Hundreds of event agencies use Hopin to host virtual and hybrid events for their clients every month.
And many of these agencies are building never-before-seen virtual experiences to wow event attendees and increase engagement virtually.
In this post, you’ll learn the strategies that four leading event agencies use to keep attendees engaged, amaze them with new experiences and increase the time they spend inside virtual events. If you're an event agency interested in learning more about our partner program (or would like more details on how agencies leverage Hopin for their events), contact our team.
Engage your audience with creative, innovative activities and events. (emc3)
Most virtual events consist of back-to-back, educational presentations from topic experts. Over time, this repetitive format can disengage event attendees.
Instead, consider how you can create content that engages with your audience in new, creative fun ways. Many event agencies are creating entirely new event activities to do just this.
“We’ve run everything from virtual conferences to awards ceremonies to cooking classes to virtual escape rooms on [Hopin] and our partners have been loving it,” said Josh King, Head of Business Development at emc3, an event and creative agency.
They even ran a virtual awards ceremony on Hopin — the ELTons Innovation Awards 2020, a ceremony for professionals working in education innovation and leadership. Twenty nine award finalists joined the live Hopin stage to find out who won the awards, and each winner was able to give a live acceptance speech from the stage.
Before and after the award ceremony, attendees could participate in roundtables and connect and catch up with colleagues through Hopin’s one-on-one video networking and chat.
Build community and make your event more accessible with rooms for smaller groups. (Saint Rock Media)
The average virtual meeting or event includes one big room with hundreds or even thousands of people. Because it’s a large crowd in one space, this format makes it very difficult for attendees to build community or relationships in smaller groups or one-on-one.
To allow event attendees to build community and relationships, create smaller rooms within your virtual event. Within these rooms, small groups can gather, communicate and create relationships.
That’s exactly what Camp Swamp did to move their summer camp online. Saint Rock Media, a full-service digital agency, helped Camp Swamp create a 10-week virtual camp experience on Hopin.
To allow campers to build deeper relationships, Camp Swamp and Saint Rock Media created virtual “cabins” with Hopin’s Sessions feature. Each cabin had two counselors and a group of campers. Campers also had a room that served as a “common area” and networking segments called the “Ring of Honor,” where they were encouraged to compliment and support each other.
Camp Swamp is headquartered in Athens, Georgia, but they have 15 affiliate campsites around the world in South Africa, India, Taiwan, Brazil, and Nepal.
To accommodate these international attendees, many of whom spoke different languages, Camp Swamp and Saint Rock Media created language specific rooms and customized each child’s experience depending on what ticket type they purchased.
Create a strategy to keep attendees inside your event. (Mann Made)
After spending days attending sessions that feel the same, it’s easy for event attendees to become tired or fatigued. And once they feel this way, they’re more likely to leave.
To combat this, you need a strategy to keep attendees engaged and inside your virtual event.
Mann Made, an event management company, designed a creative engagement strategy to entertain attendees at the fourth annual SingularityU South Africa Summit.
They created multiple educational tracks that ran concurrently on different stages and in different sessions. By doing this, the audience had to decide what session they would attend, because there were too many tracks to attend them all. If an attendee left the event, they might miss a session or talk.
Having multiple educational tracks also keeps attendees with different interests engaged. If one session isn’t relevant or interesting to an attendee, they can attend a different session. Organizers can also choose to send session recordings to their attendees after an event for on-demand access.
To reduce the fatigue of attending similar virtual sessions, Mann Made varied the length of sessions and stage events. Sessions lasted anywhere from five minutes to one hour.
Mann Made also wows attendees from the very beginning of events by creating a polished intro.
Mann Made created and played a video in the opening ceremony for the SUSA Summit Online. For this video, Mann Made built an animated and virtual city, stage and audience.
According to Mann Made, beginning the event in this highly polished and produced way showed the audience they could expect exceptional content at the event and encouraged them to attend the rest of the event.
Related: Gamification: How to Increase Engagement at Your Virtual Event
Invest in great scenography. (Der Brutkasten)
Scenography refers to the design of all the stage or visual elements during a virtual event, like atmosphere, lighting, background and props.
Great scenography elevates and polishes a virtual event and can increase the amount of time attendees spend in your event.
“We believe that the scenography plays an important role for the look and feel of the event, which has an influence on the retention rate and retention time,” says Dejan Jovicevic, Co-Founder and CEO of Der Brutkasten, an Austrian multimedia platform.
Der Brutkasten worked with Wüstenrot, a financial services group, to host the Wüstenrot IT recruiting reverse pitch. To create an unparalleled look and feel for the event, Der Brutkasten created a 100m2 LED wall that appeared behind speakers on the set.
And for the WKÖ CodingDay 2020 event, Der Brutkasten created a polished, branded stage for speakers as well.
A polished set and scenography will make your event feel higher quality and more valuable.
Interested in joining Hopin’s agency partner program? Contact our sales team today to learn more.
Check out the Hopin agency partner program
“After researching and testing 30+ different virtual platforms, we decided to start working closely with Hopin, as it was clearly a front runner in the market.
Ever since then, our business has changed dramatically. We’re now working on 20+ virtual events for clients located around the world and we’re loving Hopin.”
- Josh King, Head of Business Development at emc3
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