How the Society of Women Engineers Earned a Gold Award for Events

To make sure the audience can see themselves in its marketing materials, SWE invites members to volunteer for on-site photo shoots.

The 50,000-member Society of Women Engineers (SWE) annually hosts the WE conference, one of the world’s largest conferences for women in engineering and technology. Even though SWE is a diversity organization that was founded 75 years ago to help women succeed and advance in engineering, there is still work to do to make sure that the society’s members and WE participants reflect the overall engineering community and that they feel a sense of belonging, said Karen Horting, CAE, SWE’s executive director and CEO.

In 2023, SWE had two main goals: to boost the overall conference attendance and to expand WE23’s global reach and influence, said Tom Frederick, a partner at the David James Group (DJG), which creates SWE’s marketing and communication campaigns, in a webinar conversation with Horting. WE23 aced them both — the hybrid conference drew more than 21,000 participants from 41 countries, the highest numbers ever recorded, using a mix of digital and offline strategies, including adding keywords geared to their target audiences to the conference website, paid social media and web-based ads, email marketing, and advertising on SWE’s “Diverse” podcast and magazine, Frederick said. For its efforts, the event was awarded the 2024 American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Gold Circle Award for Conference/Meeting Marketing and an Overall Excellence Award.

WE addressed another challenge and met a third goal — to maintain a safe and positive networking space for women, Horting said. In 2023, WE was scheduled a few weeks after another large conference for women in tech was disrupted by large numbers of men who were reported to have pushed and shoved to get to the front of lines to talk to recruiters at the organization’s career fair and to have made inappropriate comments to female participants.

“We have men who are members and they’re certainly welcomed,” Horting said — about 25 percent of WE23 event participants identified as non-female. “But we really wanted to avoid any potential issues with men attending the event. We wanted to get out ahead of that.”

SWE’s strategy included outlining in detail the conference’s rules, regulations, and core values on a “Respect and Inclusion” page on the website, which reiterated SWE’s zero-tolerance policy for harassment and other unacceptable behavior and right to remove anyone who violated those standards. The information was sent to registrants by email, and SWE offered refunds to anyone who let them know that they disagreed with the policies. Along with increased security, SWE also set up a dedicated email where anyone who experienced or witnessed harassment or other unacceptable behavior could report incidents, which was monitored by two senior-level staff.

In the end, there were no reports of bad behavior. “A lot of people were commenting that they appreciated the communications we had sent around our expectations on behavior,” Horting said. It was a positive experience, she added, “including for the men who were either there attending or recruiting. And we met the goal of trying to meet the needs of our target audience.”

A Model Program

One question that SWE has been asking itself for a long time is whether its members and audience can see themselves in its branding. For more than two decades, SWE has made sure that they do, by inviting meeting registrants to volunteer to participate in an on-site photo shoot at the WE conference and to appear as “model ambassadors” in branding and marketing materials. Those interested submit a form describing themselves and SWE chooses a mix representing the organization in areas including age, image, ethnicity, and the type of industry that they work in. The images become a part of all facets of SWE’s marketing tactics, featuring “the key people who are a part of this society,” said DJG’s Tom Frederick, who leads SWE’s marketing campaigns.

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor.

On the Web

A behind-the-scenes conversation with SWE’s Karen Horting on the elements that made up WE23’s award-winning conference can be found at bit.ly/SWE-WE23.