To move from “a state of chaos” and implement strategic event management at his organization, Jeff Singsaas, general manager of Microsoft Studios and global event marketing for Microsoft Corporation, said he focussed on building partnerships.
“We can’t do it all, and don’t want to do it all,” Singsaas said at a session Tuesday afternoon at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress.
Staff from different areas of the corporation—all involved in event planning—were pulled together to form the central event marketing group. Moving toward a hub-and-spoke model, each product group is identifying a senior individual responsible for events who coordinates with the central group.
For the Microsoft central event marketing group, “we had to find the right people,” Singsaas said.
Kati Quigley, director of event marketing at Microsoft, said that in addition to event marketing experience and skills, the most important qualifications are broad experience and competence. In the future, Singsaas said, “the skill set will be about interpreting data effectively and then acting on it.”
Implementing a process to ensure a consistent and reliable approach to events “was the hardest thing I had to do,” Singsaas said. “They really loved the heroics required during an event to ensure it didn’t fall on its face. . . . I thought that was insane.”
A scalable event metrics tool, along with a heat map that’s currently in development, provides important software support. Sustainability is integrated into the tool and is on the project dashboard. A Microsoft event was the first in North America to earn certification under BS 8901, a sustainability standard developed for the events industry.
“We rely heavily on partnerships,” Quigley said, noting that she maintains a list of three to five of the best suppliers in each category. “When you have a complex business like events, at a certain point, nobody does it all well,” Singsaas said.