TEDx Vienna – Adventures Within Event (Networking Focus)

Overview

Wanting to engage their community, TEDx Vienna decided to organize a virtual event in the middle of the pandemic.

Their vision was to have an engaging program with multiple speakers delivering insightful sessions, facilitators hosting individual roundtables around a pre-selected topic, and since participants were going to be watching from home by themselves, they wanted to make sure they had a space to connect and interact with each other.

The Challenge

TEDx Vienna decided to use a virtual event platform called Hopin to host the event, while this solved some of the challenges regarding participant interaction, it presented a different one.

How to produce the main content for the event?

In particular, how to get the signal (in a reliable way) from the speakers across different countries, with their slides, videos, audio, together with the moderators?

How to make sure they have the proper setup in terms of physical space, equipment, and software?

How to make sure the audience can hear and see them?

And all in a professionally looking, brand-aligned stream with countdown timers, covers, speaker names, call-to-actions, and background music too.

The Solution

Hopin is a great virtual event platform but it has a big drawback, the way the content gets into the platform.

The system is simply not optimized for it, because it's designed for either A) each speaker to come in individually one by one (not good for an event) or B) to have a professional company like BSEEN produce the content separately and then broadcast the mixed signal into the Hopin stage where participants can watch the talks.

So that's what we did.

Since each speaker was to take part live from their home, we hosted a call from where they all joined to deliver their presentations. Through this call, we also collected their slides, as well as, the video signal from the moderators.

Once we had the video signals from the speakers, using professional live streaming software, we combined them with brand-aligned graphics, countdown timers, background music, and broadcasted the live signal into Hopin for participants to enjoy.

Now, since this is a live event, the big bulk of the work happens before the event so on the previous days, the speakers had a rehearsal call where they were trained on virtual event public speaking, technical checks confirmed

Lastly, to improve overall production quality, the moderators were supported on how to improve the quality of their audio and video signal for an overall participant experience.

The Results

A super engaging event without any technical difficulties. Participants enjoyed the presentations from the stage, joined the discussions happening in the roundtables, and finally networked with one another through video chat.

This event gave TEDx Vienna the perfect opportunity to promote the upcoming event they had in the summer for which they managed to sold out.