This guide walks admins through the process of preparing their Splash instance for the new year.

You can follow along in Splash by reading the steps below or registering for the on-demand webinar. To get started, log in to Splash.

On this page:

Scenario

The end of the year is approaching, and there’s no better time than now to start thinking about how to set your team up for success in January.

Your insights from last year's events, combined with Splash's administrative power, will help you plan and launch strategic event programs.

What's covered in this guide:

1. Analyze your event reporting. Use Splash’s built-in reporting dashboards to make data-driven decisions.
2. Review your team structure. Make sure everyone has the Splash role that’s right for them. Decommission old or inactive accounts.
3. Finalize your integrations. Keep your tech stack connected. Splash integrates with CRMs, marketing automation platforms, applicant tracking systems, and more.
4. Lock in your brand assets. Make any necessary updates to your fonts, colors, and logos, keeping your brand on lock.
5. Audit your templates. Ensure compliant event assets — and prevent rogue events — by retiring outdated templates. Consider event page designs, registration forms, emails, share cards, and more.
6. Create your events calendar. Set the foundation for a central hub, or events calendar, that will help boost event discoverability in the new year.

Analyze your event reporting

Start by reviewing insights from Splash’s built-in reporting dashboard. This data can help you understand how different event programs — including themes, email campaigns, and more — performed.

To access these dashboards, click Reporting from the Events Dashboard.

Splash recommends reviewing the Account Overview dashboard, located in the upper-right corner.

This dashboard provides a breakdown of user activity, event activity, loyalist summary and message activity summary, described more below.

User Activity

Review the Events Created by User chart to see which organizers created the most, and fewest, number of events over the last year. This data can help prompt conversations with these organizers, letting you collect anecdotal feedback.

Event Activity

The Event Activity section provides you with basic quantitative data, like number of check-ins, walk-ins, drop-offs, and more. It also includes powerful RSVP behavior data that can help influence your future event marketing strategy.

Splash recommends reviewing the following charts:

• RSVPs and Check-Ins by Day of Week / RSVPs and Check-Ins by Time of Day: Together these charts can help you determine the best days and times for your email or social promotion.
• Event Type Comparison: Understand which event types have the best performance. This is useful if you recently introduced new formats, like virtual events.
• Splash Theme Comparison: Figure out which event page formats have the highest conversion rates, then use these insights to help in your theme audit. 

Loyalist Summary

The Loyalist Summary helps you understand who your “loyalists” or Repeat RSVPers are. This is a golden list of contacts that can serve as potential beta users, interview subjects, and beyond.

Message Activity Summary

Use the Email Campaign Performance table to get a breakdown of your most successful email campaign. Use these metrics to revise or create new email templates.

Be sure to pay attention to which subject lines had the highest open rates. These can be applied to your themes’ email templates.

Review your team structure

Events require an all-hands-on-deck approach and Splash’s Team Manager makes it easy for you to manage your team’s responsibilities. 

Roles

Splash offers different roles, each with their own unique set of permissions, that help your team maximize their use of the platform. 

Here’s what an ideal team setup looks like in Splash:

• Admin/Admin (Basic): Responsible for making sure all of Splash’s top-level components — Library, Contacts, Reporting, Integrations, and Team Manager — are set up properly so that your team can be successful.
• Group Manager: Responsible for ensuring the right team members are seeing the right events.
• Creative Specialist: Responsible for managing the team’s brand assets and themes, or templates, for your event program. 
• Integrations Specialist: Responsible for configuring your team’s integrations to help automate workflows and keep your systems speaking to one another.
• Event Organizer: Responsible for creating a seamless end-to-end guest experience on each event.
• On-Site Specialist: Responsible for collecting check-in data and mastering the power of the Splash Host app.
• Viewer (Read Only): Responsible for monitoring the Guest List for important data about their prospects or contacts.

To access Team Manager, click on the Team tab for the top-level dashboard.

User Management

After reviewing the descriptions above, you can make any necessary changes to your users by editing their role.

This is also a great time to make sure any inactive team members are removed from Team Manager. 

Finalize your integrations

Splash’s top-level integrations require a one-time setup by an Admin or Integrations Specialist. One they are properly configured, these integrations will work seamlessly in the background across all of your events.

Splash’s integrations can be broken up into the following categories:

• CRMs: Includes Salesforce Sales Cloud, HubSpot, and Greenhouse.
• Marketing Automation Platforms: Includes Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce Pardot.
• Webinar Platforms: Includes Zoom Webinars, ON24, and BlueJeans.
• Extensibility: Includes Slack, HTTP Request, Incoming Webhook, and Zapier.

This is also an optimal time to check on any existing integrations since passwords and security tokens can change and disrupt your integrations’ authentication. 

To view or add integrations:

1. Click Integrations from the Events Dashboard.
2. Click New Integration.
3. Locate your integration, then select Choose.

Lock in your brand assets

Splash’s Brand Library houses your team’s logos, fonts, and color palette. These assets dynamically pull through to events created from Branded Themes.

If your team has any big brand or creative changes on the horizon for the new year, make sure they are reflected in the Brand Library.

To access Brand Library: 

1. Click Library from the Events Dashboard. 
2. Click the Brand tab.
3. Open your Brand Library and confirm your assets are up to date.
4. Click Save to close out.

Audit your templates

Themes

Based on your insights from the Splash Theme Comparison report, you can decommission, or revamp, your team’s themes. 

To access your team’s custom themes:

1. Click Library from the Events Dashboard.
2. Click the Themes tab.

To remove a theme from the Library:

1. Hover over a theme.
2. Click Theme Options.
3. Select Unset as Theme.
4. Click on the Events Dashboard.
5. Locate and select the former theme.
6. Click Delete in the upper-right corner.

This won’t affect any events already created from this theme. But the theme will no longer show as an option for your teammates when they create new event pages.

Forms

Be sure to review your team’s form templates, located in the Form Library. 

These templates ensure that guest information is collected in a standardized way. This guarantees compliance and increases the accuracy of your integrations.

To access the Form Library:

1. Click Library from the Events Dashboard.
2. Click the Forms tab.

Splash recommends creating forms for different event types. For example, a field marketing form template might include question types like:

• A checkbox to indicate that a guest reviewed your terms and conditions or privacy policy.
• An optional checkbox that indicates a guest wants to speak with your sales team, if your goal is to move potential leads down the funnel quickly.
• Splash’s premade “Are you Attending?” question which lets your guest update their registration at a later date.

While a hybrid event form template might include question types like:

• A "Will you be attending virtually or in-person?” radio question.
• A set of questions based on the CDC’s COVID-19 screening template.

Create an upcoming events calendar

Splash lets you showcase all of your events on a hub, or events calendar. Hubs help with event discoverability and let you collect subscribers.

To create a hub landing page:

1. Click New Event from the Events Dashboard.
2. Fill out the required fields.
3. Under Event Type, select Hub.
4. Select Choose Theme.
5. Choose one of Splash’s hub themes.

Filter your hub by information like date, distance, page type, or tags. Splash recommends creating at least two hubs: one filtered to display past events and one filtered to display upcoming events. 

On top of offering hub landing pages, Splash also lets you embed — a term for inserting content on a website — a hub on your actual Splash registration pages.