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NJCPA | Case Study | ON24

A new year means new targets for your team 🎯. Discover how you can hit them with webinars on Dec. 3. Register now 

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How the NJCPA grew revenue and reach with ON24

  • 25+

    Sessions

  • 400+

    virtual convention attendees

  • 25,000+

    attendees across all of their events

Capabilities

Use Cases

Number of Employees

  • 0 to 250

About

With more than 14,000 members, the New Jersey Society of Certified Public Accountants (NJCPA) is one of the largest professional groups in New Jersey and one of the leading CPA societies in the country.

Introduction

The NJCPA team relies on membership revenue to keep the lights on. They also pride themselves on being the only local community for CPAs that provides continuing education, networking and personal and professional development opportunities. 

“We have about 14,000 members, they’re in public practice, business and industry, government, education,” said C. Marc Rein, Sr. Digital Learning and Multimedia Specialist at the NJCPA. “Anywhere a CPA is, that’s where our members come from.”

Problem

Until face-to-face meetings and events became a public health liability, most of the services the association provides took place in person – whether at regional seminars, large-scale conferences, conventions, expositions, or classrooms. 

“We had a huge slate of programming and an upcoming convention – when our offices shut down.” 

So the team made the decision to go virtual, but the popular conferencing solution they had been relying on to host small-scale gatherings was not up to the task of delivering a large-scale convention and hundreds of regional events for members across the country

They needed a platform that would meet the following criteria:

  1. Easy to use – they needed to get their events off the ground as fast as possible
  2. Robust analytics and certification abilities – They wanted the ability to capture the digital body language of their members during events and webinars to track their certification progress and get a deeper understanding of their wants and needs.  

3. Ability to integrate with their tech stack – Who has time for manual data extraction and imports? Not this team.

“ON24 checked off literally every single box that I had.”

Marc Rein, Sr. Digital Learning and Multimedia Specialist

Solution

“I made this gigantic Excel spreadsheet,” said Rein. “I think I wound up demo-ing close to 15 different platforms and eventually found ON24, which checked off literally every single box that I had.” 

With ON24, Rein could launch both small and large-scale event experiences capable of hosting thousands of members from anywhere in the world. 

“We used to set up a booth and hand out business cards, and at lunch, people would chit chat and we’d make business that way.” 

With ON24 Webcast Elite, event attendees could actually interact and engage with the event elements and one another.

To keep members engaged throughout each experience Rein leveraged ON24’s 20+ engagement tools to: 

  • Send attendees to sponsor landing pages
  • Drive giveaways and newsletter opt ins
  • Provide relevant content offers 
  • Engage in 2-way chats and host small-group discussions 
  • Run live polls and Q&A sessions 

ON24 captures every audience interaction and stores it in unique engagement profiles built for each attendee, so the team can create personalized follow-up messaging based on the unique interests of every member. 

This also helped them track certification progress for CPAs looking to complete CE credits. 

“We were able to track who was there, when they were there and whether they had enough credits to qualify for certification (usually this is determined by proving their physical presence in a CPE class). 

“It doesn’t matter if you’re on a PC or on a Mac,” said Rein. “It doesn’t matter if you’re on an iPad or an iPhone. These checks work no matter where you are so our members can get the education that they need, whenever and wherever they need it.”

“Virtual is always going to be a part of what we do, and we're so happy that we found ON24.”

Marc Rein, Sr. Digital Learning and Multimedia Specialist

Results

With ON24, Rein and his team welcomed 40 speakers over 25 sessions, and over 25,000 attendees across all of their events. 

“And our engagement has been off the charts,” said Rein who boasted an average engagement score of 6.8 out of 10. Not too shabby. 

Thanks to ON24 and Rein’s incredible vision, “2021 was our most profitable year ever.”

As for the future? The team has already built a framework to scale their digital experience programs including templatized webinar consoles, and an API integration (which they refer to as the reconciliation wizard) with their AMS (Aptify). “It all just works.”

According to Rein … “it’s been lonely here without our members coming in,  but virtual is always going to be a part of what we do, and we’re so happy that we found ON24.”

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