Executive Summary
Together with the Neuromuscular Disease Network for Canada (NMD4C) and Muscular Dystrophy Canada (MDC), Jesse’s Journey hosted their Continuing Professional Development educational conference through Whova’s all-in-one event management platform. The Defeat Duchenne Canadian Conference presented expert subject matter on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) standardized care to collaborate and further educate healthcare providers across Canada.
After using Whova for two previous hybrid events, the organizers knew their two-day in-person event could smoothly transition and broaden to a virtual 6-day event with Whova’s help. The organizers successfully brought doctors, patients, advocates, and more together online to discuss standards of care and collaborate through Whova’s many networking tools.
“As soon as we had to go virtual, it was almost a no-brainer we were going to use Whova because we had used it in the past.”
Interview with the Organizers
About Defeat Duchenne Canadian Conference
In the fight to defeat DMD, Jesse’s Journey, Canada’s leading charity, has funded over $14.8 million in research projects worldwide. NMD4C and MDC are renowned Canadian organizations that improve care and support for neuromuscular diseases through extensive research and collaboration.
Their conference strives to bring DMD specialists together to connect and collaborate to provide quality patient care. With Whova’s support, the organizers managed attendance and gathered essential data about standards of care.
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Challenges
- Manage attendance for training credits
The continuing professional development training credits incentivize many attendees to join the event. To ensure the accuracy of these credits, the organizers needed to record session attendance.
- Facilitate speaker sessions through Zoom
Many speakers were already very familiar with Zoom, so the organizers wanted to limit the new technology they had to learn by utilizing Zoom for session live streams.
- Gather attendee data
The organizers wanted to capture DMD standard of care practices in Canada through the lenses of physicians and patient family members. They needed an easy-to-distribute survey form that would automatically collect this data for them.
- Separate attendees by specific roles
Each section of the event targeted specific attendees, so the organizers wanted to separate attendees by ticket types. This way, they could gather data and target communications or sessions between different categories of attendees.
- Encourage network over the three separate events
The organizers wanted to target different audiences based on the session subject matter throughout the event. They needed an online space to post questions and inspire discussions specific to each group of attendees.
Solutions
- Track attendance with Whova’s analytics
Whova automatically tracks session attendance and records attendee names, emails, and important titles in a comprehensive list. Whova also tracks how long each attendee stayed in a session, so the organizers could email credits only for attendees that stayed in necessary training sessions.
- Embed Zoom into Whova for easy speaker access
The organizers conveniently embedded Zoom streams directly into Whova’s platform so speakers could present from a platform they already knew. Speakers could join directly through Zoom while attendees watched the live stream on Whova’s platform.
The organizers also enabled breakout rooms for 1:1 session chats while communicating through Whova’s in-app chat options. They could also disable Zoom’s chat, so attendees did not have to switch between different chats.
“I was pleased the integration with Zoom was even better within Whova. I think that helped calm the nerves of a lot of our speakers and took the administrative burden off us because they were already familiar with that tool.”
Attendees could join the Zoom stream directly in Whova while chatting on the sidebar
- Collect information through Whova’s surveys
The organizers created a post-event survey to improve future conferences by gathering information about the virtual event. It was easy to post the survey through Whova’s announcements and remind attendees to complete the form. They could select all attendees or send different surveys for healthcare professionals versus patients living with the disease. Whova’s system automatically collects all survey data for organizers to view and export for valuable research to improve patient care.
- Categorize attendees through multiple ticket types
The organizers created three different events in Whova for this conference. Attendees could sign up for one or all three events through Whova’s registration page. Each registration included multiple tickets to separate attendees between specific doctor specialties, Duchenne partners, sponsors, and speakers so the organizers could keep track of the different categories present in each event.
The organizers customized questions for each tickets registration form that Whova seamlessly integrates into the platform for the organizers to view and target communications based on the attendees present.
Attendees registered under specific tickets
- Targeting different audiences on the Community Board
The Community Board, the app’s online discussion forum, let the organizers set up discussions for each of the three events ahead of time. They posted topics targeted towards session information to spark conversations about inclusion and rehabilitation management. Attendees could also post discussion topics, share photos, and send 1:1 messages to speakers or attendees.
The virtual icebreakers were an excellent way for attendees to introduce themselves on the app, where other attendees could view their profiles and set up a meet-up or phone call.
“Based on the specialty of each session, we would set up the community boards for them to ideally engage.”
Attendees could post icebreakers to introduce themselves by answering a fun prompt about their favorite foods or travel spots
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