Post Convio conference wrap up

The photo has excitement all over it—nothing like a conference with 375 of my Convio peeps to elicit a sense of giddiness. But actually, it was pretty good.

On October 23^rd and 24^th, myself and 375 of my closest peers met in Washington, DC, for Convio’s first Customer Summit. Grant it, I wasn’t really looking forward to the 2-day event, but it surprisingly worked out pretty well.

A couple of interesting points to note of the changes on the horizon were 1) enhanced reporting (report writer) capability for clients, 2) benchmark reporting capability from within Convio’s client base—we can learn how we stack up to others of similar size and market niche, and 3) use of widgets for the finger on the pulse web 2.0 play—how many donating river lovers have an account with MySpace? Not sure about that one, but worth seeing where it goes.

I took a few pages of notes, but the coolest (like most events of this stature) part of the two-day conference was the interaction with folks in my position at organizations across the spectrum. I also seemed to add to my list of wants and needs for us to accomplish over the next month—primarily list growth.

For an organization of our size, we have a very small house file of usable email addresses. And, on that note, we’re actually going backwards—losing more people than we’re taking in through the online subscription page (though we recently overhauled the process—love the feedback if you subscribe).

In fact, our conversion rate is approximately 1%, while Convio’s ‘Environment’ clients’ conversion rate is about 4.7%. Typically 2-3% is considered good. We have some room to grow, to say the least.

So, I think the next step for us is to create a basic welcome email series for new subscribers as well just making sure what page you land on, you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter.