An intimate event experience for Harvard’s veteran community
The annual Armed Forces Alumni Association Career Fair supports service members and veterans studying at Harvard Business School to transition into new career paths. The event connects attendees with potential employers and shares details of roles at major companies like Disney, J.P. Morgan, and McKinsey & Company.
In 2021, the Armed Forces Alumni Association (AFAA) used Hopin for a new and improved virtual edition of its annual Career Fair. The AFAA had three criteria when choosing a platform for the event: professional quality, a seamless attendee experience, and an intimate setting with plenty of one-on-one interaction. This all had to be manageable by a small events team of only one or two student volunteers.
“We've all become accustomed to legacy platforms where you don't interact and just tune out [...] We experimented with a couple of those communication methods and realized that they weren’t going to create an engaging, interactive experience that would lead to the best outcomes for our club members [...] For that reason, we chose to use the Hopin platform instead.” –Katie Taylor, Co-President, Armed Forces Alumni Association
Before the event, the AFAA used Hopin’s registration features to share the Career Fair with its members. This included a pre-event communication strategy using automated email reminders to maximize attendance and flag key content. Going virtual also meant the pool of organizations the AFAA could reach out to for sponsorship was much larger, including companies that wouldn’t usually be able to travel to an in-person event.