Customer Spotlight: Orange County Asperger's Support Group

[Amanda-S]

Customer name:  Orange County Asperger's Support Group - Autism in Entertainment Conference

How long they’ve been a customer: 1 year

Fun fact: OCASG recently hosted their inaugural Autism in Entertainment Conference on April 5 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Where you can find them: 

Website

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn

When Orange County Asperger's Support Group (OCASG) President Judi Uttal’s son was transitioning to college, she discovered a huge opportunity for individuals on the spectrum like her son – namely gaining confidence into adulthood through activities like learning social and public speaking skills. It was this discovery and her ensuing journey that led her to OCASG, an organization that provides resources, support, and programming for individuals on the autism spectrum, particularly those with high-functioning autism.

One key initiative that the group has undertaken is Autism in Entertainment, a workgroup and conference aimed at connecting adults with autism to opportunities in the entertainment industry.

“I have a wonderful team of people working to support this conference, but one of my focuses was the marketing. I knew that the platform I had for running our business was not the right platform for meeting the goals of the conference, so I looked around at some different products and I am so grateful that I chose Constant Contact,” Judi says of the role Constant Contact has played in the conference’s inaugural year.

With Constant Contact Premium, Judi and the Entertainment in Autism staff were able to quickly grow awareness, support, and registrations for their conference, which took place in the first week of April. “The demand has been amazing,” Judi shared. “We were shooting for 120 or 130 people with talent. We are ending up with 150 and I had to turn away another 150 just to get there.” 

Growing and managing a new event and a brand-new supporter base takes a lot of time and attention, so OCASG engaged the help of a Constant Contact Marketing Manager, a decision Judi hails as a game-changer. “Having that expertise available to us allowed us to conquer some technologies that might have been just a real pain had we not had Constant Contact as a partner, and it was just effective and very positive.”

In the end, the event was a huge success, attracting more applicants, exhibitors, and partners than the group had even dared to hope for, and garnering national media attention from outlets like Variety and Getty.

“We've over-exceeded our marketing goals. I know there's going to be a line of people out the door wanting to go to our conference,” Judi said of the success she’s seen from using Constant Contact. “I know I had to come up with other ways of fundraising to help pay for the overabundance of people that want to come – and part of that was having the right marketing tool behind all the efforts we were putting in.”

Given the tremendous success of the first year, we can’t wait to see what’s in store for OCASG and the Autism in Entertainment Conference in the future.

Want to grow your community beyond even your most ambitious goals? Here’s the supporting cast of Constant Contact tools the OCASG used:

Email - From launch announcement and welcome emails to event reminders and post-event recaps, OCASG did a great job utilizing email to keep their audience informed, excited, and prepared. And with an incredible 72% open rate and 23% click rate, it’s obvious their subscribers were engaged and ready for more.

• Tip: OCASG made use of lists and segments to ensure their emails were reaching the right parts of their contact list.

Automations - With such an engaged and complex audience, it was important to OCASG that the right messages went out to the right people at the right time, and Constant Contact’s custom automation paths helped them handle event registrants, notifications for rejected registrants, and exhibitor information, all in a streamlined, automated workflow.

• Tip: Using custom automation paths helped OCASG match up the exact triggers and messaging they wanted to send.

Social Media - With the help of Constant Contact Marketing Manager Bethany Crocker, OCASG helped grow their social media following for the event by integrating Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn with their Constant Contact account.

Events - OCASG managed a complex registration and ticketing process through Constant Contact’s events platform, ensuring the talent, employers, exhibitors, and caterers were all appropriately registered and ready for the day-of festivities.

• Tip: You can set up event registrations, add-ons and more in Constant Contact.

Landing Pages and Signup Forms - How do you go from 0 to 1000 in a year? We’re talking contacts, of course. In this case, you use lead generation landing pages, registration landing pages, and web signup forms to ensure that people who are interested know how to follow you and stay up-to-date with everything you’re doing.

SMS Text Messaging - In an on-the-go industry like entertainment, it’s important to stay in touch with people wherever they are. That’s why OCASG used SMS messaging to send reminders and welcome messages throughout the event registration process.

• Tip: Have you added SMS to your Constant Contact account?

AI Content Generator - Of course, knowing exactly what to say in all these channels doesn’t come easy, and Judi leaned on the content generator. “I love the AI tool. I used that quite a bit to create copy. I found it wrote effective copy for me and saved me time, as well.”

• Tip: The AI Content Generator isn’t just for email.