The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) is a U.S. trade association serving the home building industry. Its flagship event, the NAHB International Builders' Show (IBS), is one of the largest trade shows in the country, drawing tens of thousands of residential construction professionals each year.

Denise Miller leads event, product, and brand marketing at NAHB. Her team owns the strategy, execution, and reporting for IBS registration campaigns from open to close.

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 the Bear IQ platform, Denise Miller's team was stitching together registration movement by hand. Every day: pull a report, print it, compare it to yesterday's, try to reverse-engineer what changed.

One morning, 500 people had registered overnight. 400 of them were already registered for the show. That number meant something — but the daily report couldn't tell her which audience segments moved, where they came from, or which of the 20,000+ people not yet registered were most likely to convert next.

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

What Changed

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

With Bear IQ, NAHB moved to a dashboard view that supports segment-level pacing in real time. Denise's team now tracks 50+ different audience types across the campaign cycle. Every Tuesday they review their dashboard, talk through what's shifting with Bear that afternoon, and build the plan from there. If a segment is performing, they pull back. If a cohort is behind, they pivot fast.

One workflow Denise calls out specifically: the list builder. With 3,000 people registered and tens of thousands still to go, she can now build a precise outreach list in minutes — production builders in the Southeast who should have registered by now but haven't, for example. You size the opportunity before you build the campaign. No spreadsheets. No guesswork.

The Impact

Segment clarity doesn't stay in the marketing lane. Denise's team uses the same data to support sponsorship conversations and address exhibitor concerns mid-cycle — shifting those conversations from anxious to grounded.

"I sleep better at night, literally."— Denise Miller, NAHB

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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