Kim Hastings, Director of Global Brand Events at Procore, shares her playbook for creating high-impact events. She discusses her “edutainment” philosophy, why feedback is a gift, and why the future of marketing is all about listening to your customer.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Feedback is a Gift, Not a Personal Attack. The best career advice is: “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Treat critical feedback as a valuable opportunity to evolve and improve, not as a personal failure.
- Move Beyond “Cookie-Cutter” to “Edutainment.” The biggest opportunity in events is to create “edutainment”—experiences that are both entertaining and educational, like weaving a single speaker’s theme through the entire conference.
- The Future of Marketing is Listening. Marketers often focus on their “shiny new thing.” The real opportunity is to listen to your customers—they’ll often tell you they just want to understand the basics.
Could you please introduce yourself and your role at Procore Technologies?
My name is Kim Hastings, and I am the Director of Global Brand Events at Procore Technologies. I’ve been here for about two and a half years, and my main focus is leading the team that runs our annual customer conference, Groundbreak. We just hosted it in Houston for over 5,100 attendees, and it was a fabulous event.
I’d love to learn how you got into marketing. Was this always the plan?
Not at all. I changed my major about 20 times in college! At first, I thought I was going to get a law degree, and I was also studying environmental sciences and natural disasters. I thought I’d be chasing tornadoes.
I ended up meeting Professor Alan Fried in the advertising department at San Jose State University who sold me on the field, saying it combined my love of psychology, philosophy, and creativity with a business side. I graduated with a degree in advertising, but after a short stint in PR, I found I was always gravitating toward events. I spent time as a “one-woman marketing team” at several non-profits, healthcare and tech companies, which gave me a very well-rounded background.
As one company grew from a 4-person team to a 40-person global team, I was able to hone in on what I was most passionate about: advertising and events. When I finally left, I had to make a decision, and I went straight into events because that’s what I loved most.
What do you love so much about events?
Being an event marketer brings together all types of marketing. You’re working across the entire organisation, focusing on the creative side to bring the brand to life, but you’re also driving measurable ROI. Most businesses will tell you that their most effective lead generation tools are their events.
For me, the most exciting part is seeing it all come to life in a physical setting that you can see, smell, touch, and feel. The energy of an in-person event is more exciting than any other kind of marketing you can do.
How do you define and measure the success of a major event like Groundbreak?
That is such a key piece of the planning process. We start by putting together our OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which focus on goals like building brand affinity, driving customer loyalty, and strategic growth.
Beneath those, we have many KPIs. It’s not just about the number of attendees; it’s about the quality of the people in the room. Are they the right people? Are they engaging in sessions, viewing demos, and visiting sponsors? There are so many success factors you must map out from the beginning, as it can’t be an afterthought.
It sounds like you also value the “soft ROI,” like relationships, which can be hard to track.
Absolutely. It’s crucial to get ahead of how you measure that. I’ve worked at companies with different attribution models. Some just track the “last touch” of a lead, which I feel is a bit antiquated. The second another activity happens, it’s no longer your lead.
I am much more in the realm of a marketing attribution or influence model. This allows you to see how all your marketing activities—events, advertising, email—feed into an overall score for that lead. It gives you a much better picture of the entire journey.
What are the biggest challenges that field marketers face today?
First, it’s making sure your company understands the value you are driving. You can’t just say, “We brought a bunch of people together and they had a great time.” You must have the data to back up your story. What is the proven ROI? How many leads converted? You need to tell that story, because the other big challenge is budget. Everyone is clamouring for a piece of that big pile of money, and you won’t get the budget you need unless you can prove your value.
The other challenge is that events can feel a bit cookie-cutter. We are all in this controlled chaos, and I love seeing events as a giant puzzle. Every piece of the puzzle has a thousand pieces of its own, and you are the glue that oversees it all and makes the pieces fit.
What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for field marketers today?
The opportunity is to lean into the experience. For so long, events, especially conferences, have been the “same old, same old”—stuck in a ballroom with back-to-back PowerPoints.
Now, there is a real opportunity to create cool experiences that are “edutainment”: entertaining but also educating. For example, at Groundbreak, we hired a futurist, Nick Badminton, as our keynote. But we didn’t just have him on stage once. We wove him into the entire conference: he did his keynote, then immediately joined a panel with our customers and executives. We moved him into an executive forum for a deeper discussion. He shot a live podcast in our mini-theatre. And, as a cherry on top, we had a hologram of him in our expo hall sharing soundbites about the future of construction. It’s about taking a simple concept and creating connected experiences that people will be excited about.
What does the future of marketing look like?
I don’t think any of us can really know! But I think a big piece of the future is listening. We can get so focused on what we want to talk about—our shiny new thing—that we forget to listen to our customers and prospects.
At my last company, we did an audit of three years of Q&A and chat logs from our digital events. The reality was that people were asking about the basics. Sometimes we’re trying to jump too far ahead when we need to come back and ask, “What do our customers want to learn about?” Always keep the attendee at the core of your planning.
What career advice would you give to professionals, especially those just starting?
So many things! But the first that comes to mind is: it’s not personal, it’s business. When I was younger, I hated post-mortems because I felt like people were tearing apart my hard work. Now, I look at that feedback as a gift. It’s an opportunity to evolve and get better.
The other thing is to just be kind. Treat your vendors well, treat your teammates well. Your vendors will go ten times the distance for you if you’re a good partner, and your team will work a hundred times harder if they are happy to come to work. Be kind to others, and be kind to yourself.
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