YouCanBookMe has been the best resource we've had in the last decade."- Ben Waring, Director of Global PR and Communications, RSAC Conference
Thirty-five years ago, RSAC started as a small gathering of cryptographers trying to figure out how to secure the early internet. Today it's the world's largest cybersecurity conference with 45,000 attendees from 120 countries, 600 companies on the show floor, and around 500 journalists, analysts, broadcasters, and content creators descending on San Francisco every spring to cover it all.
That kind of scale creates problems most scheduling tools aren't built for. And for Ben Waring, RSAC's Director of Global PR and Communications, one problem had been quietly gnawing at him for a decade: how do you manage hundreds of one-on-one media meetings across 18 private meeting rooms, for four days straight, when everyone's schedule is changing by the hour?
The answer, after years of evolution and one very manual era he'd rather forget, turned out to be YouCanBookMe’s team scheduling tool.
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Ben’s stats |
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Location Colorado, US |
Company size Mid-size business |
Industry Events—Cybersecurity |
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YCBM stats Customer since: December 2025 Lifetime bookings: 585 YCBM plan: Team # of seats: 4 |
Multiple booking pages
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Key benefits 500+ meetings across 4 days Increased booked by 20% YoY Eliminated years of manual scheduling chaos |
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RSAC's press room offers 18 private meeting cubes for 500 global media to use across four days of conference. Managing who goes where, and when, had been done manually for years, and caused so much chaos. |
San Francisco's Moscone Center doesn't have space to spare during RSAC week. Every inch of the convention center is booked wall to wall, and finding a quiet spot to conduct an interview or sit down with a source is, as Ben puts it, at a premium. So RSAC reserves a dedicated room adjacent to the working press area; 18 individual cubes, each fitting up to four people, exclusively for media to use for meetings throughout the conference.
It sounds straightforward. It isn't.
About a decade ago, I used to do this process by hand, manually; people calling, ‘I need this room at this time.’ And it was chaos."
Ben had been dealing with this problem since his agency days, when RSAC was a client. He joined the organization full-time a few years later, and the room-booking challenge came with him. The core issues were structural: schedules change constantly at a live event, media don't want meetings appearing on their calendars that they didn't agree to, and the previous systems they'd tried either didn't offer enough flexibility or created friction on both sides.
In earlier iterations, both media and exhibitors could book the rooms, which quickly created confusion. Companies were slotting themselves into reporters' calendars without prior arrangement, and journalists were pushing back.
What Ben needed was a tool that gave control firmly to one side—the media—while remaining simple enough to use on a phone in between sessions, and flexible enough to handle the inevitable last-minute changes of a four-day live event.
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YouCanBookMe gave RSAC a clean, branded booking experience that put media in control, auto-assigned rooms on the back end, and scaled to handle over 500 meetings across four days. |
After years of searching, Ben's tech team colleague came across YouCanBookMe, and the fit was immediately clear. The link was shared exclusively with credentialed media—not exhibitors, not speakers, not general attendees. If you'd earned press access to RSAC, you got the link. If you wanted a meeting space, you booked it yourself.
The flow is elegantly simple: a media member enters who they're meeting with, and YouCanBookMe handles the rest. No room selection required; the system automatically assigns an available cube on the back end.
They're just picking who they’re meeting with. And then YouCanBookMe auto-populates, making sure there's something available at that time."
Once booked, the calendar invite goes to the media member and, if their guests' email addresses are included, to the other party too—read-only, so only the media member can edit or cancel. Clean lines of responsibility, no back-and-forth confusion.
For reporters who wanted to camp out in the same cube all day with back-to-back meetings, the tool accommodated that, too. Rather than being auto-assigned a different room each time, they could select a preferred cube and stay put. For a journalist running six consecutive interviews, that's not a small thing.
Email meeting reminders were set to go out the day before and an hour before each meeting—a considered decision, given that cybersecurity professionals and journalists are both groups with a healthy wariness of sharing personal data.
We let them know: we're not giving your information to anybody. This is strictly to let you know your meeting is in an hour."
The fixed end date feature meant the booking page automatically closed once the conference wrapped—no stray bookings, no confused late arrivals. When the event ended, the page ended with it.
And crucially: the whole thing worked just as well on a phone as on a laptop. For media moving between sessions, keynotes, and the expo floor all day, that mattered.
Having a mobile option as well as a desktop option was something we didn't have in the past."
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In their first year with YouCanBookMe, RSAC recorded a 20% increase in bookings over the previous system, and heard overwhelmingly positive feedback directly from media. |
The numbers told the story clearly. Over 500 meetings were booked leading up to the conference, a 20% jump from the year before. Across the four days of RSAC 2026, those meetings generated a thousand pieces of media coverage.
But the stat Ben kept coming back to wasn't the number; it was the feedback. Media are busy, and skeptical, and they've seen enough conference tech to know when something is genuinely good versus just tolerable.
The feedback we heard directly from our media was: we love this new tool you're using. It looks like our branding, which we really enjoyed. Everyone liked it, it was very friendly and easy to use."
For a PR director who spent the better part of a decade wrestling with this problem, that response landed differently.
YouCanBookMe has been the best resource we've had in the last decade, I will safely say."
The RSAC booking page is unmistakably on-brand. A deep navy background carries RSAC's signature color across the full page, with the organization's circular "C" logo mark centered at the top and a lime green accent stripe running along the top of the booking card; the same green that appears as a highlight color throughout RSAC's visual identity. The result is a booking experience that looks like it belongs to RSAC, not like a third-party tool that's been dropped in.
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Want your booking page to look this intentional? See how other organizations have built on-brand booking pages. |
The fixed end date feature is the detail that makes it work for an annual event. Once RSAC 2026 wrapped, the booking page closed automatically, displaying a clear message directing visitors to the conference website instead. No manual switch-off required, no window for accidental post-conference bookings. When the event ends, the page ends. For a conference that runs on a tight calendar and spends its off-season already planning the next one, that kind of built-in structure is exactly what the setup calls for.
Ben has been working in and around RSAC for the better part of a decade—first on the agency side, managing it as a client, then from inside the organization itself. He's seen the conference grow, seen the media landscape shift, and has learned many valuable takeaways. Here’s one:
Don't assume what worked last year will work this year. RSAC has been running for 35 years, but Ben is explicit that longevity isn't an excuse to stand still.
We don't rest on saying the sauce works every year. We wouldn't still be here if we did it that way."
Every year after the flagship event, the team runs a full debrief—what landed, what didn't, what could be better—and starts building toward the next one. For an organization whose entire mission is keeping pace with a fast-moving, adversarial technology landscape, the same instinct applies internally.
RSAC exists to move the cybersecurity industry forward, giving practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and decision-makers a week to connect, learn, and figure out what comes next. That mission doesn't leave much room for the logistics to get in the way.
YouCanBookMe gave Ben's team the infrastructure to make 500 media meetings happen smoothly across four days: branded, simple, mobile-ready, and built around the way journalists actually want to work. The tool got out of the way and let the conversations happen.
For any organization running events at scale—or simply trying to give the right people a frictionless way to get in the room—that's exactly the point.
Create your free YouCanBookMe account today and let the meetings run themselves.