Case Study: Taking the Global Summit of Women Virtual
The Global Summit of Women’s mission is to bring female global leaders and entrepreneurs together to discuss economic opportunities for women. In April of 2020, the GSW was scheduled to celebrate their 30th anniversary conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
Mary Ann Pierce, MAP Digital’s CEO was to speak on a panel curated by GSW board member and fellow Equality Moonshot co-founder, Tess Mateo. The panel would discuss MAP Digital’s amplification of Equality Moonshot from the International Day of Women and Girls in Science at the UN to build a larger community fostering women and girls in STEM worldwide via social media.
Video Snippet: Mary Robinson
“Women’s leadership is more important now than at any time…I salute you on your 30th Anniversary.”
During the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, Irene Natividad, founder and president of the Global Summit of Women asked Mary Ann Pierce to discuss how she could take the Global Summit of Women virtual. MAP Digital agreed to produce an April 23rd virtual session and then agreed to produce six more “From the Summit to You” virtual sessions including the 30th Anniversary celebration, rescheduled to October, featuring a keynote address from the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson.
Strategy
Once the decision was made to go entirely virtual, the Global Summit of Women worked with MAP Digital to produce seven virtual Summit events. MAP Digital quickly deployed their MetaMeetings Platform, creating a website for the Global Summit of Women to hold video webcast sessions, white papers, slide presentations and attendee usage data. MAP Digital’s team employed its best practices, requiring testing with each speaker prior to the live event. For the Global Summit of Women, this meant working with over 30 participants on Zoom, who called in from various time zones ranging from Australia to Mexico, Turkey to New York and South Africa to Japan. We even mixed in pre-recorded video and invited questioners into the Zoom video conference room so that they could ask their questions “on air.”
MetaMeetings Features
All-encompassing Platform
Unlike many virtual conferences hosted via Zoom, one MetaMeetings event page was created to hold all seven of the virtual sessions so that stakeholders could easily access the entire summit on one website. For attendees, the MetaMeetings platform offers an easy, one-time registration and a simple login for return users. Once on the site, users can view the event, watch the other on-demand webcasts and discover an abundance of resources relevant to individual sessions. A user can view sessions, download materials and share the sessions. A bonus to hosting the summit on MetaMeetings was that the entire event and all of its rich content will remain on the site for an entire year.
Customization
The summit hosted numerous sessions in various forms. Some of the sessions included roundtable discussions, panels or keynote speeches; each of which required a different event layout. The MAP Digital team was able to customize each session’s page, on the GSW MetaMeetings platform, to meet the client’s requests.
Empirical Data
From the moment an attendee registers on the MetaMeetings event page, the platform records each unique click of the user (found in the image below). This data is extremely valuable to the producer because it shows them which sessions and downloadable resources were most popular among attendees. The virtual Summit proved how valuable it is to make on-demand sessions available: The number of on-demand webcast views was nearly double that of the live webcast views for this event.
Outcome
Throughout the 8 months over which the summit was produced, the MAP Digital team created and supported an engaging, international and compelling experience of the Global Summit of Women for the many attendees of the event. Even though the global pandemic forestalled meeting in person, the MAP Digital team connected the summit members virtually to celebrate their monumental 30th anniversary.
“Happy 30th Anniversary to the Global Summit of Women!! Thank you, Irene for your leadership in making this moment a must in the calendar for all of us. This was so inspiring! Such diversity makes it very, very special.”
—Béatrice M. from Paris, France
“I am very grateful to have participated in this summit for the very first time. Thank you!”
—Quetzelli R. from Mexico
“Having this platform to share successful strategies to advance women’s economic progress and equality globally is amazing. Congratulations!”
—Sandra S. from Mexico
“What a wonderful celebration with so many Summitistas!”
—Alice D. from New York