Case Study: Virtual Event
Virtual Event
The Event →
The Worcestershire LEADER event was put together as a celebration of local rural business development supported by grants, on behalf of the Worcestershire County Council.
It was important that the event encouraged engagement of rural businesses and industry members, as well as having a purpose of celebrating the programme which has helped so many businesses over the last few years.
We worked with the client to develop an agenda which involved both informative workshops, panel sessions and an awards ceremony.
The Solution →
We used a secure, branded website and mobile-friendly registration portal which was built with 2 purposes, the first being to encourage businesses using the LEADER programme to nominate their business for a specific category award, and the second to inform potential attendees of the event and allow them to register their attendance. Email confirmations were sent to confirm attendance and joining instructions were distributed a few days before the event.
We chose to use the platform SpotMe, integrated with Launch TV, which allows users to experience a main hub area as well as being able to access live streams from the same hub. We felt that having everything in one central area with one log-in point makes for a more user-friendly experience and ensures that delegates are accessing all areas of the event rather than just the live streams. Another advantage point of the platform is that event and users have a log-in valid up to 1 year from the event date, meaning that the delegate can continue to access the recordings and content after the event has ended.
The SpotMe hub has an array of engagement features such as networking lobbies, Q&A, polling, broadcasting of participants, gamification and augmented reality. Having such a large range of engagement elements means that the delegate can interact more freely and therefore be connected and feel a part of the event rather than just an audience member. This also worked well for encouraging delegates to engage with the platform pre-event.
All speakers were provided with their speaker links 1 week ahead of the event to allow them to run through as many dry rehearsals as they wanted, combined with us running several virtual demos for speakers and one-to-one sessions to ensure they had a real understanding of the software and ask for any additional support they required.
Ahead of the event, we downloaded our nomination entries for the Awards Ceremony from our microsite and passed them on to the panel for consideration. Once winners were selected, we opted to notify 2 winners of their success and arranged a date to produce a case study on their business, which would later be shown during the event. All remaining nominees were to find out their success in an announcement during the virtual awards ceremony.
It was important to the client that our winners were still a big part of the event, therefore we prepared all nominees ahead of the day by asking for their permission to ‘bring them to screen’, to formally accept their award on the day should they win and invited the 2 (already confirmed) winners with the case studies to the studio to say a few words live. This combination ensured to keep delegates in suspense and the emotions running high for those finding out they had won there and then.