Events

Introduction

At Benevity, our Employee Groups platform empowers employees to come together around causes they care about—driving engagement through volunteering, fundraising, and DEI-focused initiatives. But as participation grew, employees needed better ways to organize events—from in-person meetups to global virtual panels.

We set out to build a flexible event workflow that would support grassroots initiatives while meeting the oversight needs of program admins managing large-scale programs across regions and departments.

Event details page.

Discovery

Understanding what makes events meaningful
To guide our direction, we conducted interviews and shadowed group leaders and program admins. We also audited existing event workflows (both inside and outside of Benevity). We discovered that:

• Event creation was often happening outside the platform—through forms, spreadsheets, or informal chats.

• Group leaders lacked clarity on what kinds of events they could host and how to share them effectively.

• Admins (also program owners) needed visibility into what events were happening across regions and teams.

• Both sides wanted tools that supported coordination, promotion, and tracking—without requiring separate tools.

These insights pointed to a key opportunity: streamline how events are proposed and managed—while making them easier to organize, promote, and measure.

Design

Empowering groups to host and promote events at scale
We set out to create an event workflow that was flexible enough to support everything from lunch & learns to large-scale volunteer drives—while remaining simple and approachable for all users.

Our solution focused on helping group leaders create high-quality events, and helping admins stay informed and aligned:

• A step-by-step event creation flow helped group leaders add logistics, goals, and promotional assets.

• Smart defaults, templates, and contextual tips supported consistency without restricting creativity.

• Events could be easily promoted across the company with shareable pages, calendar integrations, and internal announcements.

• Admins had access to a dashboard showing all upcoming events, with filters by group, region, or theme.

• We prioritized accessibility and mobile responsiveness to ensure engagement across diverse employee bases.

We co-developed this solution through design sprints, stakeholder demos, and rounds of usability testing with group leaders and admins. Iteration focused on simplifying the flow, clarifying terminology, and improving discoverability of promotional tools.

Presenting event participation waiver before an employee can RSVP to an event.

Event creation form.

Event attendance overview and management.

Outcome

Driving engagement while reducing friction for organizers
The new event workflow launched to positive feedback and steady adoption.

• Within the first 90 days, hundreds of events were created by group leaders across global clients.

• Leaders reported feeling more confident planning and promoting events without relying on admin support.

• Program owners gained better visibility into upcoming activities, which helped them support key moments and drive broader engagement.

• Internally, the success of this workflow shaped our approach to future features like budget management and impact reporting.

Reflection & Learnings

This project highlighted how nuanced budgeting can be across organizations—and the importance of designing flexible systems that adapt to real-world variance. The most rewarding part was seeing how small UX decisions, like smart defaults and progressive disclosure, helped reduce cognitive load and built confidence for both admins and group leaders. It also reinforced my belief that thoughtful constraints can be empowering, not limiting.

Event calendar - day view.

Event calendar - month view.

Event list.

Manually tracking time for event attendance