How PositiveHire Built a Recurring Virtual Summit Program

PositiveHire built recurring virtual summits by treating each event as part of a learning loop, not as a one-off campaign. Audience questions informed the theme, speaker systems reduced repeat work, promotion sources shaped the next launch, and live contingencies kept the programme useful when plans changed.

This historical case study revisits Michele Heyward's summit programme as it was documented in 2020. It separates dated public evidence from details reported in HeySummit's original customer story, then connects the lessons to a later PositiveHire event without assuming the same cadence or results continued.

Case-study snapshot

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Part of the story	What the evidence supports
Organisation	PositiveHire, founded by Michele Heyward. Its current work focuses on workforce intelligence, talent retention, and advancing underrepresented women in STEM.
Audience	Black, Latina, and Indigenous women in STEM, particularly experienced professionals preparing for management and leadership.
Original challenge	Create access to practical career and leadership guidance while strengthening a community around shared workplace experiences.
Historical event model	The 2020 customer story described recurring virtual summits supported by webinars, community feedback, live sessions, and reusable promotion materials.
Documented reach	A PositiveHire sponsorship proposal reported nearly 1,500 virtual-summit registrations from January 2017 to February 2020. That is a cumulative, dated figure—not an average per event.
Delivery	Live online talks. HeySummit organised the event-management workflow around pages, registration, speakers, access, communications, integrations, and reporting; a connected provider delivered the live video.
Evidence limit	The underlying interview or transcript was not available for this refresh. Unverified quotes, per-event averages, and attendance claims from the old article have therefore been omitted.

The challenge: make specialist leadership guidance easier to access

Michele Heyward founded PositiveHire after seeing how few Black, Latina, and Indigenous women held senior roles around her in engineering. PositiveHire's current account of Michele's work describes a workforce-intelligence and consulting company focused on helping underrepresented women in STEM advance into leadership while helping employers improve retention and workplace systems.

The summit programme addressed a related audience need: practical leadership and career guidance from people who understood the workplace context. The 2020 article described sessions on executive presence, salary negotiation, business negotiation, communication, and career progression. The editorial opportunity was not merely to assemble talks. It was to turn what the community needed into a coherent event promise.

How PositiveHire built the programme

The original story described a repeatable operating pattern. Some details were specific to PositiveHire's audience and historical context, but the system behind them remains useful: listen before choosing a theme, turn the theme into a clear progression, recruit speakers for fit, give partners reusable promotion assets, track what brings registrants, and carry the learning into the next event.

Audience feedback — collect the skills, questions, and workplace problems the community wants help with.
Theme and promise — choose a focused outcome and organise sessions into a progression the audience can follow.
Speaker sourcing — identify people with relevant expertise and lived or professional context, then brief them early.
Promotion system — prepare reusable copy and graphics, give speakers clear assets, and track where registrations originate.
Live delivery and contingency — define the delivery provider, session owners, support route, and fallback for a missing speaker or technical failure.
Questions and results — capture registration data, live questions, support issues, and the signals the selected tools can reliably report.
Next event — use that evidence to adjust the next theme, speaker mix, promotion plan, and attendee experience.

This repeatable summit loop is HeySummit's interpretation of the case study, not a quoted PositiveHire framework.

Community feedback shaped the theme

The 2020 customer story said Michele asked women in her community which skills and tools would help them make the next career move. That gave the event a better starting point than a generic topic list. It also helped PositiveHire organise talks as a journey across career stages instead of presenting disconnected sessions.

Registration questions continued that feedback loop. The article reported that PositiveHire collected structured information such as industry and seniority. Closed options can make patterns easier to compare, while an optional open field gives people room to describe a situation that the list misses. The right format depends on the decision the organiser needs to make next.

The lesson is bounded but practical: ask only for information you will use, explain why it is useful, and review the answers before choosing the next event's promise. Registration data should inform the programme, not become an unused collection exercise.

Historical PositiveHire summit agenda showing project management, executive leadership, communication, and speaking sessions — An agenda example from the original PositiveHire summit period. It is historical context, not a current event schedule.

Speaker sourcing became a system

PositiveHire's story emphasised starting speaker relationships early and researching how each person's expertise fit the theme. Reusable outreach templates reduced repetitive work, but the invitation still needed to explain the audience, event promise, expected contribution, and benefit to the speaker.

A current speaker dashboard can centralise profiles, talk details, resources, and speaker self-service. It does not replace editorial judgment or producer communication. Organisers still need to confirm the session's purpose, deadlines, permissions, technical requirements, rehearsal plan, and live-day owner.

That distinction matters for recurring events. A reusable system should remove administrative friction while leaving enough room to brief each speaker for the audience and theme in front of them.

