Denise Miller used to spend Saturdays and Sundays comparing daily registration reports. The team could see the totals. They couldn’t see who moved, why they moved, or what to do next.

That’s a familiar spot for event teams running large, high-stakes programs. The data exists across systems. The context doesn’t.

Denise leads event, product, and brand marketing at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). NAHB produces the NAHB International Builders’ Show (IBS).

At a glance

Organization

National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)

Flagship event

NAHB International Builders’ Show (IBS)

Team reality

Reporting was manual and hindsight-driven, even when  totals looked “complete.”

Goal

Move from volume reporting to segment-level clarity during  the campaign cycle.

The challenge

Before Bear IQ, Denise’s team was stitching together registration movement by hand.

The workflow looked like this:

·        Pull a daily registration report.

·        Print it.

·        Compare it to yesterday’s report.

·        Try to reverse-engineer what changed.

If registrations jumped overnight, that still didn’t answer the operational questions:

·        Which audience segment moved?

·        Where did they come from (region, channel, source)?

·        What campaign activity likely influenced the change?

·        Which priority cohorts are still behind pace?

The hardest part wasn’t effort. It was the gap between raw counts and decision-ready context.

What wasn’t working

The manual process produced numbers, but not clarity.

Denise describes spending weekends trying to get back to a feeling of control. Even with overall registration volume, the team still didn’t have an easy way to understand:

·        which audience groups were moving week over week

·        which segments had room to grow

·        where registrants came from

·        who still hadn’t converted

That created a common event-marketing failure mode. The team couldn’t adjust until it was too late to matter.

What changed

The shift wasn’t more data. It was usable context.

With Bear IQ, NAHB moved from daily report comparison to a dashboard view that supports segment-level pacing. Denise can now answer questions like:

·        how many people registered last week

·        how many came from a specific region or audience group

·        which priority segments still lag

That’s the practical definition of a context layer. One dataset. Cleaned. Tagged. Consistent definitions. It’s what makes downstream analysis, including AI-assisted work, more than guesswork.

How the team uses it

Denise’s team runs a weekly operating rhythm.

Each Tuesday, they review their dashboard, talk with Bear about what’s changing, and build the plan for the rest of the week. Decisions aren’t locked in before they see the numbers.

That creates real flexibility:

·        If one segment is already performing, they can pull back and stop over-spending attention.

·        If another cohort is behind pace, they can pivot quickly and focus effort where it’s most likely to move.

Denise put the personal impact plainly: “I sleep better at night, literally.”

Operational value

Denise calls out one workflow that matters in the real world: the list builder.

Instead of starting with a broad blast and hoping, she can build a precise list in minutes. Example: production builders in the Southeast who normally would’ve registered by now but haven’t.

That changes how decisions get made:

·        You can size the opportunity before you build the campaign.

·        You can target outreach without inventing segments in spreadsheets.

·        You can keep the team focused on the few cohorts that actually matter this week.

Related: Bear’s interview with Denise from Event Tech Live2023 (source).

Broader business impact

Segment clarity doesn’t stay in the marketing lane.

Denise’s team also uses the data to support sponsorship conversations and calm exhibitor concerns when performance feels uncertain. When you can point to real audience movement and registration mix, conversations get more concrete and less emotional.

That’s often the difference between a “we think we’re okay” update and a defensible, numbers-backed plan.

If your team is living in daily exports

If this story feels familiar, here’s a case-study-aligned way to pressure test your workflow without changing everything at once:

·        Pick three cohorts that matter. Define them in plain language (who they are, what “on pace” means).

·        Decide your review cadence. Weekly beats “daily panic” for most teams, if the view is cohort-based.

·        Tie every change to a list. If you can’t build the outreach list in minutes, your segmentation isn’t operational yet.

·        Write down the decision you’ll make. “If this cohort is behind by X, we do Y this week.” Keep it simple.

About NAHB and IBS

NAHB is a U.S. trade association serving the home building industry (nahb.org). IBS is NAHB’s flagship event for residential construction professionals (buildersshow.com) and is described by NAHB here: International Builders’ Show | NAHB.

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