HannaCon19 Convention Experience

Hosted every other year, HannaCon is a large-scale company convention focused on education, recognition, recruiting, retention, and sales motivation for thousands of real estate agents across multiple states. By HannaCon19, the company had expanded from 6,000 to more than 9,000 agents and employees through franchising and acquisitions, increasing both attendance scale and operational complexity.

Having worked on previous conventions, I recognized that several recurring problems were limiting attendee engagement before and during the event itself. Navigation across downtown Pittsburgh and the convention center itself was confusing for out-of-state attendees, convention-floor participation was inconsistent, and many convention experiences functioned passively rather than encouraging interaction.

I approached HannaCon19 as a behavioral and operational design problem.

Designing a Complete Attendee Experience

A strategic convention journey.

Four touchpoints.

One seamless experience.

1. Build Anticipation. Pre-Event Communication Campaign. Staged digital communications that drove record preregistration.

2. Guide Attendees. Downtown and Convention Navigation. Created a comprehensive navigation experience from hotel arrival through classroom sessions.

3. Increase Participation. Interactive Convention Floor. Transformed passive booths into a gamified Pit Road experience that required additional staffing to manage demand.

4. Deliver the Live Show. 2-Day Stage Production. Wrote executive speeches and coordinated live production for 45+ presenters.

To increase preregistration and build anticipation ahead of the convention, I collaborated with the Events & Planning department on a staged email communication campaign that teased upcoming experiences, highlighted convention activities, and encouraged attendees to plan their participation in advance. Preregistration for HannaCon19 was significantly higher than any past convention.

I then developed a detailed downtown Pittsburgh map designed to help attendees understand hotel positioning, transportation access, and nearby activities throughout convention week. As planning progressed, I realized the larger friction point was not just the city, but also the convention itself. I expanded the project into a full convention-building and floor-navigation piece that helped attendees understand classroom locations, major events, booth areas, schedules, and convention flow end-to-end. The maps became so heavily used internally that leadership expanded production and distribution beyond the original scope. At the same time, I was responsible for overseeing the HannaFinancial section of the convention floor, which later expanded to include additional companies and shared business groups. Drawing from the convention's racing theme and how attendees behaved in past conventions, I redesigned the HannaFinancial section into a "Pit Road" experience where each booth functioned as an interactive stop instead of a passive display. Attendees moved booth-to-booth completing games, tracking progress, and earning access to the Money Booth, which dramatically increased participation across the entire section.

In parallel, I returned to writing and coordinating the full two-day stage production script which included executive speeches, stage sequencing, teleprompter coordination, visual cues, rehearsal revisions, and real-time show adjustments during the live event. By this point, the show scripts had evolved into essential operational control pieces used by stage crews, executives, production teams, and presenters throughout the convention. These three workstreams ran simultaneously under overlapping deadlines and growing scope. I worked across marketing, events & planning, executives, vendors, and production teams to ensure the attendee experience felt cohesive rather than fragmented across separate convention systems. During the convention, the HannaFinancial section became so popular that attendees began lining up before the convention floor opened, forcing schedule adjustments and additional staffing to manage demand. Attendees later described HannaCon19 as "the best real estate convention they'd experienced yet." After the convention, the company owners hosted a private catered dinner for the Marketing and Events & Planning departments to recognize our efforts in making HannaCon19 so successful.