Promotion assets and attribution improved the next launch

The old article described a mix of social posts, direct messages, livestreams, word of mouth, and speaker promotion. It also said PositiveHire gave speakers prepared copy, hashtags, and graphics. Those materials made it easier for contributors to share the event without creating a new campaign from scratch.

The useful principle is not that one channel will work for every organiser. It is that source tracking turns promotion into a learning system. Use consistent campaign labels, preserve referral or affiliate data where appropriate, and compare registrations using event reporting and analytics alongside data from the other systems in the journey. Then connect each measure to a decision: repeat, change, or stop.

A 2020 PositiveHire sponsorship proposal gives the strongest dated public result available for this refresh. It reported nearly 1,500 registrations for PositiveHire virtual summits between January 2017 and February 2020. The document also described the wider webinar and community system around those events. Because the period covers multiple years and events, the figure should not be presented as a per-summit average.

Live delivery needed a contingency, not a guarantee

The original customer story described a live speaker not appearing for a session. Michele shifted the slot into a facilitated discussion so attendees could ask questions and help one another. The underlying interview was unavailable during this refresh, so the old article's exact attendance figure has not been repeated.

The operational lesson does not depend on that number. A live session should have a named owner, a decision time, a backup format, ready-to-send attendee communication, and material the host can use without pretending the planned talk is still happening. A virtual event contingency plan turns those choices into owners, triggers, fallbacks, and messages before the pressure of the live day.

Live formats can support discussion and shared experience, but they are not universally more engaging. Choose live, recorded, or mixed delivery according to the audience, speaker constraints, content, accessibility needs, and the team's ability to operate it well.

Historical results and source status

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Claim	Period	Source status	How to use it
Nearly 1,500 virtual-summit registrations	January 2017–February 2020	PositiveHire's 2020 sponsorship proposal	Use as a cumulative historical figure only.
Recurring summits, monthly webinars, audience research, reusable assets, and promotion-source tracking	Described in the 2020 customer story	Original HeySummit article; underlying interview unavailable	Present as the article's historical report, not independently verified current practice.
A speaker no-show led to a facilitated audience discussion	Described in the 2020 customer story	Original HeySummit article; underlying interview unavailable	Keep the operational lesson; omit the unsupported attendance count and direct quotation.
PositiveHire ran a later HeySummit event led by Michele Heyward	23 October 2025	Public Inclusive Infrastructure event page	Evidence of a later event, not proof of uninterrupted use, cadence, or commercial results.

What organisers can borrow

Start with one audience problem. A clear community need gives the theme, speakers, registration questions, and promotion a common direction.
Design a progression, not a playlist. Sequence sessions so the audience can move from understanding the problem to taking a useful next step.
Separate reusable systems from event-specific judgment. Templates, timelines, assets, and dashboards reduce repeat work; the theme and speaker brief still need care.
Give partners a small, complete promotion kit. Include accurate copy, images, dates, links, and a clear reason their audience may care.
Track only signals you can act on. Registration source, role or industry, attendance, questions, support issues, replay use, and downstream action are valuable when each informs a decision.
Plan the awkward live moments. Decide what happens if a speaker is missing, a stream fails, a session moves, or the planned interaction does not work.
Review before repeating. Recurrence creates value when evidence changes the next event, not when the team automatically copies the last one.

The concise takeaway: recurring summits work as a learning loop when audience feedback shapes the promise, speaker and promotion systems are reusable, registration and event data inform the next decision, and the live team has an owned fallback. PositiveHire's story illustrates that pattern; it does not prove that the same tactics will produce the same result for every organiser.

Then and now

The 2020 story focused on PositiveHire's summits for women of colour in STEM. PositiveHire's current public positioning has evolved toward workforce intelligence, talent retention, leadership development, and workplace systems, while continuing to support underrepresented women in STEM.

A public HeySummit event page shows that Michele Heyward and PositiveHire later ran Inclusive Infrastructure: Resilient Workforce Solutions for AEC on 23 October 2025. The event is finished and addressed workforce development, retention, and inclusive leadership in architecture, engineering, and construction. It is responsible to describe that as a later event—not as proof of an unchanged twice-yearly cadence, uninterrupted platform use, or any particular attendance or revenue outcome.

Build a repeatable speaker-led event workflow

HeySummit can organise the event-management layer around recurring online events: pages, registration and access, schedules, speakers, emails, tickets, sponsors and affiliates, video integrations, replays, and reporting. The selected video provider still owns the livestream or webinar delivery, while the organiser owns the programme, production choices, and attendee experience.

See more HeySummit customer success stories, or see how HeySummit works when you need one workflow for registration, speakers, schedules, communications, access, and learning from the next event.