The challenge: too much time spent on admin

Running 60 events a year is no small feat. For the B.C. Cleantech CEO Alliance, event registration had long been a labour-intensive process. On their previous platform, Atlas (Personify MC Trade), staff routinely had to step in and manually help 10–20% of new registrants complete their registration. For a webinar with 100 new attendees, that meant the events coordinator could spend 5–6 hours just getting people through the door.

The same friction showed up across their wider operations. Data lived in multiple places. Mailing lists required manual upkeep. Sharing resources with members meant emailing documents around or burying files in SharePoint where no one could find them. And when Mel Clark, Executive Director, tried to pull event revenue figures for a grant application, the numbers in the system were simply wrong.

The Alliance needed a platform that could handle their complexity — tiered memberships, partner-managed member groups, large mailing lists — without creating more work for the team.

The results: events that just work

A zero-friction launch

The Alliance’s first public event on ToucanTech was a webinar — and it set the tone for what was possible. Over 100 people registered, many of whom had never been on the Alliance’s previous platform. The events team had to offer assistance to exactly zero of them.

This was a stark contrast to the past. New registrants on Atlas regularly struggled, generating a stream of support requests that fell to the events coordinator to handle. On ToucanTech, the platform handled it all.

5–6 hours saved — per event

The events coordinator estimates she saved 5–6 hours of work time on that first webinar alone. Previously, helping 10–20% of new registrants navigate registration was simply part of the job. Now it isn’t.

Multiply that across 60 events a year and the numbers are significant — potentially hundreds of hours returned to the team annually. Hours that can go into building better events, reaching new members, and doing the work that actually matters.

Reaching new audiences

Of the 100+ attendees at that first webinar, a significant number were people who had never engaged with the Alliance before. They found the platform, registered themselves, and showed up — with no friction and no hand-holding. For an organisation trying to grow its reach in the cleantech sector, that matters enormously.

Five new workflows discovered in a single week

The events story is just the start. In the first week after launch, Mel’s team identified five distinct ways ToucanTech was already changing how they work — without any additional training or setup. Here’s what they found:

1. Publishing resources where members can actually find them

Staff used to share resources by emailing documents around or dropping files in SharePoint. Now, resources go straight onto the platform — tagged to the right committees, visible to the right members, and findable by anyone on the team. No more ‘what was that file called?’ moments in Zoom chat.

2. Real-time intelligence on member engagement

When Mel published an RFP as a news article with an attached document, she could see within seconds which contractors had downloaded it and were likely bidding. On the previous platform, that kind of insight simply didn’t exist. The Alliance had sent out RFPs before and never received a single bid — they now suspect many just never saw them.

3. Cleaner, more accurate event revenue reporting

A data review uncovered that event income figures had been pulling from the wrong column — showing gross ticket values rather than actual payment amounts. For an organisation that gives away tickets to speakers, staff, and nonprofit partners, this skewed the numbers significantly. The data was corrected across the key event series (LUTCH, Showcase, and Fusion Week), meaning reporting is now reliable for grant applications and planning.

4. Smarter mailing list management

Over 13,000 contacts previously managed through Constant Contact and multiple static user groups have been consolidated into a single, preference-based system. Staff now run a saved filter to build each mailing list rather than juggling separate groups. When someone’s membership tier changes, their communication preferences update automatically — no manual intervention required.

5. Getting marketing out of inboxes and onto the platform

Mel’s team is actively retraining staff to stop burying content in email threads and start publishing it on the platform. Whether it’s a committee resource, a staff agenda item, or a member-facing update, it now lives somewhere everyone can find it — branded, organised, and ready to share.

Other areas: data, memberships, and what’s next

Alongside the events and workflow wins, ToucanTech’s data team worked with the Alliance to clean up years of accumulated records from their previous platform — deduplicating profiles, linking individuals to their correct member organisations, and building out a cleaner membership directory across their 300+ member organisations.

Partner-managed memberships — where a third party buys a block membership and manages additions and drops — now have a clear workflow. The Alliance uploads the partner’s monthly CSV, submits a data request, and the team processes the changes. When the CSV importer launches, they’ll handle it entirely themselves.

Membership renewal workflows and the member directory are next on the roadmap, with the team already planning to explore ToucanTech’s AI automation features as they roll out.