Overview

About CAUBO

The Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO) is a non-profit professional organization representing senior finance and administrative officers at over 100 universities and affiliated colleges across Canada. Founded in 1937, CAUBO provides a national perspective on matters related to higher education administration - strengthening the capacity of leaders in the sector by connecting them with peers and information that enable them to pursue relevant opportunities and create solutions for shared issues.

CAUBO offers a robust professional development calendar consisting of webinars, workshops, leadership programs and the association's flagship national annual conference that draws more than 650 delegates and over 60 exhibitors each year.

CAUBO’s events are designed to provide peer to peer learning, networking and professional development opportunities, and collaboration across the higher education sector. Even with a lean events team, maintaining a high standard of quality and consistency across CAUBO’s event experiences is entirely non-negotiable - making the efficiency, reliability, and adaptability of its event technology absolutely crucial to its success.

Event Challenges - Before PheedLoop

Fragmented event technology, manual processes

In the years leading up to CAUBO’s transition to PheedLoop, the team faced growing frustration with a fragmented and outdated set of event tools. The organization relied on multiple disconnected systems to manage registration, mobile apps, exhibitor coordination, schedules, and virtual content. Each tool functioned in isolation, requiring separate workflows, separate data sources, and often manual reconciliation. As the number and complexity of CAUBO’s events grew, the cracks in this approach became increasingly visible.

"Nothing spoke to each other. Everything took longer than it should have."
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- Tamara Nemchin, Sr. Director, Strategy & Programs‍

Heavy vendor reliance, limited control

Simple updates—changing a registration question, modifying a session description, or adjusting a booth assignment—often required vendor intervention. Both critical and small changes alike were slow, costly, and dependent on external responsiveness. Internally, this was a strain and source of significant frustration for a staff team with tight timelines and already limited capacity.

“…a significant level of effort was required not only by our front line team members but by management who had to step in to manage contracts and relationships with unresponsive and unsupportive vendors.”

Archaic, non-responsive event website templates

Previous event systems offered outdated and non-responsive event website templates by modern standards. Rigid design framework made it difficult to modernize pages or ensure responsiveness across devices.

Challenges with bilingualism and reporting

Delivering fully bilingual events was challenging with tools that didn’t support seamless French - English parity. The team often had to duplicate content, navigate rigid templates, or manually reformat materials to keep both languages aligned. Reporting created similar strain: data lived in multiple systems, exports were inconsistent, and pulling even simple insights required time-consuming reconciliation across platforms. Together, these gaps added significant complexity to CAUBO’s workflow and stretched an already lean team.

…and COVID-19‍

When the pandemic forced CAUBO to move quickly into virtual delivery, the limitations deepened. The team needed to pivot quickly to a virtual format, adapt content rapidly, and keep the member experience seamless. CAUBO needed a solution that was modern, flexible, self-managed, bilingual, and capable of supporting every type of event they ran without forcing staff into endless manual work.

By 2020, it had become clear that the organization required a single platform that could consolidate systems, return autonomy to the internal team, and serve as a foundation for long-term event innovation.

The Solution

PheedLoop’s all-in-one, modern event technology platform

CAUBO discovered PheedLoop through a trusted referral—someone familiar with the platform encouraged them to take a closer look. From the start, the team recognized that PheedLoop offered exactly what they had been missing: a unified ecosystem where their event registration, website, mobile app, sponsor management, exhibit hall features, session content, and automated communications all lived in one place.

Autonomy and automation

For CAUBO, the biggest shift was regaining control. Instead of relying on external vendors for updates, staff could make changes on their own, in real time. They could duplicate events, streamline registration workflows, automate reminders, and update content through a single admin dashboard that fed the website and mobile app simultaneously. This autonomy was a meaningful change after years of waiting on third parties for even minor updates, and technological automation a welcome relief after years of manual tedium.‍

“The automation tools are critical—reminding speakers of their deliverables, reminding sponsors… the human labor involved with that was extensive.”

A bilingual event technology platform

PheedLoop also aligned naturally with CAUBO’s Canadian and bilingual context. The ability to manage French and English content across the website and app was a major improvement over the limited bilingual support of earlier tools. 

Ready for today and tomorrow

As new opportunities emerged - such as Call for Proposals and Lead Retrieval - CAUBO continued expanding its use of the platform, leaning on the modular nature of PheedLoop not just for its current needs but for its future vision of more interactive, automated, and scalable event delivery.

Results

PheedLoop’s impact on CAUBO’s event operations has been significant. With a single integrated system, staff now spend far less time on manual tasks and vendor coordination, freeing them to focus on strategy, member service, and continuous improvement. Event duplication that once took hours can now be done in minutes. Automated communications and reminders replaced what used to be painstakingly tracked and executed by hand. And because the system is intuitive, adaptable, and well-documented, CAUBO’s team feels confident using it, even as roles shift and new staff members come on board.

Attendees have responded positively as well. Registration has consistently received high satisfaction scores, and the mobile app - particularly the schedule - has become a standout feature. Exhibitors and sponsors have praised the interactive floorplan and showcase experience, and PheedLoop’s expanding feature set continues to open the door for enhancements to attendee and exhibitor value (and completely replacing printed programs in the process). ‍

“In recent post-event surveys, 93% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the registration platform… 95% said the app was easy to navigate.”

Most importantly, CAUBO now has a scalable platform that supports the full complexity of its event portfolio: everything from 20-person workshops to national conferences with hundreds of delegates. The system’s ability to support bilingual delivery, integrate new modules, and adapt to hybrid or virtual environments positions CAUBO to continue modernizing and improving its event experience well into the future.

Once the team began working with PheedLoop hands-on, the platform became an efficient, intuitive, and reliable foundation for CAUBO’s events—one that supports both the organization’s operational needs and its long-term vision for transforming how higher education professionals connect and learn.