Turning a regional real estate event into an integrated campaign

Campaign strategy, project management, and continuous improvement for the Forecast Symposium

For NOMAR’s Economic & Real Estate Forecast Symposium, I connected audience strategy, content, sponsor operations, and project coordination across a full event cycle. The work extended from the first sponsorship materials through post-event coverage, then into a reusable planning system informed by what we learned.

Organization: New Orleans Metropolitan Association of REALTORS® (NOMAR), Commercial Investment Division (CID)
Period: 2025 event and improvements for the 2026 cycle
My role: Campaign strategy and messaging, content development, project coordination, sponsor onboarding and fulfillment, registration and reporting, agency coordination, and event collateral and logistics

The challenge: broaden the audience and build credibility

The Forecast Symposium brings together professionals in real estate, banking, development, appraisal, title, and economic development. A volunteer committee produces the event with staff support. As the communications director supporting Forecast, I managed its marketing and communications operation and coordinated the information and deadlines that made delivery possible.

Our goal was to reach beyond the usual attendees and strengthen NOMAR’s credibility as a source of regional economic insight. That meant giving commercial practitioners, brokers, business leaders, government stakeholders, and media a relevant reason to pay attention.

The operational process also needed work. Sponsor solicitation relied on a letter, pricing grid, and fillable PDF returned by email. Logo collection required separate follow-up. There was no shared sponsor fulfillment tracker or structured record of deadlines and lessons from previous cycles. Too much depended on institutional memory.

One message, adapted across audiences and channels

The 2025 theme, “Breaking Ground: The Emergence of a New Economy,” connected the program to a broader question: how does real estate shape the region’s economic future?

I carried a shared theme and visual identity across materials while adapting the emphasis by audience:

The campaign progressed from save-the-date awareness and registration launch to speaker announcements, session previews, and deadline reminders. Recaps and media coverage extended the event’s value afterward.

I ran a seven-send email sequence to a dedicated Forecast list of roughly 1,430 recipients, with a reported average open rate of 54%. A session-by-session social series across NOMAR and CID’s Facebook and Instagram accounts introduced speakers and topics in the weeks before the event. Website updates, registration information, sponsorship materials, signage, and collateral carried the same campaign identity.

External distribution brought the message to additional business and community audiences. The media plan included dedicated emails and newsletter sponsorships through Biz New Orleans, Times-Picayune print advertising, Nola.com sponsored articles and social posts, and WWL radio promotion. Pre-event articles explained the event’s relevance; post-event coverage shared its insights.

Gambel Communications handled media outreach and paid placements. I supplied briefs, source information, and creative assets; reviewed proposed copy, creative, and media plans; coordinated deadlines; and repurposed coverage through our channels. Other team members arranged the live WWL broadcast and additional sponsor advertising. I contributed promotional copy and assets for those efforts.

The website: a connected digital experience

I designed and developed a central resource for ticketing, speakers, sessions, sponsors, news, and past programs. Dynamic database-driven pages connect speaker profiles, session filtering, and sponsor displays, while a multiyear archive keeps earlier programs useful.

I also implemented custom conversion events through Google Tag Manager, a Meta Pixel, and a LinkedIn Insight Tag. These provide a measurement foundation for evaluating campaign activity across channels.

Explore the speakers ↗ · View the 2025 archive ↗

Making sponsor commitments easier to fulfill

I redesigned the sponsorship solicitation into an 11-page package explaining who attends, the visibility available at each level, and the exhibit hall layout. Event photography and a benefits comparison across eight tiers made the offer more concrete.

I also introduced an online commitment form requiring a logo upload at submission. It routed information to billing and sent an automated confirmation, bringing previously separate steps into the initial commitment process.

A shared spreadsheet tracked sponsors from prospect to commitment through delivery of contracted benefits, including website recognition, program ads, promotional codes, and table assignments. This made fulfillment trackable and exposed a missed opportunity: only 49% of sponsor complimentary tickets were redeemed in 2025. Proactive redemption follow-up became an action item for 2026.

Iterative Process Improvements

After the 2025 cycle, I turned the planning process into a reusable Excel workbook. It contains more than 60 tasks across eight phases, with target dates calculated from offsets before the event date. Changing one event-date cell recalculates the schedule. The workbook also generates a committee meeting schedule, tracks a 13-step sponsor fulfillment checklist, and records vendor payment milestones.

Side-by-side columns capture what happened in 2025 and 2026. The next committee chair can inherit both the schedule and a record of how previous cycles unfolded.

Results and what they changed

The 2025 symposium recorded 518 registrations and 426 check-ins, an approximately 82% check-in rate, with $82,900 in reported sponsorship revenue. These are overall event results, reflecting the work of the committee, staff, agency, sponsors, and partners.

The campaign recap documented 23 earned media opportunities. Two Nola.com sponsored articles generated approximately 2,960 combined page views; the post-event article recorded an average time on article of 4 minutes, 4 seconds. Two dedicated Biz New Orleans emails generated 76 reported clicks across 21,017 sends. A four-hour WWL broadcast brought event content and participants to local radio audiences.

Registration responses provided a useful planning signal: email from NOMAR or CID received 212 mentions as a way people learned about the event, followed by prior attendance with 195 and word of mouth with 108. Those responses indicate reported discovery sources, rather than exclusive channel attribution.

For 2026, the sponsorship campaign launched on April 1, a month earlier than in 2025, to allow more time for commitments and fulfillment. The revised offer included additional $1,000 Broker-level opportunities and a new $10,000 Keynote sponsorship. The supplied tracker records $114,300 in 2026 sponsorship commitments, including $16,500 in in-kind support and $97,800 in cash commitments.

I also recommended a targeted approach to continuing education expansion. Instead of submitting the full program for attorney credit, I identified the sessions most relevant to that audience. The legal education application was approved, and the 2026 event expanded its CE offerings across four licensing bodies, including Mississippi real estate licensing and legal education. That created additional reasons for new professional audiences to attend.

The project connects the work I do best: translating a complex program into relevant messages, coordinating delivery across channels and collaborators, and using operational evidence to improve the next cycle. The campaign produced content and visibility; the systems behind it made the work easier to track, repeat, and hand over.