Blackthorn.io: Revolutionizing Event Management Through Salesforce Integration
Seamless data integration between event management platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems is essential in today’s business environment. Blackthorn.io is at the forefront of this evolution, providing a unique advantage with its Salesforce-native event management platform. Being built directly within Salesforce eliminates the need for complex third-party integrations, offering actionable data insights and enhancing the experience for both event planners and attendees across diverse sectors, including higher education, healthcare, nonprofits, and corporate environments.
The Power of a Native Salesforce Application
Blackthorn.io’s event management platform is constructed entirely within Salesforce, a design choice that removes the complexities often associated with third-party integrations. This native approach ensures all event data—registrations, payments, and attendee engagement—are automatically linked to Salesforce CRM records. This real-time synchronization provides a single source of truth, simplifying data analysis and streamlining workflows for event organizers.
Case Study: USC Marshall School of Business
The USC Marshall School of Business previously struggled with customization limitations, cumbersome registration processes, and the inefficiencies of manual data entry. Upon adopting Blackthorn.io’s Salesforce-native platform, they were able to create branded event pages, automate the attendee check-in process, and efficiently scale their admissions events using familiar Salesforce tools. The Salesforce-native design significantly decreased planning inefficiencies and simplified post-event data analysis, consolidating all data within Salesforce for a single source of truth in real-time and enabling effective follow-up.
Personalized Experiences with Salesforce Data
Blackthorn.io empowers organizations to leverage existing CRM data to craft personalized event experiences for attendees. Event organizers can segment audiences based on prior interactions, engagement levels, membership status, or specific preferences, enabling tailored communications and sponsor interactions. Advanced Visibility Controls, functioning by evaluating the entire attendee profile, ensure that only relevant events, tickets, and sessions are visible to applicable registrants with custom forms and conditional logic.
While non-Salesforce-native event technology can integrate with the platform, Blackthorn Events allows planners to utilize all standard and custom fields on multiple objects within Salesforce (e.g., Account and Contact). This comprehensive approach ensures that all relevant data is accessible and actionable.
Addressing Traditional Integration Issues
Traditional CRM-event platform integrations can often introduce complications in data flow, mandating manual data cleansing and transformation, fixing integrations, managing duplicates, and resulting in significant delays and inefficiencies. Blackthorn.io’s data-first approach unifies event-related information with existing Salesforce CRM data, providing a seamless experience for event planners. They can then manage everything from attendee registration to post-event follow-ups directly within Salesforce, operating in real-time.
Value Proposition Across Key Sectors
Blackthorn.io has made a significant impact across industries, including higher education, healthcare, nonprofits, and the public sector, by aligning events more closely with organizational missions and goals.
Innovative Use Cases:
- Corporate: Advanced payment capabilities, including support for various payment gateways, allow for complex registrant and sponsor billing scenarios. Features include web-based invoices with over 120+ payment gateways, support for card, ACH, and Google and Apple Pay, the ability to make one payment across multiple invoices, and the setting of general ledger (GL) codes for accounting. Field Marketing: Track the ROI of renting a sports venue box or hosting a large dinner by tracking the attendees’ journey through to revenue. Compare your expenses to your revenue without any integrations necessary.
- Education: Campus Tours: Utilize the Recurring Events feature to automatically generate events on a set schedule, such as every Monday and Thursday at 2 p.m. for a tour of the Arts School. Follow up with 1:1 text messaging directly from the attendee record. Large-Scale Orientations: Blackthorn’s Organizer Check-in Mobile app supports central Student ID QR code check-in, facilitating efficient check-in processes.
- Education: Advancement Stewardship: Leveraging Blackthorn’s built-in bulk and 1:1 text messaging features, combined with Blackthorn’s dynamic visibility for events and tickets, create a personalized, engaging experience to foster a closer connection with your donors.
- Healthcare: Appointment Tracking: Efficiently manage and track appointment scheduling to ensure that everyone is vaccinated. Community Learning: Manage numerous events simultaneously to educate the community about your hospital system’s offerings. Track the patient through the lifecycle for direct ROI on patient spend.
- Nonprofit: Donor Management: Use Salesforce’s reporting engine and AI features to predict high-potential donors based on event and session attendance, as well as text messaging interaction.
- Associations: Dynamically filter member versus non-member ticket prices and private event visibility based on specific member criteria.
Valued Features by Clients
Clients highly value Blackthorn.io’s Salesforce-native architecture. The ability to leverage existing CRM data and seamlessly enhance it with event registrations is a major advantage. Real-time, actionable data allows personalized interactions with constituents, creating more meaningful connections and efficient processes. Features such as QR code scanning of a central entity’s unique ID (e.g., Student ID), intelligent scheduler for bulk and 1:1 SMS messaging, with Email, and soon Push Notifications (January ’25) through Blackthorn’s new Attendee Mobile App, along with 120+ payment gateway integrations, make the technology more efficient.
