GenXYZ Nominees Thrive: Marc Crawford (2012) — Where is He Now?

Everyone was right when they predicted bright futures for these executives, entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders. Ten-plus years after ColoradoBiz profiled these Top Young Professionals of Colorado, we revisited several to see where their career paths led them and what they are doing now.

Some are with the same companies; others have moved on to different businesses and new roles.

For some, change was inevitable as their companies were acquired or merged with other entities. For still others, the desire to start something new was irresistible. All are continuing to meet and exceed their own career goals and engage with their communities.

The Gen XYZ Awards are open to those who are under 40 and live and work in Colorado.

Marc Crawford

2012: 39, Co-Founder and CEO, Educational Measures

2024: Co-Founder and CEO, Array

It wasn’t easy sustaining any business during the pandemic, but companies related to continuing education programs were especially challenged.

“The vast majority of our revenue was from in-person meetings,” says Marc Crawford, whose company, Array, provides live event technology focused on audience engagement, data collection and analytics to help clients improve future programming. “When COVID hit, it put a stop to those.”

The company, then called Educational Measures, continued to grow, partly because it had already planned to offer a hybrid format for meetings. Before COVID, the company moved its platform to the cloud, to better enable clients to move to virtual meetings.

READ: Top 5 Tech Tools Every Hybrid Team Needs for Effective Collaboration 

Array, the name of the product Educational Measures offered and the name of the company since 2021, found success in these moves. “A lot of our clients pivoted to virtual meetings, and we added some new clients,” Crawford says. “There was a period of two to three months where we were all pretty nervous, but fortunately we were able to adjust.”

Life-sciences clients began holding virtual meetings to teach about new vaccines, drugs and other topics. Soon clients saw the benefits of conducting virtual meetings instead of in-person, even post-pandemic. “For advisory boards or thought leadership, it’s hard to get people to fly out and pick someone’s brain for a day,” Crawford says.

Inflation also plays a role in the increase in virtual meetings, as food, lodging and airfare costs have increased, and meeting planners are challenged with cutting costs. Today, about 65% of the meetings Array provides technology for are in person, 20% are virtual, and 15% are hybrid.

READ: Best Hybrid Work Strategies — Success in the Post-Pandemic Corporate World

Array is a content engagement partner that collects data from meetings to help clients find out what percent of the audience understood and asked questions, what percent of the attendees did not engage with the speaker, and which programs need to be revamped.

Since it was founded 20 years ago, Array has provided information and actionable insights from more than 10,000 events.

Clients attain 90% engagement in the content using Array’s technology, Crawford says, and the technology can even measure sentiment, or how the attendees feel about the content.

The company also provides translation services for educational meetings. Before COVID, in-person training events would often attract professionals from different countries, so the meetings needed to be translated into different languages.

“There were translation booths with someone in the room, feeding that through a headset,” Crawford says. “Now we’re doing that through the platform. All the translators are remote, so that’s saving money for the client company. The translation is still happening in real time, through iPads.”

The iPads are an important piece of hardware for translation and other services, and they also are a big element in Array’s community work. During the pandemic, Array had to replace its iPads with updated ones, so it donated 500 iPads to a senior living facility.

“Elderly residents were able to communicate with their families on Facetime,” Crawford says. “It seems so simple, but it proved to be so meaningful.”

Array also donated iPads to, and works with, YMOP, a Denver metro area-based enrichment program that teaches Black and Brown boys social-emotional wellness, leadership and academic success, according to the organization’s website.

Today the Greenwood Village-based Array has more than 100 employees. The company continues to focus on life sciences, and one of the newer areas is to help clients enroll patients for clinical trials.

“One of the things you find going through COVID were efficiencies,” Crawford says. “It started just out of survival, and out of that there’s a lot of what you learned that can still be applied.”

Nora Caley is a freelance writer specializing in business and food topics.