Each year, the Society of Women Engineers produces an amazing event that furthers the power and potential of women throughout science, technology, engineering, and math. Even better, our work received two top honors from ASAE: the 2024 ASAE Gold Circle Award for Conference/Meeting Marketing and the Overall Excellence Award.
Watch the webinar to explore how we delivered on these WE23 goals:
- Boost in-person event attendance
- Make progress toward DEI+B objectives
- Support a positive networking space for women
Watch the Webinar
Read the Transcript
Ron Zywicki:
I’m Ron Zywicki of the David James Group. We’re going to welcome speaker Karen Horting from the Society of Women Engineers and Tom Frederick from the David James Group. We’re going to talk about the WE23 event today. You’ll learn about the goals for this event, how we approach the marketing and the results. So I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to Karen and Tom and they can complete their introductions.
Karen Horting:
Sure. Hi everyone, I’m Karen Horting. I’m the executive director and CEO for the Society of Women Engineers. Just a little bit about SWE. We were founded in 1950, so we’re coming up on our 75th anniversary. We’re over 47,000 members globally with an additional 7,000 young people who are part of our SWENext program. So kind of that future generation. Our mission is very much today as it was when we were founded, which is to empower women to achieve their full potential. As engineers and leaders, we want to expand the image of engineering and technology as a positive force in the quality of life. And of course, we want to demonstrate the value of diversity and inclusion. And then I did just want to briefly touch on our core values because this will play into some of the things Tom and I are going to talk about in the campaign, which is integrity, inclusive environment, professional excellence, mutual support and trust. So happy to be here today.
Tom Frederick:
Thanks Karen. And I’m again, Tom Frederick, account director and partner with the David James Group. I’m going to lead us through the walkthrough and Karen’s going to continue to talk about the overall goals that we try to reach from there. From the goals, I’ll be discussing the strategy and tactics behind each of those goals for the WE annual conference and overall results for that as well. And we’ll end this conversation with a little Q&A session at the end.
SWE’s annual hybrid conference and career fair for women in engineering and technology embodied the essence of empowerment, collaboration, inclusion, and progress critical to the STEM world. And Karen did touch base on the key features and key mission of SWE as well, which kind of covers and gets more elaborate into this annual conference. If you go to the next slide, Ron, thank you. And what Karen alluded to and what we can expand on is a few key metrics for the project overview on this is to expand attendance, increase global reach and influence, encourage empowerment and collaboration, offer access to industry leaders, provide career opportunities and advance the commitment to diversity, which I think it’s covered in all around the goals, tactics and strategies that we cover. And from there we had three key goals that were talked about in the overall project of WE23 between David James Group and SWE. And Karen’s going to cover those three points.
Karen:
Our first one was we wanted to bring the annual conference back to pre-COVID in-person attendee registration numbers prior to COVID that year. Just prior to COVID, 2019 was our largest in-person event. We had over 16,500 with us in Anaheim. In 2020, we had to pivot to a fully virtual event where we did have over 18,000. We returned in-person but in a hybrid model in 2021 with lower attendance. I think people were still cautious. WE22 in Houston, we saw a pretty good return over 14,000, so we wanted to get back to that 16,000 number, which was our target that we were trying to hit.
And just to touch on, so attendance, why is that important? One, our mission – the more people that are part of what we do, the more we can advance the mission. It’s also a large source of non-dues revenue for the society. So this is how we fund a lot of the programs that we do. I mentioned our SWENext, our young people. A lot of the things we do for collegiates, all of our professional development, we’re able to do those things and offer them in many cases free to members because we have the revenue from our conference. And then finally our career fair, we work with hundreds of employers that are all about engineering and technology. And so they’re coming to SWE to recruit and find that talent, everything from internships through to executive level. So the more folks we have in attendance, the better chance they have of finding the talent that they need.
Then goal number two – continued growth in diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging within our annual conference and the career fair. So even as a diversity organization, we find that we have work to do in terms of our participants, our members, do they reflect the diversity of the profession? Do they reflect the diversity of the engineering community overall? And so really wanting to make sure that in everything we do with our branding that people feel included, they feel welcomed. And so we really are focused on making sure that everything we do, not only around the conference but our programs overall really reflects that diversity and that sense of belonging.