AI & Automation: Enhancing User Experience
Because it is natively integrated, Blackthorn.io can leverage Salesforce’s latest AI tools, opening up a new avenue for reduced event build times and offering profound analytical insights. Event organizers can ask complex questions like, “How does a prospect’s event attendance correlate with their likelihood to buy?” and get immediate answers thanks to unified data integration. Blackthorn is building this using AgentForce, creating a Blackthorn Agent, as well as new generative AI functionality to query multiple data sources to yield insights that traditional reporting can’t offer. These will be ready in early ‘25.
Scaling Events with Personalization
By drawing upon data within Salesforce, Blackthorn.io helps organizations scale their events while upholding high levels of personalization. Authenticated attendees or those with unique, personalized links can register themselves and their household members with pre-filled contact information. The experience can filter on more than just Contact information, using the new Advanced Visibility feature set.
Flexible configuration options allow for targeted marketing and registration paths tailored to specific attendee segments. Combining Blackthorn.io with Slack and SMS creates new opportunities for meaningful human connections at scale—for instance, alerting an employee when a VIP attendee checks in so they can personally greet them.
Future Outlook: Platform Evolution and Expansion Plans
Blackthorn.io is focused on broadening its platform beyond event registration. The current suite includes event registration, SMS, and a payments module, with additional features under development to further reduce planners’ need for separate event technology.
Upcoming Launches:
- Attendee App: Launching in early ’25, this app will improve competitiveness in event formats that require session-agenda building, push notifications, and a venue map.
- AI Integration: As Salesforce expands its AI offerings, Blackthorn.io aims to provide meaningful AI features to customers, leveraging the fact that all customer data resides within Salesforce across AgentForce and generative AI.
- Marketing Cloud Growth: Blackthorn is building a native connection to Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new on-platform email functionality, separate from ExactTarget and Pardot.
Market Awareness and Partnerships
Efforts are underway to increase brand recognition, especially in the corporate/commercial sector. The Blackthorn.io team is launching regular thought leadership webinars, newsletters, case studies, and partnerships to broaden their reach. The sales team is also deepening their understanding of corporate events to better address planners’ challenges.
What Sets Blackthorn.io Apart
As event planners increasingly focus on data-driven strategies to demonstrate return on investment (ROI), Blackthorn.io stands out by being native to Salesforce, allowing users to leverage the platform’s full functionality—from reporting to automation—by measuring the constituent lifecycle in one data system, eliminating any integration challenges.
Adapting to Industry Changes
Rather than building a virtual platform during rapid changes in hybrid and virtual events, Blackthorn.io chose to integrate with existing virtual solutions. This provides customers with a suite of best-in-class virtual platforms, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars, WebEx Meetings, GoToMeeting Meetings, and GoToMeeting Webinars. Being data-first, the platform measures who registered for these web platform events within their platforms and who attended, without requiring a custom integration.
Social Impact
Blackthorn.io supports mission-driven organizations, especially in the public sector and nonprofits, through event management in several ways:
- Financial Contributions: The company donates $3,000 per month to Watsi.org and also supports Stripe Climate.
- Discounts for Nonprofits: Qualifying nonprofits receive discounts, making advanced event management tools more accessible.
- Tools for Social Impact: Features that aid in donation processing during event registrations, volunteer management, and accessible event planning tools foster social impact through event-driven experiences.
Additional Features: Coming early ‘25:
- Split payments to allow both donation and ticket sales to hit two bank accounts through one registrant transaction.
- Line-item-based invoices are generated for each transaction, allowing for easy payment reconciliation and general ledger mapping.
Empowering Organizations
Blackthorn.io offers tools that empower organizations to drive social impact:
- Donation Integration: Embed donation options directly into event registration pages, complete with split payments (splits coming early ‘25).
- Volunteer Management: Efficiently manage volunteer sign-ups and schedules within Salesforce.
- Accessible and Inclusive Events: Collect information on attendee needs to ensure inclusivity.
- Sustainability Features: Promote environmentally friendly practices through digital ticketing and communications.
- Community Engagement Tools: Build stronger relationships with constituents using personalized communication and engagement tracking.
Conclusion
Blackthorn.io is redefining event management by providing a Salesforce-native platform that simplifies workflows, enhances personalization, and unifies data for better analytics and ROI measurement. With a focus on innovation, market expansion, and supporting mission-driven organisations, Blackthorn.io is poised to meet the evolving needs of the events industry.
For more information, visit Blackthorn.io or explore their resources on case studies by vertical.
