Not many people would move from California to Montreal in the middle of a pandemic, but that’s just one of the things that makes Madison Bonser such a special part of the Planned team. A psychology graduate from the University of British Columbia and a lover of anything active, Madison joined Planned in June 2020.
As with any early stage startup like Planned, employees often have to wear different hats. Given this nature, Madison has been a key player in driving supply and operations initiatives forward. Just a few months after joining Planned, Madison became lead on marketing, while also being an awesome organizer of many team activities.
Here’s what Madison has to say about the changes since her arrival:
“When I joined Planned, it was the beginning of truly onboarding vendors into the marketplace, as well as growing our partnerships with venues across North America. Since then, the Planned marketplace has exponentially grown, and our user platform has improved dramatically and looks completely different. As for marketing, we’ve really taken steps towards including our clients and partners, by featuring our partners in various outreaches and on our social media platforms. We’ve also been engaging with our clients in a highly meaningful way and receiving feedback through post-event surveys and conversations!”
Since Madison has picked up more marketing initiatives, Planned’s online presence has grown and we’ve been able to connect with the event planning community at a much more significant level. Madison’s passion in her marketing and partnerships role at Planned shines through, and when asked how that connects with her major in university (psychology), she commented:
“To me, marketing/partnerships and psychology are very similar; at the end of the day it boils down to human behavior and understanding people. I am incredibly passionate about connecting with people and understanding what motivates them. Marketing and partnerships allows me to explore that in a variety of ways and, in doing so, recognize behavior patterns and trends and utilize that data in multiple ways.”
Along with her continuous drive and creative user-centric ideas, Madison wraps her high performance presence up in her contagious smile. A genuine pleasure to work with, Madison is excited about a few of her upcoming Planned projects:
“We have several important initiatives underway. One being updating the website, which we’re reinventing to make as innovative and exciting as our product is. We really want to have the website reflect how fun event planning can be and the constant desire to improve and elevate.” She adds that an overarching mission of the marketing programs is “building Planned’s credibility externally through various facets. We’ve created product listings on third party websites to view direct feedback from our users, because we’re always looking to build our product alongside our users. In addition to these two initiatives, we’re starting a Partner Program to collaborate with organizations across North America to grow our community and continue to revolutionize the event planning industry!”
One of Madison’s favourite shows is the Netflix series ‘Ozark’, which is not super surprising, given the show has multiple strong, powerful (albeit sometimes frightening) female characters. Her admiration carries into the real word:
“Two women I currently have been following are Melanie Perkins (CEO of Canva) and Brynn Putnam (former CEO of Mirror). It’s always really great to follow the journeys of women in tech and witnessing the path of a start-up becoming a huge success story. Both of these women are really dedicated to their field and started their companies out of pure passion”.
Madison’s curiosity and drive to help our customers are two aspects, among the many mentioned previously, that contribute to her success and ongoing growth at Planned. There’s no doubt that the sky’s the limit for her.
