Case Studies

Canterbury Software Cluster Wowed by Success of 2011 Summit

The Canterbury Software Cluster is the region’s leading ICT industry organisation and holds its annual Software Summit to inform, inspire and encourage networking and collaboration among its members.  While the Summit has had a steady history of attracting Christchurch’s best and brightest, the 2011 event moved into another stratosphere. Not only did the Summit become part of the 9-event Rutherford Innovation Showcase series around the Rugby World Cup, it was also joined for the first time with the University Commercialisation Offices of New Zealand (UCONZ) ICT & Innovations networking event. With the increasing size and scope of the event and the demands of managing such a large and complex project, the Cluster’s organising committee turned to Communicate IT to ensure its success.

Objectives: The Committee’s primary objective was to run a smooth and enjoyable event which would achieve up to 350 registrations, and provide value for sponsors.  The event needed senior level speakers with experience on the global stage to deliver topical and engaging presentations anchored around the theme “Can you compete in the international market?”

Results: Communicate IT worked closely with the Cluster Committee and sponsors NZICT and Clarus to recruit an impressiveline-up of business technology leaders to share their stories on 8 September, 2011 at Addington Raceway.  These included renowned kiwi expats Dr Craig Nevill-Manning of Google appearing via live videoconference from New York, and Andrew Lark, social media innovator from Commonwealth Bank (and formerly marketing leader at ICT industry giant Dell), as well as a number of other talented business and technical stream presenters such as Sam Gribben of Serato, Scott Bradley from VoucherMob, David Scott from Z Energy and Phil McCaw of Movac.

A successful media relations campaign with two press releases delivered preview articles in The Press, the National Business Review, Idealog, Unlimited and ExportNZ.  This was complemented by three waves of email invitations (using MailChimp) to the 1,000-strong Cluster & UCONZ database plus confirmations and reminders, as well as regular updates and speaker profiles posted on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  The invitation was also shared with other national and provincial ICT groups and posted on major event listing websites.  As a result, registrations exploded to nearly 500 – far beyond anyone’s expectations.  This included a reporter from The Press who wrote a follow-up story on the event which appeared in the paper the next day.

Moving to a new venue at Addington Raceway, trialling a new online registration system (Eventbrite) and setting up a live videoconference link to New York were just a few of the variables and challenges the team faced.  Yet the event came together beautifully, ran to time, and most importantly, gained consistently positive feedback from all participants.

The event also incorporated a number of improvements based on feedback from previous years, such as providing free wifi access for all delegates, and the need to align and keep business and technical breakout speakers to time so that it was possible for attendees to move easily between presentations in either track.

“The Summit was a polished, captivating event which has elevated the Canterbury Software Cluster to another level,“ said David Johnstone, Chairman of the Canterbury Software Cluster. “When you attend an event like this you don’t always appreciate the planning and the myriad of details that need to happen behind the scenes.  The Cluster Committee was able to set the high level requirements based on a tried and tested formulae and delegate the finer details; speaker, sponsor and venue management.  As a volunteer committee we would have struggled handling an event of this size – Communicate IT were key to helping us deliver fantastic results.”

For John Duncan, UCONZ coordinator and University of Canterbury Business Development Manager, the event was a major step forward in achieving their objectives of getting more connected and engaged with industry.  “The Summit was a unique opportunity for the universities to showcase our achievements and abilities in front of hundreds of Canterbury technology businesses in one go,” he said. “We were impressed with the scale and professional quality of the event; we’ll definitely consider being part of next year’s event, and look forward to working with Communicate IT again.”