TECH-ENHANCED EVENTS
First Website for a Life Sciences Networking Group
Brief
The Com-X Network is a quarterly networking event for commercially minded Life Sciences executives. Their word of mouth mailing list was getting unwieldy. Vetting new members and updating the list was a multi-person manual process with no single source of truth. The group needed a website to attract new members, build an email list, and collect RSVPs for the events.
Tools
- Squarespace 7.1
- Google Workspace
- Mailchimp
Role
Web Designer
Year
2023
Tools
When I was approached in Fall 2022 they were reasonably well prepared with: a listing on LinkedIn, a professional looking branding package with a logo from a reputable agency in Chicago, and a good set of professional photos from previous events.
The Com-X Network needed a website and more.They understood the need for modern tools to promote themselves effectively but no-one in the group had real experience doing it. In their day to day work they used Microsoft products designed for large enterprises.
Squarespace 7.1
I chose a Squarespace 7.1 site as the starting point. As the latest version of a long established website builder it promised to be stable and get regular updates on key features:
- Event Summary. The main events page displays upcoming and past events.
- Individual Events. These pages can show different media and most importantly signup forms.
- Summary Blocks. This allows select events to be visible on the home page.
- Forms. Squarespace's built-in forms have a good variety of input types.
- Integrations. Built-in integrations to Google's email and forms as well as Mailchimp offer redundancy and an automated way to build their email list.
It's not the perfect match. Events aren't as full featured as Eventbrite but it had the minimal viable features.I hope that event ticketing or an RSVP process might be on their roadmap. But currently that functionality is handled in Tock, which is a separate product geared towards restaurants.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp was chosen as the newsletter platform as it had enough features at the free tier to make maintaining the list easy. It would help them avoid modern anti-spam filters as their list grew closer to 500 addresses.
Google Workspace
A business Google Workspace account was the last part of the tech stack. A domain with a legitimate business email is just the cost of business today. There are technical limits to the amount of emails a free gmail account can send but in the modern anti-spam environment the key benefit of a business email is avoiding being flagged as a spammer.
Future Developments
No site is static and there are always areas for improvement.
- Optimizing event listing content. The event interface has two levels of content (summary and event). It will take practice to know how the different content levels are displayed in different locations and how to write copy that works in each location without being redundant.
- Listing Com-X as group in LinkedIn. Potential members will have trouble discovering Com-X on LinkedIn as it's currently listed as a company not a group.
- Promoting Com-X regularly. The name Com-X is easily confused with other organizations but that can be mitigated by publishing relevant content on a regular basis to improve their SEO.
- Separating memberships from RSVPs. Squarespace released a paid membership feature to support gated content soon after the site was launched. As the group grows this might help them efficiently manage membership separately from event RSVPs.