Events Association Virtual Meeting
Creating a Virtual Experience
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Overview
An events association wanted to host a meeting for its members to discuss the ramifications of COVID-19 for the events industry. Due to remote working requirements they decided to run the meeting virtually for an audience of 40 people. The client needed help hosting the meeting in a virtual format, both practically and in terms of format.
Objectives
- Engage the call participants in a relatively brief timeframe (1 hour) and in the format of a virtual meeting
- Facilitate participants joining from all over Europe, many with English as a second language
- Enable the client to include 2 blocks of 4 parallel workshops as ‘breakout rooms’ within the agenda, culminating in another whole-group feedback session
- Encourage topical discussions and display the results of polls in real-time
- Ensure collaboration and productivity, with measurable outcomes
40
Delegates
Virtual
100%
Enagement
Solution
- We delivered this virtual meeting using a combination of 2 platforms – it was hosted on Zoom (professional standard) and our Open Audience Engage platform provided interactivity features
- We worked with the client to design the optimum agenda for a virtual format, dividing the content into 4 separate discussion points: Finance, Leadership, Trust, and Digital. Open Audience Founder & CEO Leslie Robertson acted as the host and moderator for the Digital workshop
- The Open Audience team demonstrated how to use our interactivity features – Open Audience Engage had been set up to be accessed via a simple browser link that was linked in the Zoom web chat and shown on the main screen
- Attendees were asked ‘pre-entry’ polls when joining the meeting to improve the association’s understanding of the challenges facing its members, and the results were displayed as real-time graphs in the Zoom chat window for discussion
- Open Audience Engage also hosted an agenda, including the workshops attendees had chosen ahead of time, as well as relevant materials and links
- Q&A allowed attendees to ask questions and upvote those they agreed with, and could be submitted in any language and automatically translated to English
- The Ideas feature was used during the 4 simultaneous Zoom workshops to brainstorm ideas and suggestions per topic, before being upvoted
- Once the workshops ended and the whole audience regrouped, the workshop leaders summarised their findings for further discussion
Results
- Hosting this virtual meeting with creative interactivity features enabled our association client to provide a positive experience for its members during a challenging time
- Attendees could participate regardless of location or first language, and actionable next steps and key advice was gathered as a result of networking and collaboration
- Extremely positive response from the client and from the attendees, who felt it had given them a morale boost as well as useful advice
- Client gathered a significant amount of valuable information about the challenges its members are facing, through our ability to gather and supply that information, both in real-time and as detailed post-event reports