And then finally, we really wanted to avoid any potential issues with men attending the event. We certainly do welcome men to participate in the conference. We have a lot of men who are allies within their employers. We have men that are members and so they’re certainly welcomed, but one of our organizations that is in this same space that had their event about six, seven weeks prior really had some bad actors there, some bad activity that went on, some dark web things that were going on. And so we really wanted to get ahead of that. We wanted to make sure that our communications to registrants reflected that while all our welcome, all are expected to abide by SWE values. I mentioned our core values at the beginning and that come one come all, but please come and respect our core values or you will not be welcomed. And I think this is really important for women who often don’t have a safe space where they work or go to school. We wanted to make sure that we were creating that safe space and that also any of our partners and sponsors understood that just like attendees, we’re expected to adhere to that if they saw that kind of behavior happening, we didn’t want them to be rewarding it.
Tom:
Great. Thank you Karen. Now from those three goals that Karen just presented, I’m going to kind of get into strategy and tactics that we utilize in our marketing and communication campaign for the conference within those three specific goals. And we’ll start with goal number one of the global attendance growth itself and we’ll start talking through the strategy behind that. On the strategy, we wanted to optimize for global attendance. We want to optimize the conference website to enhance its performance in overall organic and paid search categories. And how we did this was through our web development team. They focused heavily on optimizing each and every page within the website using keyword analysis, finding the keyed ones that are geared towards our targeted audience. So when we do conduct either paid search through keyword, Google or Microsoft paid ad services or even just organic search functions through those same platforms, the WE annual conference, since WE in general is kind of top of the list for things that our target audience is looking for in those fashions.
Beyond that, if we get into the next one, we wanted to leverage a comprehensive mix of digital marketing and offline, global or offline strategies to expand the global audience and drive registration. We did that through tactics going beyond Google paid ads, but we also did paid social media videos, two of them, which were segmented towards two key audiences for this event, the professional society women engineer members, and also the collegiate ones. We valued different prospects to use keywords that were defined for those two key elements and deployed those targeting those audiences. Another factor that we did, we deployed some digital marketing strategies through digital ads through web-based advertisements. As you kind of see in the example here, we used a retargeting ad campaign, which anyone that visits the WE23 conference website and other websites will be targeted back with upcoming events, any key urgencies reminders to enroll and register, and also just key elements of when key points like keynote speakers to schedules are being announced.
We added another key feature called the cart abandonment as well, where any target audience member prospect that maybe went to the site and started the registration process but maybe didn’t finish it, we could retarget them to remind them of when they can still save on an early bird discount to just a reminder that they haven’t fulfilled the full registration process. Going beyond that, we did traditional email marketing through SWE’s membership services going through standardized newsletters or direct emails as well on top of the promotional videos that I discussed earlier. And we also used a variety of other SWE media platforms. Example here is their SWE Diverse podcast platform where we did introductions and interviews pre-conference for our keynote speakers. We also added advertisements into SWE’s magazine as well, just promoting key features, key new items that were coming up for the event.
Karen:
And Tom, I’ll just add, I think those podcasts tend to become some of our most listened to sessions that we do all year.
Tom:
Yeah, I absolutely concur on that. Here’s a couple of examples and I believe the next slide presentation that we have here is an example of one of the promotional videos that we did for this past year’s conference.
Women will shape the future of engineering and technology. This October, join current and future leaders at WE23, the world’s largest conference for women in STEM. Take inspiration from other STEM trailblazers, connect with female professionals from around the world and meet top tier companies looking to hire leaders like you. We’ll see you there.
Tom:
Great, thank you. That was just one key example of one of the videos that we were promoting throughout the marketing campaign for the conference, promoting primarily their collegiate or professional. Getting into some strategy behind goal number two of continued growth in DEI&B within the annual conference and career fair, we’ll first kind of touch base on trying to meet the DEI&B results in ADA compliance of making the conferences as accessible as possible. And we started that with the designing of the conference itself to meet those expectations. Some of those include on the SWE side of that as inclusive programming. This is going beyond the marketing side of everything, but inclusive programming that’s including sessions, workshops, panel discussions, anything that’s deliberately addressing diversity and inclusion within the engineering and technology fields within the venues that SWE selects for each of their conferences. They are always trying to meet that ADA compliance for accessibility, whether it’s wheelchair accessibility or beyond with the various venues that are being presented to them. And then on the marketing and branding side of it, what we were hyperfocused on for this year and moving forward is making sure that both digital assets, our websites, our social media campaigns and all the way to our print ads, to signage at the conference, try to meet ADA compliance guidelines as much as possible. We developed the entire website for WE23 to meet those needs, making each piece, whether it’s a header to subtext as readable, legible, knowledgeable as possible, and followed that with any direct signage, directional signage to location signage that was necessary for the conference as well.
