How Convene Uses Social Tables to Empower Event Planners Nationwide

We sat down with Julie Starr, Regional Production Manager at Convene, a meeting/event space and all-inclusive hospitality services provider based in New York City. Here's what she had to say about her experience working with Social Tables:

My name is Julie Starr, I'm the regional production manager at Convene and my home base is 237 Park Avenue.

So, as regional production manager I get to work with all of our planners across all properties and in my planning role at 237 Park, I'm the primary liaison between the clients and our specific facility. Convene is really a workplace/hospitality solution. Primarily, we offer meeting and event space in New York, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. So, we see a lot of corporate meetings and events.

It's all about the clients so the majority of the day is spent interacting with the clients if they're planning upcoming programs via phone calls and emails and also serving the clients who are on site and making sure their program is executed flawlessly. We're growing extremely quickly and it's very exciting, but also it comes with its own challenges. When I started with the company about 3 years ago, we had 4 properties in NY. Now, we have 11+ properties across 3 cities. So, how do you scale that and what makes sense? Systems that may have worked with four properties don't necessarily translate for the eleven, so Social Tables is a great solution for that.

We always set up a consultative phone call with our clients first and really understand their needs and coach them with what would work best within this space and we try to collaborate as much as we can. So, we use Social Tables to really bring their vision to life and we'll send them diagrams via the share feature and it's great that they have the ownership and ability to move furniture around and really customize their event within our space. As we grow, metrics are becoming more important to us, and I know Social Tables has actually sent us reports about how many diagrams we're making and what types of events we're creating the most diagrams for and how they're being used by clients. It's really nice to have that measurable as we scale to understand where we optimize our use of the system and make it a better experience for our employees and the clients we serve.

Creating the diagrams is usually very quick, it's a very intuitive system so it's a matter of dragging and dropping to, again, bring their vision to life. We say Convene is high-growth so in the next few months, and certainly by the beginning of 2017, we will likely expand in all of these cities we currently exist in and hopefully, further in 2017, you'll see us in a few new locations in the United States.