When Event Engagement Wasn’t Enough
Like many institutions navigating the shift toward hybrid and remote work, National University recognized that professional engagement could no longer revolve around isolated events alone.
The university’s Center for Hybrid and Virtual Organizations was created to help bridge the gap between research and real-world practice in hybrid work environments. As conferences, publications, and professional initiatives continued expanding, the team needed a platform that could support:
- Virtual conferences and events
- Ongoing member communication
- Group-based engagement
- Research and resource sharing
- Collaboration across internal and external audiences
Before Tradewing, the university relied on a more traditional enterprise event platform. While feature-rich, the experience often created unnecessary friction for both organizers and attendees.
Melody Rawlings explained that speaker onboarding and conference preparation became increasingly difficult as the community grew. What stood out most was how difficult their previous platform felt for users trying to navigate events and training sessions.
The university wasn’t looking for additional complexity. It needed a platform people would actually feel comfortable returning to throughout the year.
Building a Community People Would Continue Returning To
Today, National University uses Tradewing as a centralized engagement hub across its hybrid work initiatives and professional community programs.
The platform brings together:
- Faculty and staff
- Students and alumni
- Researchers and external professionals
- Conference attendees and collaborators
For Melody Rawlings, one of Tradewing’s biggest differentiators was usability. Instead of overwhelming users with enterprise-level workflows and navigation, the platform created a more approachable experience for organizers, speakers, and attendees alike. That simplicity became especially important during virtual conferences and large-scale professional events, where reducing friction directly impacted participation and engagement.
As Rawlings described it, Tradewing simply felt “easier to navigate,” which made adoption smoother across the university’s growing professional community.
Tradewing’s group functionality also created more targeted engagement opportunities across shared interests and university initiatives while supporting participation from multiple centers within one connected platform. Rather than treating events as isolated touchpoints, the university was able to create a more continuous engagement model where conversations and participation could continue long after conferences ended.
Creating Continuous Engagement Beyond Conferences
Since implementing Tradewing, National University has continued expanding its professional community and increasing participation across initiatives.
Today, the platform supports a growing network approaching 1,000 members across faculty, students, alumni, researchers, and external professionals.
Instead of engagement ending once conferences concluded, members could continue interacting through announcements, groups, events, and ongoing communication throughout the year.
According to Melody Rawlings, the difference became visible through stronger participation across the community overall. For the university team, the value wasn’t simply adding another platform. It was creating an experience that balanced simplicity with functionality, making it easier for people to participate without sacrificing the tools needed to support growing initiatives.
Rawlings explained that Tradewing “meets our needs in a really good way” because it delivers the functionality the university requires without becoming overly complicated for users.
A More Responsive Partnership Experience
For lean teams managing large virtual conferences and ongoing professional initiatives, responsiveness also became an important part of the experience.
After National University requested improvements to session formatting, Tradewing quickly released updates that allowed organizers to improve event descriptions and presentation formatting inside the platform.
The university team also highlighted Tradewing’s responsiveness during major conferences and virtual events, especially when support was needed in real time.
As Rawlings shared, the Tradewing team remained highly aware of event schedules and consistently responded quickly whenever assistance was needed.
That combination of usability, responsiveness, and continuous improvement helped National University strengthen engagement without adding operational complexity.
