QAV was approached by Open Health, the agency asked to deliver this event, as it is recognised as an expert in the technical field of producing live and virtual events. There was some trepidation around moving the event online for the first time and concerns around the quality of the event. Questions were also muted on how likely on how an online event would meet the overall objectives of allowing attendees to network and share knowledge with one another. However, QAV was able to allay fears ensuring the digital event was delivered to as high a standard as in previous years.
The number of attendees has been growing over the past few years, but this year saw a particular increase due to the increased accessibility for the digital incarnation of event program enabling over 300 attendees to join each day.
With a panel spread across a number of territories and attendees joining globally, QAV organised a number of technical rehearsals several months in advance of the event. The event stakeholder chose Webex as the delivery platform of choice due to their organisation’s familiarity. QAV guided/advised the stakeholder into deciding Webex events was the best fit for this particular program given the added presenter hierarchy functionalities required. Attendees were also sent detailed instructions on how to join as session along with a personalised agendas with relevant access links. QAV delivery also included a fully supported technical service throughout to assist with any individual challenges that arose.
The first day of the event allowed attendees to meet and greet and re-familiarise themselves with their colleagues and the content.
The second and third days were given over to concurrent plenary sessions followed by a specific workshop. Each of the plenary sessions were pre-recorded by QAV’s virtual recording studio and edited into the playback plenary programs which lasted approximately 30minutes. The audience who selected to attend these topic specific sessions watched the plenary recording and then automatically entered the workshop session which were intended to be more interactive and engaging with audiences being asked to partake in case studies, debates and interactive voting which Open Health devised and delivered the integrated Slido application. In addition to that to build further engagement, attendees were invited to ask questions throughout the session which could then be ‘up voted’ to ensure the panel addressed the most pertinent questions during the scheduled panel discussions.
Up to three different workshops were run in parallel on consecutive days with eleven workshops held in total over the course of the event. Attendees able to choose which was most relevant to themselves via the program registration portal which also hosted pre event materials and well as the legacy assets post event.
With a number of time zones to take into account the plenary sessions and workshops were held in the afternoons allowing all attendees to join without any difficulties.
Again utilising QAV’s virtual record studio, each of the sessions were recorded and edited into a series of post event training modules available to watch again on-demand via the online portal.
The final day of the event was dedicated to smaller networking events, award celebrations and sharing successful country best practises as part of the content.
With the program being closed out with a highlights video showcasing the positive experiences of the inaugural virtual Keystone program.
As with all events, the QAV team worked to anticipate any issues that could arise and resolved them before they become a problem. With only virtual communication between QAV, Open Health and their client, the organisers and presenters relied on QAV to ensure the smooth running of the event. QAV’s dedication to event delivery had a number of contingency plans in place, but were fortunately not required.
Francisca Costa, Senior Account Director, Learning and Development at Open Health commented:
“Our client was delighted with the success of their internal training event which we were able to deliver to such a high standard with the support and immense expertise of the team at QAV. There was a huge amount of positive feedback from attendees around the smoothness of the presentations and workshops, as well as the ease of networking on the final day.
“The delivery of the event and the flexibility of the QAV team were outstanding and incredibly reassuring as this was our client first event to have been delivered digitally.
“The needs and expectations of our attendees were fully met. We are incredibly grateful to QAV for their skills, capabilities and generally being a great team to work with and QAV will definitely be our first choice for all future events that we deliver.”
