About
Building Bharat Sampaark, a civil engineering bootcamp, with JSW Steel, Tata Projects & JW Consultants, was held at IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Kanpur & IIT Madras.
CUSTOMER STORY
Building Bharat Sampaark: The Event That Got Smarter Every Time It Ran
76% fewer emails by edition three (9692 → 2295), while registrations grew 39%
550+ QR check-ins across 3 editions
2000+ registrations filtered down to validated, preselected attendees
Company Size
51-200 Employees (Association of Infrastructure Industry, India)
Industry
Industry Association
Location
India
Website
https://aiiindia.com/
Problem
Most recurring events don't actually repeat. They rebuild. The name gets a new number, and the team goes back to step zero.
The Building Bharat Sampaark team knew this firsthand. Outreach for each edition ran through personal contacts with universities. Student data lived across scattered sheets and forms. Filling one venue took close to 10,000 emails, because there was no targeting. And when the event wrapped, the working knowledge wrapped with it.
Three problems kept repeating:
- No system to carry forward. Every edition started over from scratch.
- Blasting messages to everyone, instead of only the students each one was for.
- No way to turn open registrations into a reliable headcount.
Solution
For all 3 editions, Nunify became the system underneath the event, a single source of truth that ran the events.
- Registrations flowed into a centralized student database.
- Survey confirmations sat between registering and attending, so only genuinely committed students made it to the final list.
- QR check-in handled entry in seconds, with timestamps and batch allocation at the door.
- Segmented emails replaced volume sends.
The same setup traveled from Gandhinagar to Kanpur to Madras. Nothing was rebuilt.
The first edition's biggest output wasn't the event
It was the database.
Even tools and forms outside the platform answered to one database.
For instance, idea submissions came in through an external Google Form. But every submission was validated against the student database for who counted as a participant.
By edition 2, the team didn't start from scratch. They messaged students already in the system and asked them to spread the word. Edition 3 did the same. Registrations grew by 39% across the three editions.
Edition 3 ran on what editions 1 and 2 built: nearly 4x fewer emails to reach a bigger, more targeted list. Students could be segmented by registration status, hackathon theme, team, submission stage, and confirmation, so each message reached only who it applied to.
The 569 (registrations) vs 177 (turnout) gap wasn't a failure. It was the point.
Free events fail in two directions.
- No-shows hollow out your headcount.
- Unvalidated walk-ins overrun it.
The team opened registrations well past venue capacity (which was ~250) on purpose.
Every extra signup was interest captured into the database, for this edition and the next. Raw registrations weren’t counted as headcount to plan the event.
A survey confirmation sat between registering and attending. Only students who confirmed intent progressed to the final list. So when 569 registered and 177 showed up at Gandhinagar, the organizers weren't surprised. They had already planned against the real number. And anyone arriving unplanned was flagged instantly at the door.
Check-in stopped being the bottleneck it always is on campus
Campus events funnel hundreds of students through one door in one morning. On paper, that means queues and approximate attendance.
Here, QR check-in handled entry in seconds per student, with timestamps, no duplicates, and batch allocation at the same moment.
As one volunteer at the Gandhinagar desk put it:
"They come, they scan, that's it. As a registration desk, one person is enough to do the work."
Attendance became a record the team could act on. It was no longer a stack of sheets to refigure later.
Key takeaways for recurring and multi-city event organizers
- Build the event as a system, not a project. A project ends and takes its knowledge with it. A system carries your lists, communications logic, and check-in flows into the next edition. The question after every event shouldn't just be "how did it go?" It should be "what does the next edition launch with?" The trend across editions tells you whether your operation is improving or just repeating.
- Treat registrations as intent, not attendance. For free events especially, put a validation layer between signing up and showing up. In this case, the gap between registrations and turnout was a design choice and the event was planned against confirmed attendees.
- Replace volume with targeting. If your email count grows with your event, it means your list isn't segmented. Sharper targeting cut this team's sends by 76% while reach grew by 39%.
