We’ve all heard companies tout the benefits of their products and been a little skeptical. “Sounds good,” we say, “But how are people really using it?” That’s a fair question!
When it comes to our web-based scheduling solution, we answered it in a Connect session titled “Mazévo in Action: Practical Use Cases From Our Clients.” Four Mazévo users from different organizations shared their experiences and advice for maximizing the benefits of using our system.
If you want insights from actual Mazévo users, you should check out the video! To give you a taste of what you’ll see and hear, we’ve summarized the webinar below. And keep in mind that we’re always happy to answer your questions about Mazévo and provide a personalized demo of the system so you can envision people using it in your environment.
Contact us or schedule a demo anytime!
TL;DR Key Takeaways:
- Sarah from Arizona State University demonstrates using event coordinators in Mazévo to streamline workflows and manage high event volumes.
- Emily from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace highlights the flexibility of Mazévo's Request for Information feature in gathering specific details.
- Jennifer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology showcased the benefits of the Mazévo Event Book, which provides a quick way to easily find open rooms and manage numerous event spaces.
- Tammy from the University of North Alabama explained how her team uses event questions to handle document submissions and coordinates parking arrangements with campus police.
- Wendy shared how The American College of Greece utilizes the Event Description field to gather information for the scheduling team.
Sarah Strohmenger, Arizona State University: Helpful Info on Event Coordinators
Sarah and the reservations team at the Tempe location manage approximately 100 active reservation spaces. Last year, they touched just over 4,300 events made up of more than 15,000 bookings for 630 organizations.
In her presentation, Sarah focuses on the event coordinator feature in Mazévo. ASU has a very intentional process for assigning event coordinators. It ensures there’s a clear understanding of workflow, which is essential for their small team to manage a large number of events.
Sarah points out that Mazévo users can be designated as event coordinators. She then opens the Day At A Glance page, which she and other team members rely on heavily, pointing out the EC column for the list of events. Events without initials in that column need attention, as no event coordinator has been assigned.
Sarah demonstrates how and where to add the event coordinator to an event. She also notes that requesters see that person’s name (and email address, if specified) on the confirmation they receive, so they know who to contact with questions.
Sarah goes on to explain how she and her team use the event coordinator designation in the Find Events feature. She walks through how to create views to pull up events that meet specific criteria, like one sorted by event coordinator that shows booked events with details pending.
Emily Vaughn, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Using the Request for Information Feature
Emily is the senior events manager for her organization, which has an office in Washington, D.C., and others in cities worldwide. She manages approximately 100 public events per year and thousands of other meetings, from small gatherings to large, multi-day events.
Emily emphasizes that Mazévo’s tiered approach to security is crucial to her organization, which had grown accustomed to having free rein in its old system. It’s also essential that requesters only have to answer questions pertinent to the type of event they’re holding.
Previously, you had to answer the same questions for a two-person event as one for 250 people. So, Mazévo’s flexible event question functionality is a huge help to them. That includes the option to request information by manually selecting questions that are very specific to an event, notifying the requester that their reply is needed, and setting a due date.
Emily and her team also use the document upload capability with event questions to get vital information from event hosts.
Jennifer Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Using the Event Book
Jennifer is the assistant director for the Campus Activities Complex at MIT. She oversees event planning, finances, billing, communications, and technology. MIT’s Student Center is open 20 hours a day, seven days a week, during the academic year.
Jennifer and her team coordinate approximately 15,000 events annually in 68 rooms ranging from smaller spaces to a 1,100-seat auditorium. They even manage the school's mascot costume (Tim the Beaver) as a room!
As Jennifer says, the Mazévo Event Book has been a game-changer for MIT. She opens it and describes how to filter to find, in her example, empty rooms (i.e., those that are available)—a capability that’s very important to them (and many Mazévo customers).
Jennifer also switches from the Daily to the Weekly view to demonstrate that feature and shows how to view the Event Book only for specific rooms. Taken together, these capabilities make it much easier to meet the needs of people wanting to book space.
Tammy Jacques, University of North Alabama: Room Security Tags, Event Questions, and More
As associate vice president for student affairs, she oversees the Center for Student Engagement, which includes more than 100 registered student organizations, the student allocation funding process, the university programming council, fraternity/sorority life, and more.
Two years ago, the Student Union Building came under her purview. When one of her team members retired and took their deep knowledge of Mazévo with them, Tammy realized she needed to get into the system—not as a person managing events but as someone needing the campuswide perspective Mazévo provides. She had to be able to support the training of new team members and the development of smoother, more efficient processes. This was critical since, in a year’s time, they have added every UNA building to their system, training 40-50 people in the process.
Three features in particular have helped the school implement Mazévo. The first is Security Tags. She demonstrates how they use this functionality in two buildings where different people manage different floors. It enables them to specify each person’s scheduling authority within the facility.
The second feature that is particularly useful to UNA is event questions. She gives the example of needing people to review event-related rules on the school’s website, print and sign a document, and upload it to Mazévo, showing how that works from the user’s perspective and behind the scenes.
Tammy also explains how UNA makes parking reservations and communicates this important information to campus police, again giving user and setup perspectives. Essentially, they have defined parking spaces as resources with UNA Police as the provider. They have also created event questions that link to a campus parking lot map and ask about the type of monitoring needed. Ultimately, they’ve made it much easier for people to arrange parking for their events and for campus police to stay informed about those needs.
Bonus Presenter: Mazévo’s Wendy Newlon on Event Descriptions
Wendy shares information on behalf of our customer, The American College of Greece in Athens, given the time difference that would have required them to join the session in the middle of the night! She explains that the school started using Mazévo in February 2024, manages 200 rooms, and, within eight months or so, had already created over 36,000 bookings.
Wendy gets into Mazévo as a requester to show a feature that can be turned on to reveal an Event Description field in the Add New Request function. The school uses this field for information that helps the scheduling team determine if the event is acceptable, needs to be advertised, etc. They also plan to start using the event description in conjunction with entries on their calendar to provide helpful details about events.
Bryan closes by sharing some interesting trivia about the name Mazévo (it means gather in Greek) and how it caught the eye of people at The American College of Greece!
Real World, Real Scheduling Advantages
Many thanks to Sarah, Emily, Jennifer, and Tammy for sharing their Mazévo use cases! And also, to The American College of Greece for sharing their tips through Wendy!
We’ve designed Mazévo with input from real-world scheduling professionals to meet real-world needs, and we’re happy to report that customers tell us it does exactly that.
“Sure, but can it meet our needs?” Yes, we’re confident it can.
Schedule a demo, and we’ll do a deep dive into your requirements and discuss how Mazévo can meet them!
