Goodway Group Hosts a Successful Hybrid All-Company Summit with Confetti

About Goodway Group

Goodway Group is a leading data-driven and technology-enabled digital media and marketing services firm that offers companies holistic digital marketing strategies. They’ve been fully remote since 2008 but enjoy coming together for their bi-annual all-company summits. Pre-pandemic, employees would attend in person. However, in 2021, Goodway Group had to change up its event strategy and plan for a virtual and in-person event experience.

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👋 Meet the Goodway Group team

Maria Villella and another Goodway Group employee both worked on planning Goodway Group’s 2021 winter summit. 

Maria is a Sales Ops Coordinator for the company and worked closely with Confetti when planning the shippable experience portion of the summit. The other Goodway Group employee co-lead the planning for the 2021 winter summit.

We had the opportunity to speak with both of them about their Confetti experience!

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Summing it up: Goodway Group 🤝 Confetti

• The Challenges: After two years of separation, Goodway Group was ready to host its first all-company hybrid event. However, they wanted to ensure remote employees felt as essential and engaged as those attending in-person. 

• The Discovery: While searching for unique virtual activities, they discovered the Confetti platform, which presented various experiences with all the information upfront — including availability and pricing. Since they knew exactly what to expect from each activity, they were able to better understand what experiences would best appeal to their virtual team members!
  
  
• The Outcome: With Confetti, Goodway Group’s event planners elevated the virtual event experience to something incredibly special. In the end, the company gave their in-person and virtual employees a summit that was engaging and fun for everyone involved! 

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😰 The challenges

At the end of 2020, Goodway Group faced an especially unique challenge (that’s since become more common): hosting a hybrid all-company summit that gave in-person and virtual attendees something special, memorable, and fun. 
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“If you're remote you have to get your people together. But for the summit, there were people who wanted to attend but remain virtual. So, how do we keep those people engaged? We needed to figure out experiences that felt completely different from the day-to-day.”
-Goodway Group

For this to happen, Goodway Group wanted:

• More event information upfront to ensure the virtual component of the summit would keep attendees engaged 
• To easily share event offerings with their team so their remote employees had a say in what activities they did
• The ability and autonomy to curate the perfect hybrid experience without jumping through hoops or having to wait on a response
• A certain level of self-service to help them save time and energy 

Thankfully, Confetti was there to lend a hand. 🙌

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🔎 Upon discovering Confetti 

The Confetti platform offered exactly what Goodway Group needed:

• A platform with a wide variety of virtual experience options
• All event information directly—from availability to pricing—on the event page (easily shareable with the whole team) 
• A way to book events right then and there without waiting for vendor responses 
• An overall smooth, user-friendly event management experience 

“I think it's important to have experiences that get you out of your every day and to be doing something hands-on. And that’s something that I really love about Confetti.” The summit's planner then went on to note: “Plus, the experience library is huge! We were able to book unique classes for all the virtual components of the summit, and will even be able to offer entirely new virtual experiences for our next one.”

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👀 Unexpected problems & efficient resolutions

Due to a spike in COVID cases, Goodway Group made the difficult decision to push their summit back a month to keep their employees safe. 

For event planners, unexpected scheduling issues can turn up a whole load of problems: vendor cancellations, drastic itinerary changes, and a sharp hit to morale. 

But Confetti met Goodway Group with the empathy, understanding, and flexibility they needed. 

"I was blown away at how quickly Confetti was able to act. We had to reship a lot of the materials, especially for the Latin American Cooking and the Mixology classes. Confetti did a tremendous job accommodating our date change — it went so smoothly for us!"
-Maria

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Giving the team something special 

For Goodway Group, it was crucial the company-wide summit gave every attendee a memorable experience. They wanted their virtual folks to feel included, involved, and connected, even from afar. 

"We were trying to do something out of the ordinary, so for the virtual folks, it's not just another week at home — they're doing something special, too. And our Confetti experiences gave us that. It's not a normal work day when you're in a Candle Making Class with your coworkers, or learning to make cocktails at noon."
-Goodway Group

And when all was said-and-done, the feedback Goodway Group received from their virtual team let them know: mission accomplished. 

“When the summit ended, I was getting pinged by people in the company that I didn't know letting me know what an amazing time they had in their Confetti experiences,” Maria said. 

Goodway Group also noted a nice improvement in their employee engagement thanks to Confetti! 

"We definitely saw an improvement in employee engagement. Teams were able to engage and explore, whether it was in the art class or cooking class. People really enjoyed the hands-on experiences because Confetti did it so well. And Confetti will be my first choice when we do this again."

Maria even took a moment to highlight an event she attended: “I did the Watercolor Painting Class myself and loved it. Everybody in my class did,” she said. “The instructor was great and even the not-so-artistic people made something that had everyone saying, ‘Wow, that looks beautiful!’”

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🎉 Transforming the virtual event industry & virtual experience for hybrid teams 

It’s no secret event planning has its fair share of challenges, and giving both virtual and in-person employees something to remember adds another layer of difficulty. 

But Confetti was happy to help Goodway Group with the heavy-lifting, so long as it meant their hybrid team could have a summit worth remembering. And, by the looks of it, that’s exactly what happened.

“Confetti gave us exactly what we needed. All-in-all, it was an amazing experience.”
-Maria

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