Digital Summit: Fast Check-In, Lead Retrieval, and Real-Time Data Across an 8-City Event Series

Digital Summit:

Fast Check-In, Lead Retrieval, and Real-Time Data Across an 8-City Event Series

“Every single event we get people asking about Expo Pass. They like the printers, they like the speed of things. I’m always singing your praises.”

Digital Summit (Images: digitalsummit.com)

For over 15 years, Digital Summit has brought marketers together for hands-on education and networking. The series travels the country, eight events in 2026, each welcoming 400 to 600 attendees and 10 to 20 sponsors capturing leads on the show floor. We sat down with Brie Johnson, Sr. Director of Event Operations, Danielle Blanchette, VP of Marketing, and Adriana Murillo, Registration Manager, to talk about what it takes to run a multi-city event series with a lean team, and how Expo Pass keeps registration, badging, lead capture, and live event data running smoothly in every city.

The Challenge

Running the same event eight times a year in eight different cities means there’s no room for clunky processes. Every workflow gets repeated, and every inefficiency gets multiplied. Before integrating their registration platform (Swoogo) with Expo Pass, the team managed attendee data entirely by hand. Murillo describes the old routine:

“Previously, I had to upload the list to a CSV document from Swoogo and then upload it in Expo Pass manually… I actually waited until a day or two prior to the event to upload the list, because people were going to contact us to cancel. And if someone new registered, I had to go back and manually add that person.”

On site, the stakes are even higher. The team opens registration at 8 a.m., and the 15 to 20 minutes before the first session brings a rush of hundreds of attendees at once. With sponsors paying for lead retrieval and VIP attendees expecting a premium experience, check-in has to be fast, accurate, and flexible enough to handle on-the-spot registrations, badge changes, and last-minute info corrections, instantly.

The Solution

Digital Summit has made Expo Pass its standard operating system for the on-site experience, pairing on-site check-in and badge printing with lead retrieval for sponsors and real-time session feedback through the event app.

For its event series, Digital Summit implemented:

✔︎ Four check-in kiosks per event with on-demand badge printing, including a dedicated VIP, speaker, and sponsor lane

✔︎ Swoogo integration for automatic, two-way attendee data sync, with new registrations, cancellations, and edits reflected instantly

✔︎ Lead retrieval for 10–20 sponsors per event, running on the sponsors’ own devices with no rented scanners

✔︎ In-app session ratings for real-time speaker and content feedback

✔︎ Branded check-in screens and lanyards as a premium registration sponsorship perk

The integration eliminated the manual upload cycle entirely. Murillo says:

“Now I just turn on the integration, do all the field mapping, and I know everything is going to come directly from Swoogo to Expo Pass. If someone cancels, it automatically cancels… The workflow is much faster and easier.”

And that speed carries straight through to event day. Johnson explains:

“If someone registers on site or we’ve got to change a badge, it’s basically instantaneous. It’s changed in Swoogo, it’s changed in Expo Pass, and that person is able to check in seamlessly on site, which is what we need to keep that line moving.”

The Results

With check-in handled, the team gets something even more valuable: trustworthy, real-time data they use throughout the event and long after it ends.

“Just knowing how many people are checked in by noon, so I know how many people are eating lunch. You can shape that data all these different ways, but without that check-in, that visibility was really difficult. It’s such a key piece and we use it for everything.” — Brie Johnson

For the marketing team, synced attendance data powers smarter communications. Blanchette notes that segmenting messages by attended versus no-show, without manually appending data after the fact, “makes a huge difference in our workflow,” and that having immediate answers when leadership and sponsors ask who’s in the room “goes a long way.” The in-app session ratings have become a differentiator the team hasn’t found anywhere else. Johnson says:

“We love that you can do in-app session ratings, because you can’t get everybody to take a post-event survey. We’re getting that feedback in real time, and we haven’t seen another app that does in-app ratings the way you guys do. That’s really how we decide whether we’re rebooking a speaker.”

And the attendee experience speaks for itself. No plastic holders, no pre-printed badge boxes, and instant reprints when someone forgets their badge at the hotel. Murillo says:

“Attendees ask, ‘What do I have to bring?’ You don’t have to bring anything. Just stop by registration and we’ll have your badge. They’re like, ‘Wow, really?’ The smoothness of the registration process is very nice.”

After years of partnership, Expo Pass has simply become part of how Digital Summit runs. As Johnson puts it: “People just aren’t waiting in line, and that’s what attendees expect now.” Expo Pass is proud to power the Digital Summit series and help the team deliver a fast, modern experience for attendees and sponsors in every city they visit.