Customer Story: 8VC

The Before Times:

Pre-Gatsby, 8VC lacked a common events toolkit. Worse, there was no firm-wide understanding of our broader events strategy. Even with our most popular recurring events, we had no documented best practices for defining target audiences and managing living guest lists. The firm would sponsor events, but organizing them was left to various groups, using various tools, with processes ranging from strict SOPs to completely ad hoc outreach. This created a number of problems, on top of the organizational friction. Our close friends would get invited to everything, relevant or not, while others would only get invited due to being top of mind. Names would be added or removed from guest lists without knowing who added them, or why. More fundamentally, there was no way to ensure collaboration or delegation.

How 8VC Uses Gatsby:

1. Create The Event

• Add a skeleton of an invite list

• Add collaborators

  • Explain what the expectations are for each, i.e. design, content, vendor management, etc.

• Add notes to fill in the picture of what the target audience looks like

2. Customize the Content

We call our design team the “Bespoke Brigade”. Our invites inspire guests to be there, and we create memorable graphics for each. Gatsby makes it easy to have a clean, elegant RSVP page and craft custom emails, while leveraging Gatsby’s organization templates for newsletters, event reminders/followups, and large-scale events (where consistency across communications is especially important).

3. Collaborate with Co-Hosts

Gatsby makes co-hosting events and collaborating on guest lists a breeze. Co-hosts can message guests as they go, using their own addresses - and there’s no back-and-forth between Google Sheets and various email threads

Use tags and Groups to Fine-Tune the Audience

Groups help us create reusable cohorts for recurring invitations, while tags let us combine groups based on common characteristics. For example, since 2018, we’ve run a summer fellowship program combining internships at different companies with weekly events for the whole cohort. This summer, we used the 2023 Fellowship group to form each event’s guest list and used the “Fellowship Alumni” tag to batch-add previous cohorts to our reunion party.

4. Batch and Stagger Outbound Invitations

We get a much higher response rate through targeted outbound. One of the best features of Gatsby is the ability to do multiple custom invitations for the same event. Our team members can use Gatsby’s “Send From” feature to invite their friends, using personalized notes, from their own email addresses, while using the “Reply To” feature to limit responses to personal email. Meanwhile, people we don’t know yet, but want to, will receive a more generalized version. All of this data is captured in Gatsby, and we can track response rates by group and message type. With Paperless Post, we could only upload a CSV and blast off one email.

We also follow a messaging cadence. For a design meetup, we’ll send the initial invite a month out, follow up two weeks and one week out, and send out venue/logistics information the day before. We can specify templates for each email, and control who receives which version (e.g. someone who has already registered won’t be prompted to). 

5. Collect Guest Information

Gatsby conveniently pulls and pushes specific information, based on RSVP. For example, if someone RVSPs “yes” for a dinner, we can immediately note dietary restrictions, or a +1’s name, and concurrently, share helpful information about the venue, parking, weather, etc. Gatsby captures all of this data on the back end, allowing us to create a more personalized experience the next time around.

6. Track as You Go

Gatsby acts as a command dashboard for each event. This lets us adjust on the fly - i.e., if RSVPs are arriving slowly and we want to hit a certain number, we can curate a new list of invitees, or send a custom follow-up for people who have opened the invite but haven’t replied. We can also create unique special RSVP links for our best “event evangelists” to use to invite their networks. This allows us to quickly widen our invitee pool, and over time, engage friends of the firm more strategically.

Impact:

Gatsby has transformed our events workflow in many respects. Our events coordinator estimates she saves ~12 hours a week by having invites (drafts, sent, etc.), RSVP capture, guest lists, and check-in all in one spot, while Gatsby’s RSVP management spares her inbox of ~300 emails per month. Qualitatively, the longer we use Gatsby, the more insight and value it creates. Managing our networks in Gatsby creates a compounding data asset, reflecting and reinforcing the networks themselves.

Quotes:

"We’re able to ensure we have the warmest, most curated approach for each group of people we’re inviting. I feel like I’m hacking the event system, like I have superpowers that other people throwing events don’t.” - Luke Bugbee, Director of Design

"It’s twofold for me. The first is the collaborative piece, since I touch a lot of different teams and events. The ability to bring people in and collaborate on specific events, outside of email and Google sheets, and capture that information to reference later, is big. And being able to manage contacts in Gatsby has saved me a ton of time.” - Caroline Haun, Director of Operations