The client
The Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment (IEMA) is an international membership organisation committed to global sustainability. With 15,500 individual members and 200 corporate members across multiple countries, it is the largest professional body for environmental practitioners in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
We have been working with IEMA since 2019, when we built a new website to facilitate growth and transform member services online. Building on this initial success, we continued to work with IEMA to develop their website further, expanding their online offering in an effort to grow their membership.
The opportunity
In 2021, IEMA announced plans to host a new conference for its member base of professionals working in the environment and sustainability sector. With their members spread across the globe and with the aim of keeping their carbon footprint low, it was decided that this would be a fully remote event, with experts coming together online for productive debate on the most important questions about how to combat climate change.
IEMA had selected a third-party platform, Cvent, to host the event, but they needed a way for Cvent to communicate with their existing CRM, Microsoft Dynamics. The idea was that members should be able to sign up to the event with just a single click and their membership info would be automatically passed from Dynamics to Cvent.
The solution - a bespoke Cvent integration
Our proposal was to build a bespoke Cvent integration to communicate directly with Dynamics so that IEMA members could sign up quickly and easily for the event without the need to re-enter their membership details.
Members logged in on the IEMA website would be able to visit an event landing page which would present information about the event, including an agenda showing the times, topics and speakers at the various speeches, debates and workshops taking place throughout the days of the conference.
The landing page would contain a simple form into which the member’s details would be pre-populated, so that they could simply review their details to make sure they were correct and then click “Sign up” to register for the event.
Implementation
We built a new custom module to handle the integration between the IEMA website and Cvent. This module handles the user registration in Cvent without members needing to enter the Cvent portal, allowing them to sign up for the event with a single click from the Connect landing page.
The module also checks the member’s details in Microsoft Dynamics against the attendee list in Cvent and displays a “thank you” message instead of the signup form if the member has already registered for the event, in order to prevent duplicate applications.
The outcome
Over 2,000 members virtually attended IEMA Connect 2021, where members had the opportunity to engage with thought-provoking panel discussions and workshops, as well as exploring hard-hitting discussions on COP26, climate change and much more.
For Connect 2022, IEMA also wanted to target new members with a streamlined signup process, using the event as an incentive to drive member recruitment. We created a modified application journey allowing members to apply from the Connect landing page, complete a quick application, and then return to the landing page to sign up for the event. This proved successful, with over 3,000 people registering for the event in its second year.
Connect has since become an annual event for IEMA, with subsequent editions taking place in 2023 and 2024 to great success.
