Skip to content
Hopin LogoHopin Logo
Features
Features
Virtual Venue
Create incredible experiences for your digital audience.
Studio
Produce professional, high-quality streams with ease.
Event Marketing
Promote beautiful landing pages that drive registrations.
Onsite
Manage in-person attendee and exhibitor engagement.
Platform
Integrations
Connect Hopin with your favorite event apps and services.
Security
Protect your events with enterprise-grade security.
Developers
Develop tools and apps.
What’s new?

Monthly Product Update

Read more about Hopin's January 2022 product updates that help with simplifying event creation, optimizing the attendee experience, and enhancing event production, expanding tech integrations.

Monthly Product Update

Read about Hopin product updates that help with audience engagement, data & insights, production quality, hybrid solutions and more.
Solutions
Event Type
Virtual Events
Host a digital event that engages your entire community.
Hybrid Events
Extend your in-person event to a global audience.
Internal Events
Maintain company culture in a hybrid work environment.
What’s new?

2022 Guide to Hybrid Events

Hopin's 2022 guide to best-in-class hybrid events: what they are, why they're important, and how to ensure they're successful.

2022 Guide to Hybrid Events

Hopin's 2022 guide to best-in-class hybrid events: what they are, why they're important, and how to ensure they're successful.
Pricing
Resources
Resources
Case Studies
See how Hopin helps teams achieve their event goals.
Blog
Learn the latest best practices and stay ahead of industry trends
Hopin’s Certified Agency Partners
Hopin's Partner agencies who are experts in Hopin and can help elevate your events!
Hopin's Certified Agency Program
Learn about our Certified Agency Program and the benefits of partnering with Hopin!
Support
Need a hand? Let's get you answers to your questions.
Hopin Learn
Master the Hopin platform with our event experts.
Guides and Templates
Dive deep into event guides and save time with our curated templates
What’s new?

#EventProof: Level-Up Your Virtual Experiences

Join event industry peers for a half-day summit dedicated to showing event profs how to become #EventProof. You’ll learn how to level-up your virtual events and craft online experiences that satisfy attendees and sponsors alike.

2022 Event Planning Toolkit

Download our free Event Budget, Event Brief, and Run of Show Templates to make planning your in-person, hybrid, and virtual events easy. Save time, stay organized, and feel confident you and your team are on the right track.

Hopin XC: The Global Summit for Experience Creators

Join us for the inaugural virtual summit to recognize, celebrate, and elevate the professionals behind the experiences that define us and make the world feel closer. You'll learn how industry thought leaders are engaging distracted audiences and discover innovative ways to gather.
Company
Why Hopin
Learn the benefits of hosting your events on Hopin.
Careers
If you love solving big challenges, let's chat.
About Us
See how we're reimagining events.
Our Mission
Learn what fuels the Hopin engine.
What’s new?

#EventProof: Level-Up Your Virtual Experiences

Join event industry peers for a half-day summit dedicated to showing event profs how to become #EventProof. You’ll learn how to level-up your virtual events and craft online experiences that satisfy attendees and sponsors alike.

Hopin XC: The Global Summit for Experience Creators

Join us for the inaugural virtual summit to recognize, celebrate, and elevate the professionals behind the experiences that define us and make the world feel closer. You'll learn how industry thought leaders are engaging distracted audiences and discover innovative ways to gather.
Log in
Log inRequest demo
Back to all case studies
UCLA Campus seal

How UCLA hosted a Nobel Laureate and 2,000+ attendees at their virtual community event on Hopin

About UCLA

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public research university. UCLA is the number-one public university in the United States, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report.

Challenge

Events are a key part of UCLA’s strategy to educate and build connections, not only among students and faculty but also in its community. It hosts orientation events for new students, graduation ceremonies, educational events for the public, and more. 

In 2020, UCLA needed to move all of its in-person events online.

Lisa Garibay, Public Relations and Diversity Manager for the Division of Physical Sciences at UCLA, wanted to create a virtual experience for UCLA’s events that closely mirrored the in-person experience.

For the UCLA Physical Sciences team, this meant using a more advanced platform than a virtual meeting tool. Garibay explains that an online meeting tool would require event attendees to navigate to and from dozens or even hundreds of different virtual rooms with unique links.

Instead, UCLA wanted an event platform that could handle all of their events—both large community events and small student-orientation events —and give attendees one place to access all of the different areas of an event. They also wanted to create the sense of an interactive, in-person experience. 

“People are tired of online meetings, but not necessarily tired of being online to connect because that's all we really have,” she says.

Solution

UCLA found their ideal event platform in Hopin. “We chose Hopin specifically because we felt it would best replicate specific in-person events where interpersonal connection and hands-on interaction were key.” 

First, they used Hopin for a series of internal, orientation events to welcome new students to UCLA in the fall of 2020. During these events, students could meet and build relationships with faculty, older students, and their classmates. They also attended sessions and panels to orient them to their new university.

