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Blackthorn Doubles-Down on Events with New Product Offerings, Executive Hires

Published: May 1, 2025

Blackthorn has launched a suite of advanced event capabilities that empower planners to drive engagement and show impact from their system of record.

Blackthorn, the leading Salesforce-native event management platform that allows event operators to run their entire event program from your Salesforce CRM, new offerings include Event Navigator, a new attendee mobile app that pulls event details directly from Blackthorn. Organizers can update agendas, send notifications, and manage event details in Salesforce, while attendees can access their schedules, session information, and speaker details from their mobile devices.

In addition, Blackthorn is expanding access to its Messaging app, which enables native 1-to-1 and 1-to-many SMS communication that can be managed and scheduled directly from Salesforce. Customers are being given 1,000 free messages to use for events and other communications.

“Events are business-critical for many organizations, but traditional solutions force planners to work in fragmented, disconnected systems,” said Blackthorn CEO and cofounder Chris Federspiel in a statement. ”At Blackthorn, we’re eliminating that friction — bringing event management fully into Salesforce so planners can stop wrestling with data gaps and unreliable integrations and focus on creating impactful experiences.”

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Executive Hires Deepens Event Industry Expertise

With Blackthorn’s growth in the event tech space, the company is bolstering its leadership team with two industry veterans — Chris Kearney has been appointed Senior Vice President of Sales and Lauren McCullough has been named Senior Vice President of Marketing.

Kearney spent more than 12 years at Cvent in various sales roles in the mid-market and enterprise segments. During his tenure he helped launch Cvent’s London office and expand the company’s European footprint. “Event planners are becoming part-time data scientists because there is a clear need to demonstrate return-on-event,” Kearney said. “I am excited to help more organizations create impactful, data-driven events and help event planners articulate their impact on the organizations they support.

McCullough was most recently the Vice President of Marketing at Bizzabo, where she helped launch and drive demand for the Event Experience OS and Klik, Bizzabo’s Smartbadge technology.

“Events are one of the most impactful marketing channels, but that impact is often hard to quantify,” McCullough said. “Blackthorn eliminates the manual work and lengthy delays from wonky integrations, letting you build and manage events directly from Salesforce.”

For more information about Blackthorn, visit www.blackthorn.io.

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