Context
event:decision was founded by Matt Grey, a 25-year veteran of the events industry, after COVID-19 brought in-person events to a halt. Rather than return to agency life, he asked what the sector lacked. His answer was measurement: events were notoriously poor at capturing ROI, benchmarking and, in particular, carbon and sustainability data.
He built a simple website and a research-based framework for what sustainable events should measure. As the business grew, eventually working with agencies turning over £100 million and managing thousands of staff, that DIY foundation, including manual data-sharing via SharePoint, could no longer keep pace.
Challenge
event:decision needed to evolve from a one-person, manually run operation into a credible, scalable platform for major international agencies and their clients. That meant solving several things at once:
- A robust, secure client application to replace spreadsheet and SharePoint workflows
- The architecture to support two products, Track (carbon reporting) and Impact (broader ESG benchmarking), as they grew from checklists into self-serve platforms
- Automatic benchmarking by geography, sector and event type, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
- A proprietary Social Value Yield score, plus safeguards against data manipulation that did not make reporting burdensome
Matt was clear that event:decision brings deep domain expertise in events and sustainability, not web architecture. He needed a technical partner who could translate that expertise into working software, and keep building as the product and market evolved.
Pentangle know how the web works, and what it can do. We know the output we want, but they know how to get there.
Approach
Introduced through a personal recommendation around two and a half years ago, we built the client-facing application, app.eventdecision.com, from scratch, separate from the marketing WordPress site. As Matt puts it, the public site is "the shop window," while everything beyond client login is "all Pentangle."
Working closely with Matt, we translated his sustainability and events expertise into a scalable platform with three core views: a high-level company view, an event-by-event view, and a granular question-level view.
- Automated benchmarking of client performance by region (UK, EMEA, APAC), sector and event type
- Automatic alignment of results with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
- A Social Value Yield score, built from weightings developed by event:decision, projecting likely social value from budget, geography, sector and reported activity
- Data integrity safeguards: a traffic-light question system, signed self-declarations, and random follow-up on roughly one in three submitted reviews
- An AI agent integrated into Impact, giving users real-time benchmark comparisons as they answer questions, and used elsewhere to accelerate report generation
The commercial relationship is deliberately lightweight: a modest retainer covers day-to-day tweaks, while larger builds are scoped and quoted separately. Matt describes the working relationship as genuinely collaborative, with us regularly proposing ideas and technical possibilities rather than simply executing a fixed brief.
Outcome
Over roughly three years, event:decision has grown from a solo, self-built website into a platform with around 150 international customer profiles, spanning agencies in the UK, US and beyond, including a recent US agency signing up for 200 events' worth of benchmarking.
Track and Impact now underpin the credibility of event:decision's proposition in an industry increasingly asked to prove, not just claim, its sustainability and social value credentials. That reputation has led to interest from major names in events and hospitality, including invitations to present to organisations such as Iconic, Lime Venue Portfolio, Celtic Manor Resort and the Houses of Parliament.
Every time the word Pentangle comes up, it's always positive. It seems like a really nice firm that's doing good work.