SAE International
RingCentral Events helps SAE International connect an international network of over 200,000 members.
Tens of
thousands
of event attendees using RingCentral Events
8.5 out
of 10
average Net Promoter Score on SAE Ride event series using RingCentral Events
Hundreds of
thousands
of dollars generated in sponsorship revenue
We are always in the search for solutions that can bring everyone together. We’ve been using RingCentral Events for three years [...] as an efficient and cost-effective and extremely dynamic way of getting folks to get together.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
A new events solution to drive the future of mobility
SAE International (The Society of Automotive Engineers) was originally established to help aerospace, automotive, and commercial vehicle engineers share knowledge and technical expertise. Today, SAE sets standards for engineers in the mobility industry, bringing engineers together to share ideas and create the safe, clean, and accessible transportation of the future.
SAE’s business depends on interaction and connection between thousands of members, customers, and sponsors. Events play a key role in the organization’s work as they help establish the business as a leader in mobility and ensure its services are at the forefront of customers’ minds.
Event engagement and revenue generation are key factors determining the success of their events. After pivoting from in-person to virtual events, their challenge was ensuring SAE company events were as good — if not better — than previous in-person experiences. Attendees needed to leave each event excited about the future of autonomous and electric vehicles and the potential for transport improvements. The events also needed to offer career support and foster connections that would lead to future collaborations and business.
INDUSTRY
Aerospace, automotive, and commercial vehicle mobility
HQ
Warrendale, PA
YEAR FOUNDED
1905
EMPLOYEES
200+
We want attendees to feel engaged. We want them to feel excited. We want them to feel enthusiastic, and we want them to feel that all our events are meaningful. When you can combine all of those elements together, I think that’s where the magic happens [...] and I think that’s something that RingCentral Events helped us achieve.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
As part of their new digital event strategy, the SAE team chose to run monthly events on RingCentral Events (formerly Hopin) as part of their RIDE (Real-Time Interactive Digital Event) series. This event series brings together innovators and thought leaders in emerging mobility sectors to exchange ideas, showcase research, demonstrate cutting-edge technologies, and engage in business interactions.
RingCentral Events stood out to the SAE team for its stellar customer service and clean, intuitive interface that offered an in-person feel. The platform’s networking features allowed SAE to get the essential peer-to-peer connection they were looking to include. RingCentral Events’ broadcast-quality streaming capabilities and reporting features were also key selling points. Director of New Business Development and Events Matt Wasowski states the platform’s analytics allowed SAE to focus marketing efforts on channels with the best engagement and return on investment.
It’s almost like [attendees] are watching a real broadcast on TV. I have no television background, I’ve never worked at MSNBC or CNN or the BBC, yet I feel like some of our broadcasts really are comparable.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
Low management, easy-to-navigate events
SAE’s events are typically a whirlwind of activity. They often attract tens of thousands of attendees across the globe looking to collaborate and discuss cutting-edge technologies and topics relevant to the mobility industry. The organization uses RingCentral Events’ automated communication features to help attendees navigate events. The team sends attendees agenda and sponsor reminders 24 hours before the event and then again 60 minutes ahead of the start time. Chat and notification banners inside the RingCentral Events platform also help highlight key sessions and direct attendees to sponsor booths.
Thanks to RingCentral Events’ ease of use, SAE’s fully immersive events can be managed with an impressively small team. Matt can often handle most of the setup and management process by himself.
With really the help of one or two people during the live events who can just monitor the backstages, I’m doing the whole thing myself. It’s very manageable. It’s very reasonable. And I think that should give hope to other organizations looking at RingCentral Events that you don’t need a staff of two dozen people to run an event.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
The team has hosted dozens of mobility industry thought leaders from major automotive and aerospace brands. They’ve used virtual events to connect and build relationships with up-and-coming businesses, giving attendees the inside track on future household names that will revolutionize how we navigate the world.
Two to four stages run concurrently at SAE’s events, leading into coffee meetings and breakout sessions. Informal daily recap sessions keep attendees up to date, while Q&A and polling features boost engagement during presentations.
The all-in-one nature of RingCentral Events has helped SAE completely reimagine several previously physical events, including their annual Formula SAE event, which challenged college students to build and compete with their own race cars. In its place, SAE launched a new virtual artificial intelligence data mining competition. Colleges from across North America analyzed Detroit and Pittsburgh transportation data to design better public transport systems.
