Project Play, an initiative of the Aspen Institute's Sports & Society Program, drives community health through sports. Their flagship Project Play Summit attracts over 600 attendees and 100 speakers for two days of transformative programming.
While the summit serves as a crucial platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration in the sports and society sector, managing an event of this scale presented significant operational challenges. The Project Play team needed a solution to coordinate hundreds of participants, multiple sessions, and complex logistics while maintaining clear communication across their organization. They found their answer in Kardoe, a comprehensive event management platform that integrates seamlessly with Cvent to automate routine tasks and centralize critical information.
Key Challenges
- Complex Content Planning: Managing numerous sessions, speaker commitments, and presentation materials while maintaining effective team communication.
- Extensive Speaker Coordination: Tracking invitations, collecting materials (bios, headshots, credentials), and maintaining current speaker information.
- Private Event Management: Streamlining invitations and RSVPs for exclusive summit events.
- System Integration: Ensuring smooth data flow between Kardoe and their Cvent registration system.
The Kardoe Solution
Kardoe provided a unified platform that addressed Project Play's key challenges head-on, transforming their event management process.
Centralized Programming Management
Kardoe provided a unified platform for all summit programming. The team could efficiently:
- Track speaker commitments
- Collect and organize presentation materials
- Generate detailed run-of-show documents
- Facilitate team collaboration through integrated commenting
- Monitor all speaker communications
The Kardoe session manager was a game changer. It allowed us to easily keep track of all of our content and programming as it evolved. Because Kardoe helped keep information organized, it felt like we were two weeks ahead in our planning. It made internal and external communication much more efficient saving valuable time, especially as we got closer to our event. The entire Kardoe team could not have been more responsive or pleasant to work with.
— Katherine Quinn, Project Play Summit Director, Sports & Society
Comprehensive Speaker Management
Kardoe revolutionized the team's speaker coordination by:
- Automating invitation and RSVP tracking
- Streamlining collection of speaker materials
- Providing a single source of truth for speaker information
- Generating call sheets
- Managing travel and accommodation details
Kardoe streamlined speaker management and communication processes. With significantly less manual data entry, we saved valuable time and were able to eliminate easy but common errors. We only just scratched the surface of the speaker management features of Kardoe and look forward to maximizing them at our next event!
— Sabrina McDonnell, Program Associate, Sports & Society
Sophisticated Private Event Coordination
The platform enabled efficient management of exclusive summit events through:
- Quick deployment of branded invitations
- Streamlined RSVP management
- Seamless Cvent integration for data synchronization
It was incredibly convenient to be able to manage private events, create email invites and track RSVPs all in the same platform as the overall event. It streamlined a lot of processes that used to live in different platforms and spreadsheets.
— Marty Fox, Program Manager, Sports and Society
Results & Benefits
The implementation of Kardoe delivered significant improvements:
- Operational Efficiency: Eliminated manual processes and consolidated multiple tools into one platform.
- Enhanced Team Collaboration: Centralized information access and communication improved coordination.
- Error Reduction: Automated workflows minimized data entry errors and inconsistencies.
Kardoe kept our team organized as our annual Summit took shape. It gave us a place to store information that would otherwise be spread across a web of spreadsheets, emails, and documents and made it easy to coordinate scheduling.
— Jennifer Brown Lerner, Associate Director, Sports & Society