On September 29, we brought local event professionals to Startwell in Toronto's King West for the second installment of Horizons, our quarterly customer event series. Horizons I was a hit daytime experiment; Horizons II built on it, this time with evening programming and more room to hang around afterward.

Here are the highlights from the night:

George opens the night

Our president, George Wong, welcomed the room and set the tone for the evening: Horizons exists so event planners have a place to network and learn from each other, hear directly from us on where the platform is headed, and tell us — candidly — what's working and what isn't. He recapped Horizons I, and told the room to expect the same thing tonight: good conversation, a few surprises, and an open door to talk shop.

Event Data Lab Session: Breaking down four new reports

We used this session slot to walk through the latest four entries in our Event Data Lab series — reports 07 through 10, each pulled from real usage data across the PheedLoop platform:

• Report 07: Half of Onsite Check-ins Arrive Within a Single Hour — about 51% of opening-day check-ins land inside one 60-minute window around the published start time. The takeaway for organizers: it's peak throughput, not total attendance, that determines how much check-in capacity you actually need.
• Report 08: Attendees Attend 5.5 Sessions, and One in Four Attend None — at the median event, attendees who go to sessions at all go to 5.5 of them, but roughly a quarter of attendees never enter a single session. Quadrupling your program only drives about 2.5x the attendance, so the bigger opportunity is the quarter of the room skipping programming entirely, not adding more of it.
• Report 09: Late Registrants Aren't Flakier, Their Events Are Different — within the same event, early and late registrants show almost no difference in attendance (0.6 points). The 24-point gap people see when they pool across events is really a story about free vs. paid events, not about when someone registered.
• Report 10: Half of an Event's Leads Go to a Fifth of Its Exhibitors — the top 20% of exhibitors using lead retrieval capture a median 55% of an event's total leads, consistently, regardless of event size. If you're reporting exhibitor performance with an average, you're understating how uneven the floor actually is.

The panel: What Sponsors Are Actually Buying

The centerpiece of the evening was a panel moderated by our own Austin Yin, Growth Marketing Manager, with three guests who sit on different sides of the sponsorship table: Edward Byers, President of CANRev Collaborative, and Ruth Abrahamson, CEO of Base Consulting & Management, who both consult across multiple associations; and Kimberly Maharaj, Director of Business Development & Client Management at Blackbox Communications, who builds sponsorship on the corporate side.

The premise was simple: sponsorship packages haven't changed much in a decade, even though the people approving the spend have. The conversation moved from there into what's actually changed and what hasn't, a pricing review that found one organization an extra $100,000 just by correcting underpriced exhibit space, what used to sell itself in association sponsorship and doesn't anymore, and how corporate and association sponsorship models could each borrow from the other. It closed with a lightning round — one thing every organizer in the room should cut from their sponsorship deck, and one thing they should add — before opening to audience Q&A.

You asked, we built: what we shipped since Horizons I

Next, we “closed the loop” with updates on features first unveiled at Horizons I in July, where we first showed PheedLoop Go 2.0, PheedLoop OnSite, Invite Lists, and the Post-Event Report. All four have since shipped. Then, we moved into what’s new since then:

Group Registration, rebuilt around people, not tickets. Most registration systems treat the ticket as the unit of work and the person as an afterthought — which is exactly where group registrations stall out, since every ticket means re-entering the same name, email, and custom questions all over again. The new flow flips that: add a person, assign everything they’re attending, then move to the next person. Each person’s information is entered exactly once, no matter how many tickets or items they’re tied to. For organizations with membership systems connected, it also recognizes members automatically at sign-in and applies the right pricing and eligibility without anyone needing a promo code. 

One Unified Event Portal, not four. The Attendee Portal, Speaker Portal, Exhibitor Portal, and Sponsor Portal used to be four separate links. They’re now one Event Portal, with speaker, sponsor, and exhibitor tools living inside it instead of scattered across logins.

Badge scanning is back. Go 2.0 dropped it, you told us, and we rebuilt it as a Universal Scanner: one scan for gamification points, one for check-in confirmation, and one that pulls up a contact card for networking.

Three more you asked for directly: a full, plain-language history of every order and every attendee record; promo codes that can be excluded from specific tickets so they never accidentally discount the wrong thing; and surcharges that attach to a ticket and apply automatically at checkout.

What’s next: entitlement rules that handle member pricing, gated tickets, sponsor comps, and scholarship pools without handing out promo codes; registration transfers that move a ticket (or a whole order) to someone else without losing the payment, QR code, or history; and registration applications, so you can review and approve or decline attendees before a seat is ever committed. We’re also rebuilding the admin dashboard from the ground up, starting with a redesigned manual registration experience — more on that when it’s ready.

Then the night opened up

After the programming wrapped, the room shifted into food, drinks, and a few things to do:

• President's Corner, where George made himself available for candid, one-on-one conversations with customers about the platform and where it's headed.
• A live demo workshop, with hands-on stations for check-in and badge printing.
• A photo scavenger hunt, run entirely through our own mobile app using its gamification feature. One attendee took home the win and a $100 Amazon gift card; runners-up went home with branded swag.

Who was in the room

Horizons II pulled together our team, customers, prospects, and event industry professionals for a night that was as much about learning as it was about getting people who don't normally end up in the same room to talk to each other. And what a night it was!

Horizons III is coming

We're doing this again in Q4. More details soon.