Blackthorn launches Forge, ending the choice between Salesforce-native and easy-to-use event technology

NEW YORK, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackthorn, the leading event management platform built natively on Salesforce, today announced the general availability of Forge: a single workspace where event teams can build and run events end-to-end, from setup and registration to attendee management, budget, and reporting. The announcement lands on the opening day of IMEX America in Las Vegas, where Blackthorn is running live Forge demos at its booth all week.

According to Global DMC Partners' 2026 Meetings & Events Industry Pulse Survey, 70% of event professionals don't yet have the tools in place to track and prove the ROI of their programs. Blackthorn was built to close that gap by keeping event data inside the same Salesforce org that already holds an organization's donor, customer, or student records. What's remained harder to solve is who can actually do the day-to-day work: Salesforce is powerful, but the learning curve has kept event building in the hands of a technical few.

That's the trade-off event technology has lived with for a decade. Platforms capable of running a real program, the kind built on top of a CRM like Salesforce, tend to come with a learning curve. The ones that feel simple from day one usually live entirely outside of Salesforce, with event data reaching the CRM via an export or a sync job that can fail. Forge is the first release where a Blackthorn customer doesn't have to choose. Every event record it creates lives natively in Salesforce, with nothing exported and nothing waiting on a sync, now behind a front end built for the person running the event, rather than the person administering the org.

"For years, Salesforce-native meant powerful but hard to learn, while easy-to-use tools kept your event data somewhere else, hoping it would catch up. No platform built to run a real program could promise both, until now," said Chris Federspiel, CEO of Blackthorn. "Good software shouldn't need a manual, and starting today, running Salesforce-native events end-to-end will be accessible to everyone — regardless of their technical skillset."

Blackthorn previewed Forge this past February as part of a broader platform vision, and has since been refining it with a live customer cohort ahead of today's release.

"The flow to set up an event was much easier than in Salesforce," said Kevin Show from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, who has been an early Forge user. "It is very easy to navigate and less jumping through different screens to set up an event."

Forge delivers easy-to-use Salesforce-native functionality

Inside Forge, planners set up events, manage sessions and speakers, configure tickets and registration, track attendees, send scheduled emails, manage budget and payments, and pull reports, all without opening the Salesforce interface that their CRM admin lives in.

The new Page Designer, built into Forge, lets planners brand the attendee-facing event page themselves: drag and drop, no developer, with sessions, speakers, and tickets pulling in live as the event changes.

"Using Page Designer feels like switching from a PC to a Mac," said Charlotte Strickler, Director, Special Events Strategy at Purdue for Life Foundation. "It's beautiful, it's intuitive, and we were able to jump right in without needing someone to walk us through it. We're building event pages that actually look and feel like Purdue for Life, while having more flexibility to create them ourselves."

"We spent years proving Salesforce-native events could scale," said Andrea Adcock, Blackthorn's Chief Product Officer and Chief Architect. "Every event, every ticket, every registration form created with Forge is still a Salesforce record. We just built a front door for the person actually running the event instead of the person administering the org."

Forge, including Page Designer, is available starting today. Prospective customers can see Forge in action at Blackthorn's IMEX America booth, B5096. Existing Blackthorn Events customers can start using Forge in their Salesforce sandbox today at forge.blackthorn.io, with guided migration to production available. Everyone is invited to register for a live walkthrough at "Forge FORWARD: The Future of Salesforce-Native Events" on Oct. 20, 2026.

For more information about Blackthorn, visit www.blackthorn.io.

About Blackthorn

Blackthorn is the leading Salesforce®-native event management platform. With Blackthorn, you can run your entire event program from your Salesforce CRM. Blackthorn Payments centralizes online, subscription, event, and mobile payments directly in Salesforce. Blackthorn Messaging lets you easily send and track text message communications directly in Salesforce. Blackthorn is the most recommended event management app on G2, powering more than 250,000 events annually. Blackthorn was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York.

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SOURCE Blackthorn