Going into another addition to meeting that more diversity aspect of this is one thing that I love with what we do with SWE and their annual conference is a member focused ambassador model shoot. We conduct this for every annual conference since I believe 2007. Karen, you can correct me if I’m wrong with that, but the goal of this is to not use stock footage of a theme for our brand and everything, but use real people, real members and show the diverse aspect of who all is involved, what they do, who they are. So each year, we conduct these model shoots. We reach out to the entire audience of SWE membership that is registered to attend. We ask them if they’re so willing to apply and submit a form that tells us a little about themselves. And along us and SWE staff, we go through a process of picking and choosing based on standardized diversity aspects, body, age, image, ethnicity, but also going beyond that and looking at who they are and what industry of engineering they are focused in. We’re looking to get a full grasp of anyone from really anywhere that’s part of this big group.
Karen:
Yeah, this has been really popular with our members and I think back to that inclusion and welcoming. Do our members see themselves in the branding? Do they feel like, oh, this is a place for me where I’ll feel welcome. And so to Tom’s point, different body types, different ages, race, ethnicity, what industries do they come from? Do we have some folks from small companies versus the big Fortune 500? So we really try to make sure that we’re covering all aspects of diversity. So again, when I see that marketing piece or I see the ad in the magazine or something, I’m like, oh, I want to check that out. I’ll feel welcome.
Tom:
Perfect. And getting into the strategy and tactics behind goal number three, avoiding that potential issue of men, attending a women’s centric event. We on a tactical side for the marketing piece of it, focus on designing the conference and creative to feature those members. That’s why that’s also part of the reason that we do the model shoot to show the members off on that front. But before we start with that, a couple of things that SWE conducted on this front to get kind of in front of it is they prepared a respect and inclusion page that’s highlighted on the WE23 site. And speaking to what Karen said earlier is outlying expectations for every person that’s in attendance in that fashion. And we also during the conference, as Karen mentioned earlier, the career fair is such a key pivotal moment of the conference itself with that many people both exhibiting corporations looking to hire and the career goers themselves do look forward to going to that career fair. It does have a grand opening, which can be a security nightmare in some situations, but that’s always been a focal point on how we can remove any necessary wrongdoers that maybe trying to get ahead, maybe trying to jump a line, maybe push and shove whether that factor. And they did a really excellent job this year of identifying the protocol, identifying how to narrow that search, and we’ll show examples of one of the lobby photos that identifies how grand, the amount of people that want to come to the career fair and how it was identified on that front.
In addition to goal number three, as I stated before, utilizing and enacting marketing strategies and ensuring women and those who would identify as women, are the main focus. That is the Society of Women Engineers and they do welcome all. But when we are using that model shoot that’s representing the Society of Women Engineers and who’s all involved, we use those in all facets of our marketing tactics, our branding, our collateral that gets out into the field features the key people that are a part of this society.
So to the fun part, success and metrics achieved. As stated before, we’ll get into the overall metrics behind each of the goals that we were trying to reach and how we came to the conclusion of reaching the highest attendance at the WE23 conference. So total results of the conference, as Karen stated before, we had higher attendance levels in previous years leading into COVID pandemic that arise and how we were going to get above that. And the key results here. The goal was to hit 16,000 members or more to come to the conference, but this year we hit 21,600 total attendees, both virtually in-person and beyond that we hit 18,000 plus that were in-person along with 3,500 plus that were on the virtual network, which broke at any other record from before by nearly 10 to 15% in those key areas.
A couple stat tactics on the marketing side of this to just show a little bit of how the digital and Google ads strategy did. On the digital ads that I spoke before, the retargeting campaigns, cart abandonment, retargeting people that have visited the website, we saw a steady go of 1000 confirmed attendee registrants that visually used and clicked on one of our ads to then come back to the registration process. And our Google paid keyword search – thanks to the web team with their optimization skills, we were able to see a click-through rate of 46% on any ad that we sent out through Google paid search, which on a threshold on that front, a good campaign has roughly 5%, so kudos to our part and I tip the cap to us for that part. Overall, trying to meet that growth in diversity both at a global presence, there was a reported 41 different countries represented at the conference this past year with a few photos of groups that came in in collective sections from around the world. Some other key results getting into the goal number two of the DEI&B factor. Every year SWE conducts a post-conference survey where they ask a few questions to the audience and we’re going to share overall some key survey questions and Karen can kind of elaborate on them more.
