Case Study: Flipping the virtual switch on the world’s largest in-person GLOBAL investment banking healthcare conference…without missing a beat.
EXPERIENCE SHOWCASEThe Largest Global Investment Banking ConferencePlanned as in-personthen went virtual in less than a month |
|
Shifting from an in-person to a virtual event is a nerve-wracking experience, even under the best of circumstances. But when a large conference with 600 presenting companies, on which hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business transactions rely, has to be virtualized in less than a month, there’s only one way to do it.
One of the top three, global investment banks has relied on MAP Digital, as their long-term partner, to run their conferences. MAP Digital is an events agency that was born hybrid over 20 years ago. Here’s how the MAP Team of experienced event designers and engineers turned this massive in-person conference into a flawlessly delivered virtual-only one on their MetaMeetings platform.
“Thanks so much to the MAP team for all of your many months of work and then flipping to virtual in the final moments! Everything went very smoothly.”
—Global Investment Banking Client
“‘Thanks’ doesn’t cut it but really nothing does to say how grateful I am for your dedication, your teamwork, your partnership, your problem solving, your quick pivot to fully virtual. It’s an incredible feat and I’m so impressed every day.”
—Global Investment Banking Client
Sizing up the situation and making the tough decision
After months of backup planning with MAP Digital, the client moved the conference to virtual only on December 15, 2021, for a start date of January 10, 2022. Because of our 20 years’ (hybrid) digital events experience, MAP Digital was able to execute the pivot to virtual seamlessly – and immediately enacted “Plan B” hoping that no time would be lost due to the holiday season and COVID-related supply chain delivery issues. Here’s what the pivot required:
More humans, training and equipment. The virtual event required at least 25% more technicians, producers, and speaker coordinators to now manage 2000 speakers into Virtual Conference Rooms; and to capture, webcast, and archive presentations. With more staff, MAP also needed to source additional equipment—which means identical, secure, and compliant laptops with the same operating software, memory, and applications—which then need to be shipped to more home offices, bedrooms, and even heated garages. In addition, every employee’s internet connection had to be tested (and upgraded if needed) to deliver consistent connectivity. Then the new, additional staff had to be on-boarded according to compliance, sent equipment, trained and participate in a series of mock events. All done over Christmas and New Year’s.
More live presentations and speakers. Healthcare companies that had canceled their in-person participation rejoined as virtual presenters, and some companies that would not normally webcast their in-person presentations would now have to do so. The conference agenda soon grew to 631 live sessions.
All speakers would now need to be managed by a Virtual Conference Room Producer who would remotely check their technical set up, and manage their live virtual session. All presentations, instructions, special requests and Zoom credentials were listed in each Session’s microsite on the MetaMeetings platform.
New interactivity and complex webcast feeds. In 2022, conference organizers invited the tens of thousands of live attendees to ask questions during the live presentations for the first time. The MetaMeetings platform could handle easily this because its Ask A Questions feature is built into every Session Page.
While all of the presentations from publicly traded companies were live, some international and privately held companies opted combine pre-recorded and live portions of their presentations. The MAP Team had the systems in place to manage multisource streams via the MetaMeetings platform using AWS CloudFront and Wowza servers. MAP Digital video engineers and room producers, then were able to deliver broadcast quality video streams.
Transferring content and managing the live virtual event on one platform. Content management and collecting assets, such as presentations, photos, and biographies, permissions; and determining whether a presenting company will webcast, receive their content usage report, transcript, or video file workload stayed the same when our client flipped the virtual event switch. All content and permissions that were logged into the in-person MetaMeetings conference platform were available, along with an “Event Day View” that served up each Session’s specific details such as Zoom credentials, contact information of all the speakers, host presenters and MAP technicians, along with latest version of presentations and content usage statistics.
Because of our 20 years of partnership with this global bank, MAP Digital invested the time and resources to build MetaMeetings, an enterprise-grade, event Software-as-a-Service platform to manage all of their global conferences. The MAP Team of experienced event engineers and designers executed a detailed deployment plan that relies on time-tested workflows, along with established APIs into the client’s internal enterprise databases that are event-type agnostic whether the event takes place in-person, virtually, or a combination of both.
MAP Digital: MetaMeetings
Readymade for Events 3.0: Events-as-Community and Content Marketing Engines
From on-site connectivity to webcast production, API workflow integration, event community content curation to data analytics, MAP Digital’s event designers and engineers will help you meet your event and your stakeholders’ KPIs.
One, Integrated Event Platform
MetaMeetings does the heavy lifting of live webcasts, content management and optimization, attendee badging with RFID and agenda signage via a single dashboard in an all-in-one, integrated Event SaaS platform.