How We Turned Gryffin Into an Event Management Project Tracker [Case Study]

Have you ever found yourself planning a large event with multiple people, in multiple locations, with many moving pieces? Gryffin founder Marcela De Vivo talks about how she solved her event management, project tracking, and organization problems:

“[Organizing events] is my daily bread for my role as a digital marketing analyst and corporate speaker at SEMrush. Not only do I have to pitch to and apply to speak at conferences, I also have to plan workshops at cities all over the world.

For every workshop, my job is to set up the event from start to finish.  To accomplish this, I work with team members in 3 different countries.

I have events at multiple stages of development, all requiring at least a dozen different steps to a successful event completion.

How in the world can you manage projects with so many moving pieces?

Adapting Gryffin to Event Management & Project Tracking

I started by creating a new company in Gryffin that was dedicated to my SEMrush projects.  For this company, I created an module called Events which would function as my event management project tracker tool.

event management project tracker tool

At the workspace level, I created a workflow for each type of event:

  1. Conferences
  2. Workshops

Coordinating Conferences

Believe it or not, applying to speak at a conference and coordinating the tasks required is relatively simple.

The workflow takes me through each stage of preparing for a conference, and generates a series of tasks based on the current status. The first status is “Schedule on Social,” which generates a series of tasks to schedule social media updates at 6 internals before the event.

The next status is to create the content for the presentation, which contains various tasks including work order creation, design, and final edits. “Book Travel” contains the tasks to book flights, hotel reservations, and register for the conference.

Here’s an example of an event calendar with a list of tasks specific to a conference:

event management project tracker tool

Setting up Workshops

Believe it or not, workshops have many more moving pieces than conferences.  For a workshop, we have to:

  • Find a venue
  • Set up catering
  • Create landing pages
  • Create banners
  • Write email promotions funnel
  • Coordinate paid social promotions
  • Coordinate social media promotions
  • Invite guest speakers
  • Order swag
  • …and more.

Workshops have varying layers of complexity and we can’t leave a single detail to chance and risk a failed event.

To accomplish these successfully, there are several statuses set up for the workshops workflow, all assigned to people in different teams.  Everyone has to mark their tasks done, and anyone who is working on the project can see, at any time, what’s done and what’s pending.

All of the emails back and forth can be saved to the project to track conversations, files can be uploaded, and a project feed can be tracked so we can see the changes made to the project:

event management project tracker tool

event management project tracker tool

event management project tracker tool

No Task Left Behind = Successful Event!

The ability to automatically create all of the tasks associated with an event, and to visually track the event through messages, the feed, files, chat, and tasks, is what makes this event management project tracker tool so effective.

Not only can any team member jump into the process at any moment and know exactly what’s happened and what the status is of every task that belongs to a project, but by adding all emails to the project, it’s possible for anyone to continue moving the project forward.

Gryffin has made what could’ve easily been an impossible, overwhelming project become manageable and scalable.  Because of Gryffin, I can coordinate a dozen events simultaneously, utterly confident in a positive, successful outcome.”