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Chris Federspiel began his career at a young age, coding websites in middle school followed by Perl and CGI scripts in high school. He later moved into the field of sales and marketing for Internet Creations and Silverline. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found Plative as a Salesforce Systems Integrator (SI), followed by Brainiac. Chris’s latest venture, Blackthorn.io, was established in 2015 and has seen exponential growth and success since then, having received multiple Salesforce.org Partner of the Year awards. Under Chris’s leadership, his dedicated teams have worked relentlessly to earn Blackthorn Events the honor of being the highest-rated events app on the Salesforce AppExchange, while Blackthorn Payments now has the most gateways and payment methods available on the platform.

Chris’s Tips for Taming the Event Tech Overwhelm:
* Every event has a message to deliver whether it’s a new piece of content, capital campaign or updates to stake holders
* Think through what your event’s message is and how you’ll know if you’ve conveyed it to your audience/constituents/donors
* Answer these questions to help you think through event metrics you’ll need
* Will this be in person, virtual or hybrid?
* Do you know who attended which types of events in the past?
* If they were virtual, do you know if they actually attended vs just registered?
* Do you know how long they were at your event? (For in person: Did they stay the whole time, leave before the keynote, etc? For virtual: Did they log on early/late? Did they pop in and out of the event? When did they exit the virtual event space?)
* Did this person register for and attend more than one of your events? Which ones?
* Did they engage with you at the event? Did they type in the chat box, ask a question, participate in a poll?
* Have you entered data from past events into your database?
* What do you want these attendees to do after this event? (Ie, become a recurring donor, attend more events, volunteer regularly, make a planned gift)
* Make your event as easy to engage with as possible
* Have multiple ways for attendees to tell you what they’re thinking with polls
* Focus on making your event’s content compelling
* Have one system for everything (event attendance recording, donor/attendee information, payment processing, poll results) rather than seperate systems you have to cobble together or remember to update individually
* If you’re having sponsors consider a piece of technology that integrates with the rest of your system to be able to see if attendees engaged with sponsors, which ones and how
* C-vent for virtual, in person and hybrid events with sponsors https://www.cvent.com/
* Silent Auction management
* Blackthorn.io event management and payment processing apps. They are native to Salesforce so you will skip having to do all of the extra data imports, tech management and typical scramble

Other Interesting Links
* Stripe Climate
* https://stripe.com/climate
* Contribute a portion of the revenue you accept through stripe toward funding companies working toward capturing carbon in the atmosphere
* Watsi
* https://watsi.org
* A nonprofit organization collecting donations to fund vital health care and procedures for people in developing countries.