Executive Summary

Alberta Health Services (AHS) partnered with Whova for the 6th annual AHS i4 conference, which focuses on the future of health through their “four i’s”: ideation, incubation, invigoration, and innovation. Attendees joined the virtual conference from all over the world to listen to industry leaders and earn Continuing Education credits. As their second year using Whova to facilitate the virtual event, the organizers utilized many new features, like the Speed Networking sessions, to encourage interactions between attendees.

Interview with the Organizers

About Alberta Health Services (AHS) i4

AHS is one of Canada’s largest government-funded health organizations with a fully integrated system of over 12 health institutions, responsible for ensuring the wellbeing of over 4.4 million citizens in Alberta and other Canadian provinces since 2008. The conference empowers health care workers through dynamic speaker presentations and forward-thinking, technologically driven health and care ideas. With Whova’s assistance, the organizers successfully hosted an interactive pitch presentation and tracked session attendance for training credit distributions. 

Challenges

• Facilitating interactive pitch presentations 

In the past, the organizers facilitated standard poster presentations in person but wanted to try something different this year by creating a more interactive, online environment for the presentations.

• Tracking attendance for training credits 

To accurately award training credits offered by the Canadian College of Health Leaders, the AHS organizers needed session attendance verification for each attendee participating in the event.

• Encouraging networking on the app

With such a wide variety of attendees, from doctors to patient advisors, it was critical they could connect online to share new practices and ideas in their field. They needed an interactive online platform to facilitate conversations and face-to-face video calls.

• Gathering important session feedback 

It was only their second year hosting the virtual event online and the organizers wanted to continuously improve future virtual and in-person events. They wanted to gather session feedback about speaker performance and overall event satisfaction during the event, so attendees did not forget to fill out the feedback forms.

Solutions

• Host interactive pitch competitions in the Artifact Center

The organizers successfully hosted a virtual, collaborative pitch competition through Whova’s Artifact Center. They simply uploaded basic presenter information to Whova’s pre-made excel templates to automatically populate the Artifact Center. They could then quickly email the presenters personal links to upload the rest of their information, including photos, PDFs, and presentation descriptions.

Attendees could view and chat with the presenters in the Artifacts before the two-hour live streamed pitch presentations and after to review the materials as they voted for their favorite presentations. The organizers reviewed the results and announced the competition winners through Whova’s handy in-app Announcements. 

Presenters shared their information through the web and mobile app’s Artifact Center 

• Keep track of session attendance with Whova’s activity tracking

Whova’s system automatically tracks online session activity and monitors how long attendees remain in each live streamed session. Organizers could view the comprehensive lists for each session, complete with attendee names, emails, and company titles to easily verify participation and email credits. They could also download convenient Excel files that listed session viewing activity per each attendee or by each session. 

It was simple for the organizers to export session attendance to PDF and Excel files 

• Encourage face-to-face interactions with Speed Networking sessions

Whova’s Speed Networking tables were a popular feature that helped attendees connect at the virtual conference. After joining the unique “speed dating” session in the agenda, they were randomly ordered into video calls with 2-4 other people. The organizers set the virtual tables to shuffle into new groups every 5 minutes, giving attendees just enough time to meet and exchange ideas within their industry. At the end of the session, Whova conveniently provides each attendee with the contact information of other professionals they met during the session so that they could chat or schedule a virtual meet-up for later. 

• Motivate discussions and meetups on the Community Board 

The app’s Community Board, an online networking forum, was a great way to involve attendees in the virtual community. They could set up video calls through the boards meet-ups, participate in discussion topics, share articles, and introduce themselves through the virtual icebreakers. The organizers motivated attendees to participate online by awarding “certificates of awesomeness” to highly active attendees on the board.

Attendees could add new discussion topics or add to the comments on previous topics in the Community Board

• Efficiently collecting session and event feedback with survey options

To gather data about the overall event, the organizers sent out an in-app survey for attendees to answer questions about their learning experience. With the session feedback forms applied to each live-streamed presentation, attendees quickly answered organizer questions about the session content and speaker satisfaction. If attendees forgot to fill out a form, the organizers could remind them via the app’s Announcements. The organizers could export all survey responses into Excel sheets and PDF files or visualize the survey data in comprehensive bar graphs.