Seamless communication between event management platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems is crucial. Blackthorn.io is at the forefront of this unified data landscape, as no integration is necessary with its Salesforce-native event management platform. By living in your system of record, it yields actionable data insights and enhances the registrant and planner experience across various sectors, including higher education, healthcare, nonprofit, and corporate.
Platform & Integration
Streamlining Event Management with a Native Salesforce Application
Blackthorn.io’s event management platform is built entirely within Salesforce, eliminating the need for complex third-party integrations. In this native approach, all event data registrations, payments, and attendee engagement are automatically linked to Salesforce CRM records.
Case Study: USC Marshall School of Business
The USC Marshall School of Business faced challenges with customisation, cumbersome registration processes, and manual data entry. By adopting Blackthorn.io’s Salesforce-native event management platform, they could create branded event pages, automate attendee check-ins, and efficiently scale their admissions events using familiar Salesforce tools. Being Salesforce-native reduced planning inefficiencies and simplified post-event data analysis, consolidating all data within Salesforce for a single source of truth in real-time and future follow-up.
Leveraging Salesforce Data for Personalized Experiences
Blackthorn.io empowers organisations to utilise existing CRM data to personalise event experiences for attendees and constituents. Event organisers can segment attendees based on past interactions, engagement or membership levels, or preferences, enabling tailored communications and sponsor interactions. Advanced Visibility Controls, functioning by evaluating the entire attendee profile, ensure that only relevant events, tickets, and sessions are visible to applicable registrants with custom forms and conditional logic.
Non-Salesforce-native event tech systems can integrate with Salesforce and pull basic fields back for marketing purposes, but Blackthorn Events allows planners to leverage all standard and custom fields on multiple objects (ex: Account and Contact) they may have in Salesforce.
Solving Traditional Integration Challenges
Traditional CRM-event platform integrations often introduce hurdles in data flow, requiring manual data cleansing and transformation, fixing integrations, and managing duplicates, leading to hours or days of delays and inefficiencies. Blackthorn.io’s data-first approach unifies all event-related data with existing Salesforce CRM data, providing a no-headache experience for event planners. They can then manage everything from attendee registration to post-event follow-ups directly within Salesforce, in real-time.
Value Proposition for Key Sectors
Transformative Impact Across Industries
Blackthorn.io has made significant strides in higher education, healthcare, nonprofits, and the public sector by aligning events more closely with organisational missions and goals.
Innovative Use Cases
- Corporate: Advanced Payment capabilities for complex registrant and sponsor billing scenarios. Generate and send web-based invoices with over 120+ payment gateways, support card, ACH, and Google and Apple Pay. Allow one payment across multiple invoices and set your general ledger (GL) codes for accounting.
- Field Marketing: Track the ROI of renting a sports venue box or hosting a large dinner by tracking the attendees’ journey through to revenue. Compare your expenses to your revenue without any integrations necessary.
- Education: Campus Tours: Use the Recurring Events feature to automatically generate events on a schedule you set, such as every Monday and Thursday at 2pm for a tour of the Arts School. Follow-up with 1:1 text messaging, directly from the attendee record.
- Education: Large-Scale Orientations: Blackthorn’s Organizer Check-in Mobile app supports central Student ID QR code check-in, for expeditious check-in without integration headaches.
- Education: Advancement Stewardship: Using Blackthorn’s built-in bulk and 1:1 text messaging features, combined with Blackthorn’s dynamic visibility for events and tickets, create a personalised, engaging experience to foster a closer connection with your donors.
- Healthcare: Appointment Tracking: Ensuring everyone is vaccinated by efficiently managing appointment scheduling and tracking.
- Healthcare: Community Learning: Manage hundreds of events at once from a central location, focused on educating the community about your hospital system’s offerings. Track the patient through the lifecycle for direct ROI to patient-spend.
- Nonprofit: Donor Management: Using Salesforce’s rich reporting engine and new generative AI features, utilize registrant engagement to create a score and description of your most would-be donors, based on event and session attendance, and text messaging interaction.
- Associations: Dynamically filter member versus non-member ticket prices and private event visibility based on specific member criteria.
Valued Features by Clients
Clients particularly value Blackthorn.io’s Salesforce-native application. Using existing CRM data and enhancing it with event registrations seamlessly is a significant benefit. Real-time, actionable data allows for personalised interactions with constituents. Features like QR code scanning of a central entity’s unique ID (think Student ID), a smart scheduler for bulk and 1:1 SMS, Email, and soon Push Notifications (January ‘25) with Blackthorn’s new Attendee Mobile App, and 120+ payment gateway integrations, you can simplify the event technology stack you’re using to achieve what traditionally takes multiple applications.
