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Realizing Association Goals: AnitaB.org’s Strategic Alliance With RainFocus

How AnitaB.org partners with RainFocus to scale their event portfolio and grow their membership.

20K+

Attendees from around the world

198

Sponsor companies

3K+

Interview meetings

Quick Facts

AnitaB.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to getting professionals hired, trained, advanced, and funded in the technology sector. The organization hosts the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), the largest tech conference specifically designed to serve the needs of tech professionals and connect individuals worldwide.

Industry
Technology
Event Types
Conference
Virtual Career Fair
Event Location
Chicago
Key Features
Meetings
Virtual streaming
Reporting
Related Pages
Meeting Programs

Background

AnitaB.org wanted a strategic business partner to help them manage their GHC event and ensure they could generate the needed revenues to fund their services. They sought to move away from vendors that provided “one-and-done” events. Instead, scalability was key. The company needed a tool that would help over 20K+ attendees from around the world to connect with hundreds of employers in an interview setting.

A Scalable and Repeatable Solution

From the beginning, RainFocus acted as a true strategic partner, helping AnitaB.org build a roadmap to scale their business. RainFocus enabled the productization of events by building a single template for AnitaB.org that could be deployed everywhere. This allowed for rapid scaling and repeatability.

“Our design thinking was ‘build once, deploy repeatedly.’ Given our success over the past two years, we have now entered what we call our ‘Scale Phase.’  This means we are taking what we have built and deploying it across all experiences, including membership. ”— Jerome Edwards, Chief Growth Officer, AnitaB.org

Growing Membership Through Events

Because RainFocus supports both in-person and virtual event solutions through a templated event setup, AnitaB.org expanded its events program and launched a bi-annual virtual career fair. The career fair initiative has driven more growth in membership than any other single initiative outside of GHC. 

“What really separated RainFocus from other vendors is that they became a strategic business partner to us. They took the time to understand our mission, our values, and what our goals are, and then helped us measure and achieve those goals.” — Jerome Edwards, Chief Growth Officer, AnitaB.org 

Connecting Attendees and Employers

Switching to RainFocus gave AnitaB.org more control over ticket purchases, ensuring only those that they had invited were in attendance. The team used registration codes to verify student access. A primary goal of both GHC was to enable attendees to schedule interview-style meetings with employers in the tech industry. AnitaB.org used RainFocus’ meetings management to facilitate interviews with 198 sponsor companies. All meeting openings were filled within a day of the registration launch. As a result, more than 3,000 interviews took place during the conference.

With these major successes, AnitaB.org is now migrating its entire membership experience to RainFocus to create one intuitive interface for members, donors, and partners.

To learn more about AnitaB.org’s experience with RainFocus, watch the full conversation (held at RainFocus INSIGHT) on demand here.

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