Elevate Conference Graphics

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About Paylocity:

Paylocity is a software company that specializes in HR & Payroll with many features within it’s app to make the employee lifecycle smooth from hire to retire.

Their Business Needs and Goals:

Paylocity hosts it’s very own virtual HR event that is popular every year in the industry. For this year they wanted it to be bigger and better than ever. As all businesses do! Their goal was to increase attendees, sponsors, presentations, and impact for attendees. They had a lot of ideas to increase attendance and revenue from the event, but they needed help.

The Solution to Their Needs:

They needed a graphic designer to own the creative for this event to give them the graphics and focus they needed to execute on all of their marketing pieces to drive up registration for the event. I was selected to be the designer to help them with this. I worked together closely with the events team putting this event together by meeting with them for weekly check ins and collaborating often on more ideas to hit our goals!

Results:

This event was a challenge at the start of it, but became a huge success in the end! The registration rate was slower than the previous year for the first half of promoting it, but as the event got closer and we collaborated on ways to hype up the event. We ended the second leg of marketing it very strong and were able to surpass the previous year’s numbers!

Our marketing efforts through the use of email, website landing page, and social media delivered us an increase of:

Registrants by 15%
Client registrations by 5%
Prospect registrations by 5%

Not only did we increase this year’s numbers, but we planted seeds this year to help increase retention and get people excited to return to the event the following year. We added extra flair, improved presenter usability through a new platform, and had more follow up this year than in previous years.

Planning

This was a collaborative event and process to get ready for it. The event planner built a spreadsheet of everything we would need to build or do leading up to the event. The spreadsheet showed who was assigned what and by what date. It was super helpful and we had weekly meetings to check in with one another and check the status of all pieces as their due dates approached.

Powerpoint Slide Templates

The first piece that I needed to create was the powerpoint slide templates so the presenters could have time to prepare their content and build their decks for the event early to ensure that the presentations they built were on brand for the event and kept everything cohesive.

The template pages included: speaker /title card, transition slide, text heavy slide, empty slide, and the closing/end card. It was built in powerpoint so they could fully and easily customize each deck as they needed to.

Zoom Backgrounds

Next I built Zoom backgrounds for the presenters to all have branded and matching backgrounds. I originally only built a dark version of the graphic, but after seeing it tested out by one of the event planners on our weekly meeting I realized we would need a light version as well. She wore black that day and she nearly blended in with the background and looked like a floating head talking to us. Lol! It was a happy accident to find that there was room for improvement in the design files I was building for the event! I went and built a light version right after the meeting so that each presenter could choose which background they wanted to use so they could stand out on the screen depending on what color their clothing was for their presentation.

Social Media

We had a lot of our efforts on social media to build hype about registration for the event. Graphics included: speaker promotion, general speaker promotion, various early bird registration reminders, customized sponsor graphics so each vendor could promote the event on their social media platforms, and a general registration post.

I built each post in 3 different sizes to account for all social media platforms to make it easy for everyone to use these graphics where ever they wanted to.

Agenda

I built an agenda to give everyone time to prepare for their day whether they were a presenter, host, or attendee. This content was provided to me in a word doc format and the event planner wanted to give it flair and make it an actual design file that they could email out to their list ahead of the event.

These documents were Interactive PDFs that allowed viewers to click through and get linked right to the registration page. This significantly improved the rate of registration after theses files were sent out.

Attendee Hub

I built assets for the attendee hub, which was an improvement from the previous year. The hub was very bare bones and not customized for the event. This was extra flair that the presenters and hosts really loved and made them excited as the event got closer.

Video Assets

I made two video elements for the event. First was a short looping logo animation to have on the screen during transition periods of the event. It has no audio and the production team would play music over the loop at their leisure to set the tone in the waiting rooms.

The second video is the opening video that would countdown 5 minutes before the event started and play an opening video to lead people into the first session of the day. In this video clip I fade from the first text card to the second that the video would rotate between. Then the last 30 seconds shows the intro video. The into video was reused from the previous year, but I added the new graphic elements on it to make it on brand with the rest of the event.

Emails & Thank You

Here are a few of the emails we sent to hype up the event before and remind attendees that they had access to the session recordings for 30 days after the event closed. We also created a thank you card to send out after the event as well.

Closing Thoughts

Our marketing content and design elements before, during, and after the event were very well received. There was a lot of praise from people who were a part of and attended Elevate Conference. I was very proud to be part of such a cool project and get to be part of a team that helped the event continue to become an improvement from years past.

Increased:
Registrants by 15%
Client registrations by 5%
Prospect registrations by 5%