Launched to bridge the gap between the tech industry and education, Galvanize has over 3,000 members across eight campuses around the United States. These spaces are home to Galvanize’s community members: a mix of entrepreneurs, founders, students, teachers, industry partners, and most of all, people motivated to make an impact.

While Galvanize uses Envoy’s visitor management system at all their locations, the San Francisco campus is the busiest. The space is home to up to 210 companies on any given month, with 100-200 people visiting daily. There can be as many as 700 community members in the building at one time—which means that Galvanize’s 10-person operations team is always busy.

The front desk is a constant flurry of activity. Before Envoy, Lizzy Roberts, Membership Manager, says the team would have to manually text every Galvanize member individually when they had a visitor. “It was a nightmare,” she said. Compared to what they were doing previously, Lizzy estimates they’ve saved 30 percent more time with Envoy’s automatic host notifications.

Using Envoy also supports Galvanize’s professional and tech-forward brand—not just to guests but also their members. Community Coordinators Katie Hess and Barbara Suroz say Envoy lets them keep their focus where it needs to be. “It’s our job to encourage member success and create a sense of community. If we’re unable to help one of our members because we’re manually checking someone in and texting their host, this means we’re not doing our jobs properly,” said Katie.

It’s our job to encourage member success and create a sense of community.

As Galvanize has grown in size, Katie and Barbara’s responsibilities have grown as well. Since Envoy reduces the time they spend on manual tasks, they can spend more time focusing on what’s most important: taking care of their members.

Maintain security as the community scales

Galvanize’s San Francisco campus has doubled in size over the last year and this required an increased emphasis on maintaining security within the building. “When we were smaller, we knew everyone in the community by face and name,” said Katie. “As we grew, we started asking each other more and more, ‘Do we know that person?’ It was much harder to keep track of everyone.”

Envoy’s automatic badge-printing feature makes it easy for every guest to have a badge with their name, date, and time of entry—something that helps the operations team distinguish between guests and members.

“For security purposes, it’s extremely helpful to know who’s inside the building and quickly determine who’s a visitor and who’s a regular. As we continue to grow, it’s great that Envoy has our back,” said Lizzy.

Boost event strategy and marketing efforts

In addition to internal member success, Galvanize uses Envoy to assist with community-building activities—specifically, hosting events. Galvanize takes events very seriously, hosting an average of 25 events every week. These include member events, like workshops and meetups, and external events with people who have rented the venue.

“We care a lot about events here,” said Shiri Sivan, Events Manager. “They not only provide value to the community, they’re also a great marketing funnel for new leads.” Sivan takes advantage of Envoy’s visitor registration and badge-printing features to streamline the check-in process. Galvanize’s marketing team has also integrated the system into their outreach efforts, adding a simple call-to-action during registration which prompts people to subscribe to Galvanize’s marketing emails.

Galvanize uses Envoy to track the success of their event strategy. “We can measure engagement by tracking people who have registered for events through Envoy and later become members at our campus,” said Sivan. “This allows us to understand which events are successful for encouraging new member registration.”

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