Sohn Hearts & Minds
Head of Marketing and Operations for Sohn Hearts & Minds Investment Leaders Conference, Maggie O’Neill, uses Humanitix to help raise critical funds for Australian medical research.
Head of Marketing and Operations Maggie O'Neill redefines traditional fundraising methods for medical research. She uses Humanitix to help raise critical funds through her event, Sohn Hearts & Minds Investment Leaders Conference. Find out what inspires Maggie and how she hosts seamless conferences with Humanitix.
“One of the reasons I love working with Humanitix is our one-on-one relationship with the team”
Maggie O'Neill
Sohn Hearts & Minds
How Maggie O’Neil uses Humanitix
Customization
Create your event's unique brand look and feel with Canva design tools in our event builder.
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How Maggie O'Neill uses Humanitix
Human support
Our support team is based in Sydney, Denver, and Auckland, and is ready to help set up your event.
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Q&A with Maggie O'Neill
Can you tell us about your event?
Sohn Hearts & Minds Investment Leaders Conference is Australia’s premier investor event. It brings together international thought leaders, research scientists, fund managers, surprise guests, and entertainers, all supporting Australian medical research. Deliberately disruptive, it’s a one-day annual conference like no other.
As a host running a dynamic and fast-paced event, there are a lot of moving parts in the backend to coordinate - one of which is ticketing and managing the attendee experience, and that’s where Humanitix supports us.
Can you tell us about your attendees?
Founded in 2016, we have delivered seven sold-out events and have built an incredibly loyal audience base, and we are really proud of the audience that we've attracted. While our focus is on delivering an exceptional in-person experience, following the success of our virtual conference in 2020 and 2021 we have continued to offer an on-demand component. This has made us more accessible to a younger audience and allowed us to increase our global reach too.
“It was a no-brainer to partner with Humanitix, and it was a really easy transition for us. We were able to automate so many processes that we'd previously been doing manually, such as issuing tickets.”
Maggie O'Neill
Sohn Hearts & Minds
How many people are involved with running your event?
While we have an army of pro bono supporters and volunteers, we’re a small executional team; it's myself and an executive producer. Together we've been working on this since day one in various capacities, and we pull in experts as needed, to ensure we have maximum impact for our beneficiaries and deliver the experience our attendees have come to expect, and what we expect of ourselves.
Why is hosting events so vital for your mission?
There’s something special about being in the room together - feeling the energy of people sharing high quality ideas, collaborating and meeting like-minded people - nothing beats it in my opinion. We pride ourselves on curating a program that challenges your thinking, introduces you to new ideas, uncovers hidden gems and reframes the way you look at things. In a world that is so ‘online’ it’s nice to be ‘offline’.
Partnering with Humanitix
Prior to partnering with Humanitix, so much of our process was quite manual, so it’s been incredibly valuable to move to an intuitive, digital platform that understands events, and has the ability for customization.
Humanitix has helped automate our operations which has been very additive to the attendee experience, and has freed up resources to focus on other aspects of the event.
Perhaps one of the most tangible benefits of Humanitix has been the registration scanning process. It’s incredibly easy to use and can be quickly adopted by our team of volunteers on the day. We have upwards of 800 people registering in a short time window, and the Humanitix app has helped facilitate a smooth process.
And it goes without saying, but it is incredibly important to highlight the alignment between our philanthropic mission and Humanitix. A key reason for our manual process in the early years was to ensure every dollar was going to medical research, and through Humanitix we are able to benefit from an automated, market-leading ticketing process all the while donating our booking fees back to our beneficiaries - a win-win on all accounts.