Karen:
Yeah, and I will say we’re blessed that our members and our participants do take the survey. We tend to get a really good response rate, so we’re always pretty confident in our data that it really does reflect the overall feeling. And so I’ll just jump in here. The last couple years we’ve added more questions to the survey about sense of belonging and growing your network and just did it feel that we had put a priority on these things and over 90% said yes, that they felt that belonging had been prioritized and that it was a welcoming and inclusive environment. Eight out of 10 said their sense of belonging, eight out of 10, 80% at least felt that it was very, very welcoming, and then more than 85% grew their network. So that’s good. That means they were meeting each other. They felt open and safe to meet other people. And so again, this is something we measure every year, and so we want to see it continue. I’d love to see all of these be 100%.
Tom:
Getting back into that diversity and global attendance platform. Sharing a few metrics here along the growth in several different cultural groups, and you can see heavy increases in Asian Pacific Islander, middle Eastern, black and African as well, along with some other cultural groups on the far right that might be a little hard to read about. We just wanted to share an overall global cultural increase from past attendance. On the next one, we reach into getting back into the DEI&B and also the focus on meeting the goals from goal number three where we shared about men versus women on that platform. But overall gender identity came still and strong with 75% identify as women.
Karen:
And I’ll just jump in, Tom, that we had no reports of any bad behavior. A lot of people were commenting that they appreciated the branding and the communications we had sent around our expectations on behavior. We didn’t see negative social media about the event. I think overall it was a pretty positive experience. I think also for the men who were there who were either there attending or recruiting, felt that it was a pretty inclusive environment and again, that we met the goals of trying to meet the needs of our target audience.
Tom:
Absolutely. And so these are some key things. Just highlights and key points from this presentation overall with the goals, strategy and tactics. There was a diverse speaker lineup and inclusive programming. Accessibility was prioritized, inclusive networking, anti-harassment and feedback mechanisms, all part of making this very successful and well-attended conference. And as I mentioned before, on our next slide, we’re going to share a couple photos to illustrate some of the key things that we discussed. Far left is an opening keynote address by Kate Maxwell, followed by pictures from the awards ceremony. Far top right is the closing celebration that is conducted every year followed by group get togethers on the bottom left. As stated before, utilizing the program of our Diverse SWE podcast, we conducted 12 podcast recordings in person at the last conference and as stated before, getting back into the career fair, we had, this is a lobby view from Los Angeles Convention Center of people filing into lead into the career fair. So you can overall see what we were talking about when a mass group is looking to speak with the exhibitors there. And this here is a lovely picture from this past ASAE with the Gold Circle winner. Again, we did win both the Gold Circle award from ASAE 2024 for conference marketing or meeting marketing plus the overall excellence award for 2024 as well.
Karen:
Yeah, and I’ll just say, I mean for sweet, this was very meaningful. We’ve won a Gold Circle now, I think this was our seventh Gold Circle, but the first time we won the overall award and to win it for this, for our conference marketing just was super rewarding. We’ve been working with DJG on our conference marketing since 2007 and just the fact that our commitment to DEI&B and what we do, that we really are showcasing the value of being part of the conference and that diversity of our membership and to have that be recognized by our peers was really exciting. I happened to be in Germany at one of our events when I heard we won the overall award and our president was there. And so we had a little mini celebration in the Hilton bar because we were like, this tells us that we are doing the right things. And it sometimes takes more time and maybe a little bit more investment, but when you see it be recognized, that tells you you’re doing the right thing. So a big thank you to DJG for being a partner with us on this and for making sure that our feedback, that you always hear it and help us to be the best that we can be.
Tom:
Thank you very much, Karen. All right.
Ron:
Thank you. Tom. Open up to questions. You can either enter a question by clicking on the Q&A button along the bar, or if you’d like to click on the “more” and raise your hand, I can enable your audio, you can ask it live. So I encourage you to ask that. While we’re gathering questions, Karen, I’d be curious to, if you could share, just kind of looking back over the overall experience, what do you think really made a difference in the jump in attendance to this year? What are your thoughts on that, maybe even beyond the marketing?