AI & Automation
Enhancing User Experience with AI and Automation
Due to its native architecture, Blackthorn.io leverages Salesforce’s latest AI tool. This opens up possibilities, from reducing the time to build an event to providing new analytical insights. Event organisers can ask complex questions like, “How does a prospect’s event attendance correlate with their likelihood to buy?” and receive immediate answers. All thanks to the unified data.
Blackthorn is now building this using AgentForce, creating a Blackthorn Agent, as well as a new generative AI functionality to query multiple data sources to yield insights that traditional reporting can’t offer. These will be ready in early ‘25.
Scaling Events with Personalisation
By drawing upon data within Salesforce, Blackthorn.io helps organisations scale their events while maintaining high levels of personalisation. Authenticated attendees or those with unique, personalised links can register themselves and their household members with pre-filled contact information. The experience can filter on more than just Contact information, using the new Advanced Visibility feature set.
Flexible configuration options allow for targeted marketing and registration paths tailored to specific attendee segments. Combining Blackthorn.io with Slack and SMS creates new opportunities for meaningful human connections at scale—for instance, alerting an employee when a VIP attendee checks in so they can personally greet them.
Future Outlook
Evolving Platform and Expansion Plans
Blackthorn.io is focused on broadening its platform beyond event registration. The current suite includes event registration, SMS, and a payments module, with additional features under development to further reduce planners’ need for additional event tech.
Upcoming Launches
- Attendee App: Set to launch in early ‘25, this app will enhance competitiveness in event formats that require session-agenda building, push notifications, and a venue map.
- AI Integration: As Salesforce expands its AI offerings, Blackthorn.io aims to provide meaningful AI features to customers, leveraging the fact that all customer data resides within Salesforce across AgentForce and generative AI.
- Marketing Cloud Growth: Blackthorn is building a native connection to Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new on-platform email functionality, separate from ExactTarget and Pardot.
Market Awareness and Partnerships
Efforts are underway to increase brand recognition, especially in the corporate/commercial sector, where Salesforce has a significant footprint, and events are crucial to marketing strategies. The Blackthorn.io team is launching regular thought leadership webinars, newsletters, case studies, and partnerships to broaden their reach. The sales team is also deepening their understanding of corporate events to better address planners’ challenges.
Competitive Landscape
What Sets Blackthorn.io Apart
In order to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), event planners are increasingly focusing on data. Blackthorn.io stands out by being native to Salesforce, allowing users to leverage the platform’s full functionality—from reporting to automation—by measuring the constituent lifecycle in one data system, with no integration required.
Adapting to Industry Changes
Rather than building a virtual platform during the rise of hybrid and virtual events, Blackthorn.io chose to integrate with existing virtual solutions. This allows customers to leverage best-in-class virtual platforms alongside Blackthorn.io’s suite of products, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, WebEx Meetings, GoToMeeting Meetings, and GoToMeeting Webinars. Being data-first, the platform measures who registered for these web platform events within their platforms and who attended, without custom integration.
Social Impact
Supporting Mission-Driven Organisations
Given its focus on the public sector and nonprofits, Blackthorn.io supports mission-driven work through events in several ways:
• Financial Contributions: The company donates $3,000 per month to Watsi.org, contributing to global health initiatives for the past two years. They also contribute monthly to Stripe Climate, supporting carbon removal technologies.
• Discounts for Nonprofits: Qualifying nonprofits receive discounts, making advanced event management tools more accessible.
• Tools for Social Impact: Features like donation processing in event registrations, volunteer management within Salesforce, and accessible event planning tools foster social impact through event-driven experiences.
- Split payments: Coming in early ‘25 to allow donation and ticket sales to hit two bank accounts through one registrant transaction.
- Gift Receipts: Line-item-based invoices are generated for each transaction, allowing for easy payment reconciliation and general ledger mapping.
Empowering Organisations
Blackthorn.io offers tools that empower organisations to drive social impact:
• Donation Integration: Embed donation options directly into event registration pages, complete with split payments (splits coming early ‘25).
• Volunteer Management: Efficiently manage volunteer sign-ups and schedules within Salesforce.
• Accessible and Inclusive Events: Collect information on attendee needs to ensure inclusivity.
• Sustainability Features: Promote environmentally friendly practices through digital ticketing and communications.
• Community Engagement Tools: Build stronger relationships with constituents using personalised communication and engagement tracking.
Conclusion
Blackthorn.io is redefining event management by providing a Salesforce-native platform that simplifies workflows, enhances personalisation, and unifies data for better analytics and ROI measurement. With a focus on innovation, market expansion, and supporting mission-driven organisations, Blackthorn.io is poised to meet the evolving needs of the events industry.
For more information, visit Blackthorn.io or explore their resources on case studies by vertical.
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Author: Adam Parry
Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.
