
- A dedicated Eventsforce support team reduces the need for in-house support