Karen:
Yeah, I mean, I think having a really compelling program. We have a peer review process for our sessions where it goes through multiple reviews. We work really hard to have keynotes that represent different industries that have some aspect of diversity. And I think we did a great job this year with that. I think the networking that we offer is unmatched. And I think coming out of the pandemic people were really, really anxious to make those in-person connections and to grow their network that maybe suffered a little bit during the pandemic. And so I think we made sure that we had a lot of programming, but we also wanted to make sure that we had opportunities for people to network to get together in different ways through our Affinity group lounges, through just sort of downtime throughout the conference, making sure we created physical spaces where people could do that. And we worked with you all on that. And then just showcasing that in the marketing that this was not to be missed or if you were thinking about a career change. I mean, we know coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people were like, why am I doing this? I want to do something else. And so the career fair I think was our biggest ever as well. So just having all those elements and then making sure in everything we did with the marketing through all the channels Tom mentioned, I think it was just kind of the perfect storm of all of that.
Ron:
Great. We do have a couple of questions here. First question, how are you able to directly track the 1000 registrations to your marketing campaign tactics?
Tom:
Sure. Our digital ads, we use a platform that’s called Feathr, and this allows us to apply some tracking mechanisms on the website through online and internet services gives us the ability to track back to people that have conducted the things that we’re asking for. Have they visited the website? Have they visited certain pages to the website and have they gone through the registration process but maybe have not conducted the final yes on that? That allows us to retarget them through the ads where then we can track their progress of how they made that final decision of registering. This Feathr tool allows us to see that trackability and also with some approved or applied information that that audience member is looking to offer, email, first name, last name type of thing, and we can identify who they are and which advertisements that they actually clicked on and viewed to track the success of it.
Ron:
Thanks, Tom. Another question, and this is for Karen, do you have any new milestones you’d like to reach for the next event? So for WE24 maybe in an event and or in an area that you haven’t shined as well as years passed?
Karen:
Yeah, I think one thing I’m excited about for Chicago, we didn’t even talk about this. One of the components of our conference is on Saturday we have a big outreach event for middle school and high school students. And we’ve longed wanted to do this event in a way that had perhaps a more lasting impact on the local community. And this year we’re actually partnering with Chicago Public Schools and we are going to be working with them to bring girls from underserved communities that are part of CPS. And we’re going to also do, following the conference, we’re going to do a virtual event for students that because there’s only so much capacity for in-person that we’re going to do some virtual content later in the year for students that weren’t able to participate in person. And just through our local, we call them sections, others might call them chapters, that we’re really going to have a way now to connect the local section with Chicago Public Schools and hopefully this becomes a more sustainable effort with some impact. And so again, it’s always great to do a one day and expose girls to the opportunities in engineering, but I think this is what we’re hoping is going to be a model for how we might work with cities in the future. So I’m excited.
Ron:
Great. Again, if you have any other additional questions, please submit them. Karen, our clients have a wide range of event sizes and types. And when you think back to the chart we showed with the growth curve, from your point of view, what is one or two things you think really over time make a difference to focus on for an organization to continue to grow its attendance? Is there one or two pieces of, is it the programming…..
Karen:
Yeah, I definitely think the programming, I mean we had heard over the years that, oh, it’s just for students. And so we have what we call a conference advisory board, which is made up of members that come from these different segments, different experience levels, and so they help with that peer review of the content and making suggestions. And I think really making sure that we say, wherever you are in your career, we have something for you. And so we’ve worked really hard to make sure that that’s true, that we have something, whether you’re still a university student or you’re a very experienced professional, that we have content that’s relevant. So I think that’s number one. The content has to be there. And then I think two – in our marketing and that really showing that we are welcoming everybody and that this is an organization that regardless of who you are and what you look like and where you come from, that there’s a place for you. And I think we’re seeing that in what people are experiencing and then they go out and tell two friends and kind of so on and so on and so on. And so we find that for SWE, kind of that gorilla marketing works really well for us too because people come and if it’s not positive or their employer sponsored them and they go back and say, wow, that was a waste of time, that’s not very good. But if they go back and say, yes, we should, instead of sending 100 women, we need to send 200 next year. That’s what we want to see.
Ron:
Great. Well thank you to Tom and to Karen for this presentation and thank you to all that have attended today and bearing with those technical issues at the top. Appreciate your time today. We do have another webinar in August where we’re going to talk about developing membership value propositions for membership marketing and beyond. So save the date for that and look for future marketing from us in terms of registration and so on. If you have any questions regarding this presentation or other things, please reach out to your DJG contact and feel free to ask them and we’ll be happy to work with you to answer those questions. Thanks.
Karen:
And Ron, I’ll just say I’m always happy to talk with other clients or prospective clients about what we’re doing with you all, so I’m happy to do that as well.
Ron:
Thanks. So we can connect you with Karen who graciously offered this. Have a wonderful afternoon and thank you for your time.