Connecting Communities Through Trellis Events

Trellis CRM, the University of Arizona's enterprise constituent relationship management program, improves the university constituent experience by helping units make data-informed decisions in their day-to-day workflows. Of the products in the Trellis ecosystem, Trellis Events, allows users to easily create and manage free or paid virtual, hybrid, and in-person campus events. 

Because Trellis Events already provides these capabilities to the campus community at no cost, the university will transition away from Eventbrite when its contract ends in September 2026. Going forward, free and paid event hosting and management will be available through Trellis Events to create a more streamlined and consistent user experience. The best part is, many units are already using Trellis Events.  

From the Maguire Center to the College of Fine Arts, the Office of Research and Partnerships to the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, Trellis Events is transforming how campus units engage with their communities and deepen their relationships with event attendees. The Master Gardener program, which hosts Ask a Master Gardener events, adopted Trellis Events to replace Eventbrite and multiple ad-hoc tools, streamlining event setup, resource delivery, and volunteer collaboration. Though overall attendance initially dipped after the platform transition, Program Coordinator Beth Reidhead shared that “people aren't dropping off between the time that they sign up for an event and attending”, in part because of the resource delivery and automated reminders in Trellis Events. 

William Peck, Senior Business Manager for the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship and the Economic and Business Research Center, shared how Trellis Events replaced manual workflows, made processing payments from attendees easier, built more consistent branding, and increased time savings through improved automated communications.  

The McGuire Center Entrepreneurship Summer Camp, which reaches high schoolers interested in entrepreneurship, was made smoother because attendees could “pay...with credit card – and the tracking on that is so much easier” (Peck). Trellis Events “allowed us to have a larger outreach, and… this is our first year we came close to raising our goal amount of money.” 

Trellis Events can improve how you reach your audience. Amanda Harill, Program Manager for the Office of Responsible AI, uses Trellis Events to facilitate recurring AI Info Sessions and an AI Insights series. Since onboarding into Trellis Events, she’s been leveraging the platform to replace ad-hoc Zoom/Qualtrics/spreadsheet workflows.  

Amanda expressed that “before, it was...putting together a Zoom link, and putting it on my calendar, and I'm going to keep track of it in a spreadsheet.” Now, she’s saving time with automated communications, increasing attendee trust with centralized branding, and using attendance data to inform outreach and content strategy. Amanda also appreciates being able to reach more potential attendees by adding her events directly to the university calendar. 

Kelsey Nussbaum and Jenny Stern are using Trellis Events in the College of Fine Arts to host the Summer Music Camp, a four-day event for band, choir, and orchestra students who are completing 5th through 9th grade to participate in ensemble rehearsals, sectionals, electives, and other activities. Previously managed with Microsoft Forms, a separate payments service, and many spreadsheets, they are pioneering using Trellis Events to reduce the friction for attendee registration and payment.  While initial set-up was a lot of work, Kelsey and her colleagues have “been... trendsetters, because a lot of people are using [Trellis Events] for youth-facing events in the College of Fine Arts now.”  

While the camp’s multi-level choices and overlapping electives required careful planning, Kelsey, Jenny and team expect Trellis to enable them to track repeat attendance, year-over-year retention and other success measures that were previously manual and time-consuming. 

Trellis Events equips users from disparate areas of the university to engage their constituents thoughtfully. It is, like other tools in the Trellis suite of products, centered around improving the student, faculty, staff, and broader university community experiences. A enterprise event platform available to the university community means less hassle for attendees, valuable insights for event-creators, and time-saving tools to bring efficiency to how events – paid, free, in-person, virtual, or hybrid – are done at the University of Arizona.