William Reed is the trusted digital, high-value data and events business serving the food and drinks industry. William Reed is recognised for outstanding multi-platform digital and print media, compelling research, powerful insights, innovative exhibitions and events, prestigious awards and informative conferences.

The company saw incredible growth with their events and quickly began to outgrow its current systems. In 2019 William Reed sought a solution to consolidate existing event and marketing software into one platform and needed a specialist software provider that focused on the end-user experience.

William Reed’s focus was to provide a brilliant user experience for their attendees and judges. Their goal is to make attending a William Reed event a brilliant experience from ticket purchase through to the event itself. Their objective has always been to provide outstanding customer service from start to end.

In researching and selecting a provider of event management software to run their awards and conferences, the key factors in making the selection were driven by the ability to configure different options for different events and provide a seamless experience for their attendees and clients. The flexibility in setting up the award categories and the ease of entry management were also key factors alongside the ability to have a judging process that was both efficient and hassle-free. William Reed was also seeking a solution that would reduce the ongoing overhead costs for support and maintenance.

Other factors that William Reed considered when researching and selecting a provider of event management software and virtual venues were the ability to apply their own styling across the end-to-end experience, flexibility in awards setup, ongoing support for set up and decommission, price, the ability to set up marketing sites alongside the event itself, multi-currency and internal reporting.

Not only was William Reed confident that Evessio provided specialist event-focused functionality, and excellent usability for users but they were also confident in the people supporting the software. Even long before Evessio's onboarding, training and support service won two awards it was evident that their customer service was exceptional. It was clear the whole of the Evessio team was passionate about the technology, service and people. Sharing the same aspiration for customer service excellence as William Reed, both company goals were aligned.

Since adopting Evessio's platform William Reed has grown the number of live events significantly, they now host 150 events with circa 20,000 attendees. Collectively, their awards programmes have 900 judges and attract 8,370 entries/ nominations.

William Reed’s key measures of success from using Evessio's platform were scalability, consolidation, usability, support and cost of ownership. The software allowed William Reed to roll out events in a standardized way to an infinite number of branded events. William Reed wanted to consolidate software, they were looking for one software solution that met both functional event management requirements and marketing requirements. Evessio's support team coupled with the specialist software allowed for a seamless user journey for their attendees. Evessio's award-winning onboarding and training process also allowed for a seamless experience for William Reed's staff operating the software and organising the events. Ongoing support was always hands-on when needed.

Rachael Miller quotes her experience as "Extremely positive. The team at Evessio are always on hand to help and are extremely quick to respond. They also listen to recommended enhancements and often take them forward into their development pipeline. The Evessio team are a very attentive supplier which carries a lot of weight with us and is a key part of the Evessio value proposition. Since rolling out the platform two years ago it has allowed us to greatly improve the experience of our attendees, judges and internal staff and grow our events across the group. The initial onboarding was well run, and our team quickly got up to speed with how to set up different event types (awards and conferences) and the marketing sites to support. When viewing the functional capabilities of the software with the service levels given by Evessio the product being delivered is exceptional."

The features William Reed uses to run their events are the Evessio virtual venues and event management software. Rachael credits Evessio's digital awards room for helping keep events running during Covid. The virtual room allowed guests to network and celebrate digitally. The unique digital experience combined with a seamless entry process and easy-to-use judging interface created a fantastic overall experience.

The technology and service exceeded the event organisers' expectations. When asked what the company's hopes were for the future of events, Rachael Miller stated a more thorough merge of the face-to-face and digital event proposition. William Reed has seen phenomenal event growth and continues to collaborate with the Evessio team generating outstanding results.

Claire Singleton

Marketing Manager

Evessio

Claire is the Marketing Manager at Evessio, an industry-leading event management platform for awards, conferences and exhibitions. Claire has years of experience and specialises in marketing event software, marketing events and sponsorship. Claire has a proven track record of re-branding events and implementing strategies that doubled event participation.