“It was so critical for us to have a way for these new students to feel welcome and to feel a support system behind them at a time which was nothing like what they've been imagining college was going to be like,” says Garibay.

After successfully hosting this series of orientation events on Hopin, UCLA also chose to host Exploring Your Universe—an annual, free, public community event—on Hopin.

Exploring Your Universe (EYU) is a science fair with activities for kids from kindergarten through grade 12. It includes interactive booths, guided virtual science demonstrations, science talks, and Q&As where students can ask scientists questions.

Exploring Your Universe UCLA Hopin Virtual Event Landing Page

Hopin features UCLA used:

  • Hopin Stage: UCLA used one Hopin Stage for featured talks and presentations—like keynote presentations and an award ceremony—so it could leverage the large attendance capacity (100,000+ concurrent attendees) of Hopin Stages. 
  • Hopin Expo: With over 40 booths, UCLA created an expo center for hands-on science demos and experiments. Scientists used a combination of pre-recorded video and live demonstrations in their booths, and they allowed attendees to join the live video stream to ask questions.
  • Hopin Sessions: UCLA leveraged the interactive features of Hopin Sessions to host Q&As between scientists and kids where both kids and scientists could join the live video stream at one time.

When hosted in person, EYU’s hands-on science demonstrations are the most memorable part of the event. To replicate this experience, UCLA used Hopin’s Expo feature and booths for the science demonstrations.

“The expo functionality was unmatched,” says Garibay. “I cannot imagine how we would have been able to replicate virtually this in-person event and the experience of having so much going on at the same time if we didn't have something like Hopin. It would have been impossible. We were able to create that feel of being on campus and moving from booth to booth.”

UCLA created more than 40 virtual booths in the expo area of Hopin—including an information booth for attendees to ask general questions, an elephant toothpaste experiment booth, a candy boat racers lab where attendees designed boats out of foil, and many more.

Hopin Virtual Expo booths UCLA Exploring Your Universe

‍

For the interactive Q&A, UCLA leveraged Hopin’s Sessions. “The sessions were also fantastic in terms of being able to connect people intimately and interactively with scientists,” says Garibay.

“We'd never before had the opportunity for kids to be able to chat with our renowned faculty in such an intimate way. This was one instance where hosting an event online was a bonus, because it allowed our scientists to connect with attendees where in-person scheduling may not have allowed.

"We were even able to offer bilingual Q&A sessions to reach an even broader audience. Both our professors and the kids who attended loved that!”

Another highlight of the event was their keynote speaker—Andrea Ghez, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics—who spoke about black holes. UCLA used a Hopin Stage for this keynote speech. “It was an extraordinary opportunity,” says Garibay. “We considered that a screaming success.”

Result

Over 2,000 people from around the world joined the Exploring Your Universe event. “It was a huge boon for us because in person we're only able to bring in people from Los Angeles and people who can get to the UCLA campus,” says Garibay. “But we were able to spread the joy far and wide this year.”

Colleagues from other departments at UCLA who attended Exploring Your Universe were impressed with Hopin. Garibay says, “They came to us saying, ‘Hopin was great. How can we use it too?’”

Garibay explains that Hopin gave UCLA the ability to host unique, memorable, interactive events. “We were able to give our attendees an experience that felt very different from and very special compared to other things they were attending or interacting with,” says Garibay.

The expo functionality was unmatched. I cannot imagine how we would have been able to replicate virtually this in-person event if we didn't have Hopin. It would have been impossible.
#
Lisa Garibay
Public Relations and Diversity Manager for the Division of Physical Sciences at UCLA

Get started with Hopin

Contact sales

Read more customer stories

The Next Web
The Next Web

How The Next Web ran 9 events with 20,000+ attendees in 8 weeks on Hopin

Read story
HiiL Innovating Justice Forum
HiiL Innovating Justice Forum

How the Virtual HiiL Innovating Justice Forum provided live interpretation in 2 languages with Hopin and Interprefy

Read story
Smashing Media
Smashing Media

How Smashing Media engaged attendees for an average of 13 hours on Hopin

Read story

Moving your event online actually amplifies the value of sponsoring it

Get our free ebook How to Generate 6-Figure Value for Virtual Event Sponsors today.
Hopin Logo
Hopin is the all-in-one event management platform for virtual, hybrid, and in-person events.
Watch your live events on your phone
App Store downloadGoogle Play download
Request demo
Get started with Hopin
PricingStreamYardContact usSign upLog in
Product
Virtual venueStudioEvent marketingIntegrationsSecurity
Solutions
Virtual eventsHybrid eventsInternal events
Resources
SupportHopin learnCase studiesBlogDevelopersWhat's New
Follow us
Facebook logo
Facebook
LinkedIn logo
Linkedin
Twitter logo
Twitter
Glassdoor logo
Glassdoor
Legal and Policy CenterCookie PreferencesStatusSitemap
© Hopin

Get started with Hopin

Fill out this form to start a conversation with a Hopin team member about your events and get your questions answered.
text
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.