.svg){kind=logo}
A high-stakes annual summit with no margin for error
The Family Office Initiative's annual summit is its flagship event of the year. Held in Chicago in May 2026, the invite-only event drew family office principals, faculty and senior practitioners for two days of programming, with a welcome dinner hosted at the Obama Presidential Center.
Every detail of the summit reflects the standards of the initiative's audience, including a seamless digital experience for attendees to navigate the agenda, find their peers, and access closed-door resources after the event.
[QUOTE — short line on why a secure digital hub mattered for this audience, ideally referencing privacy, the calibre of attendees, or the move away from a printed/PDF guide.]
From PDF guide to live online hub
Before this year's summit, all attendee-facing information lived in a static PDF. Any change to the agenda, the speaker list, or the resources meant a new version of the file, a new round of emails, and a long tail of attendees still working from an outdated copy.
Malorie and her team came to ToucanTech with a tight window — roughly five weeks — and a clear ask: replace the PDF with a secure, branded hub that the team could update in real time. The hub needed to feel polished enough for a Booth audience, and allow attendees the ability to self-serve from their phones.
In five weeks, ToucanTech delivered:
- A branded community site, gated behind a login
- A registration flow with custom consent fields for privacy and directory inclusion
- A live agenda, speaker list, and resources library that the team could easily update themselves
- A logged-out homepage with the public-facing agenda, for attendees who only needed the schedule
The shift from PDF to live hub meant attendees had one place to check, the team had one place to update, and the inevitable last-minute changes to programming stopped triggering a chain of re-sends.
Consent-led online directory, built into the registration flow
For an audience of family office principals, privacy is non-negotiable. The team wanted attendees to be able to find each other, but only if they opted in.
The summit hub was one of the earliest live uses of ToucanTech's new online directory. On the community registration form, attendees were asked a single question: Are you happy for other attendees to be able to search and connect with you?
Behind the scenes, a flexible group on the directory page pulled in only the people who agreed, so the directory showed an opted-in subset, not the whole registration list.
The team had a fully consented, ready-to-use directory the moment the summit went live — without any of the legal or comms work that usually surrounds attendee data at an event of this calibre.
Self-service resources, so the team isn't a bottleneck
The hub also took care of the long tail of post-event admin. Where the team used to receive a steady stream of "could you send me the deck from session three?" emails for months after each summit, attendees can now log in and download resources, breakout notes, and speaker materials themselves.
Resources sit behind the same login gate as the directory, so the team still has full visibility of who's accessing what — and the downloads are tracked back to individual attendee records, giving the initiative its first proper view of post-event engagement.
For Malorie and her team, the practical effect is straightforward: every download is one fewer email they've had to respond to, and one more attendee who's getting what they need instantly.
What the team uses today
The summit hub already brings together:
- A gated community site with branded design
- A custom registration flow with consent-led directory inclusion
- A live agenda and speaker list, updated in real time
- A downloadable resources library, gated and tracked
- An attendees panel powered by the opted-in directory
- A speakers panel linking to bios, CVs and LinkedIn
Each module replaces something the team was previously stitching together across PDFs, email threads, and a separate event platform
Advice for other business schools and initiatives
A few takeaways from how the Family Office Initiative approached this:
- Don't try to launch a permanent community in the same window as a high-stakes event — pick the most urgent use case and ship that first
- Make consent a first-class question on the registration form, not an afterthought; it'll save the legal and comms work later
- Give your attendees a live hub to log into, not a PDF to lose — even a small directory and resources library will outperform an event app no one re-opens
- Think of an events hub as the start of a year-round community, not a one-time deliverable