RingCentral Events has also helped SAE demonstrate the value of virtual events to long-time sponsors and empowered them to capture the energy and spontaneity of real-life engagement via video networking with attendees. Sponsors can easily customize their own booths, using RingCentral Events to upload materials, host demos, and create unique, branded experiences with detailed reporting on the attendees who interacted with them. SAE has successfully offered sponsorship packages that include opportunities to present, share exclusive deals, and take part in post-event webinars in the RingCentral Video portfolio.
RingCentral Events features engage global attendees with ease
Below are some of the RingCentral Events features that make SAE’s events successful:
- Stages: Prime event content, like keynotes, is hosted on RingCentral Events’ stages to ensure maximum visibility.
- Sessions: SAE uses breakout sessions to drive attendee interaction and speaker-audience connection around specific topics.
- Audience engagement: Knowledge sharing and community discussion are important parts of SAE’s mission. RingCentral Events Q&A, chat, and polling features encourage attendees to engage directly with the subjects at hand instead of consuming content passively.
- Notifications: Attendees receive reminders of upcoming events and speaker times to help them navigate the day’s schedule with ease. The ability to send event-wide notifications to attendees also helps SAE point its audience to the most important content.
- Networking: Attendees enjoy randomized one-on-one video networking sessions at all of SAE’s events.
- Expo: Sponsorship is a core component of SAE’s events. Offering customizable booths sponsors can easily set up themselves has helped SAE land more than $200,000 in sponsorship revenue in 2021.
- Live streaming: SAE used StreamYard — RingCentral Events broadcast studio — to produce a TV-quality live stream for event content. Customizing the live stream on the fly has been a hallmark of SAE’s events. The team encourages engagement by bringing poll results and chat contributions up on the screen for attendees to see.
- Reporting: SAE is constantly adapting its content and marketing efforts based on the insights they’re able to gather from RingCentral Events analytics. They use these metrics to do things like optimize session length and determine their best-performing marketing channels.
When it comes to creating and actually managing the events themselves, I’m pretty much a team of one, which I think speaks a lot to the ease of use and the richness of the functionality of RingCentral Events.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
Accelerating into new markets and new relationships with RingCentral Events
Prior to using RingCentral Events, SAE hosted the majority of its events in person in the United States and China. Thanks to the improved reach of RingCentral Events virtual event capabilities, SAE has now been able to establish strong connections with more global audiences. This new worldwide network has opened up a wealth of new business opportunities for SAE and helped them build a reputation in previously untapped markets.
Feedback from attendees has been overwhelmingly positive. SAE had its busiest year of events in 2021, and the team has received hundreds of unsolicited compliments from attendees, speakers, and sponsors. The average Net Promoter Score (NPS) for the SAE Ride event series is an incredible 8.5 out of 10.
For Matt and his team at SAE, the analytics offered by the RingCentral Events platform are indispensable for enhancing future events. As Matt explains, “It’s really nice to be able to pinpoint the different places that we can improve upon. I can track event attendees. I can track attendee movement. I can track session attendance. I mean really, you name it, there’s some type of analytics behind it, and it really allows us to flourish in future events.” In fact, RingCentral Events’ reports have proven so useful for refining SAE’s event strategy that the organization hired a full-time employee whose sole focus is to analyze post-event data.
With the success of SAE Ride, the organization ramped up its events calendar in 2022 and 2023. SAE used RingCentral Events for many events that previously took place in person, doubling the total number of events and increasing the seats in its RingCentral Events plan to cope with the new demand.
My favorite memory was getting an unsolicited email from our CEO after the very first event that we did. He was skeptical about the whole idea but after our first event wrapped… he just said, ’I saw the event, it was incredible and this validates our decision to go into this new market and create a whole new business segment based on it.’ What more do you need than that?
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events
In addition to building new relationships with established companies via its events, SAE is growing into new markets like urban ground mobility (electric scooter and bike rentals) and urban air mobility (drone package delivery). The organization credits their successful events on RingCentral Events with creating new strategic directions for their business and genuinely shaping future growth.
2,700+
Virtual event attendees (and counting) since January 2024
2-4
Virtual events hosted each month
From an engagement standpoint, we really want to make sure that having this live online experience was comparable or even better than the face-to-face experience… We really did accomplish the engagement piece with flying colors.
Matt Wasowski
Director of New Business Development and Events