Dejanelle Peterkin had yet to graduate college when she began her career in events as a seasonal promotions and events assistant at the Maryland Zoo. Despite the role being execution-focused and the year being 2007, she had the foresight to pay mind to more than logistics. The first bullet on her LinkedIn resume notes the impact productions like Brew at the Zoo and Octoboo Fest had on revenue.
In the years that followed, she built a portfolio impressive for its diversity across experiences and sectors, tackling fundraising, PR, and production with ever-increasing responsibilities at for-profit companies like Healthfirst and charitable organizations like Girls Who Code. She signed on to work at Google for YouTube in 2017, a year when monthly users surpassed 1.5 billion.
On the ads marketing team, Peterkin liaised with influencers to produce events inviting senior marketing executives into Google’s offices to support shifting budgets toward digital spending. In a nutshell: “The goal was to help them understand the value of YouTube,” Peterkin recalls.
However, though events impressed a vision of the future that—it should be said—is easy to take for granted as inevitable in 2024, Peterkin felt dissatisfied by the view from where she sat.
From then on, Peterkin pursued roles at B2B tech companies like Stack Overflow and CrowdStrike, where she had more opportunities to work with marketing operations specialists to develop data-driven strategies that—crucially—also got her along the lines of “the content narrative piece,” as she calls it.
“I didn’t get to see the value of these events,” she explains, elaborating further: “I knew they generated ROI, but because I was a contractor, I wasn’t looped into any data aside from net satisfaction rate, attendance…not anything to do with revenue.”
Peterkin continued onward and upward during the pandemic, emerging with even more experience and insights that now equip her to weigh in with veteran authority on questions that define “the new normal.” She lays out a neat, considered case for virtual events, for instance:
“We realize that digital events can thrive because the purpose of those events is more brand awareness, thought leadership, showcasing products and services—you can do all that stuff virtually, and most companies who do digital events understand the value of doing it because it’s cost-effective,”
she says. On the other hand, Peterkins is also of the opinion that in-person events are “a mainstay.”
“We also learned in the pandemic that the desire for connection or relationship building is paramount, and in-person events are the only real driver.”
Taking a step back to survey the landscape, she surmises:
“I think that what we’re seeing now is that we’re living in an industry where both [digital and in-person events] can evolve. It’s just contingent upon your goals, which determine the format that suits your needs.”
In her current role at Paylocity, an Illinois-based provider of cloud-based payroll and human capital management software solutions, Peterkin specializes in national trade shows and events like SHRM and HR TECH. But she’s also involved in webinars that range in audience size from the thousands to less than 100. In the former case, she’s working to crack the code on pipeline flow and conversion: an equation riddling the eventscape whose solutions are likely to comprise tomorrow’s best practices. When it comes to more intimate virtual events, Peterkin is finessing a formula that leverages satisfied clients and conversational Q&A.
Then, there are the golf outings. Ironically, the oldest relationship-building activity in the book is somewhat new to Peterkin. But if she’s anything, it’s open-minded when it comes to tactics that work. Noting the goodwill tournaments breed among participants and the high attendance rates, she offers a bit of advice that ultimately speaks to her comfort in experimentation—even if what’s new is old.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” she says with just the right measure of humor.
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