Executive Summary

Sepsis Alliance Summit, sponsored by T2 Biosystems, worked with Whova to throw their second annual educational event. The three-day healthcare conference aimed to inspire healthcare providers, managers, policymakers, and industry leaders from around the world. With the help of the Whova event platform, event-goers could attend presentations from industry leaders and experts and even earn CE nursing credits.

Interview with the Organizer

About Sepsis Alliance Summit

The Whova app helped organizers run their event last year without a problem, so Sepsis Alliance decided to partner with the all-in-one event platform again for even more efficient event planning. Organizers could easily register attendees in-app and manage speakers and sponsors in one location. With Whova’s help, conference organizers boosted participant engagement even further during the three-day event.

Challenges

As an event with thousands of attendees, organizers wanted to ensure everyone was able to fully engage and learn from the Sepsis Alliance Summit.

1. Coordinating busy presenters: With key speakers being prominent doctors who were seeing patients, there was a chance they could be called away during their presentations. Sepsis Alliance needed a way to overcome any possible disruptions and ensure sessions could go on as planned.

2. Maintaining clear communication with attendees: Communication is an important part of any event – in addition to needing a way to keep participants updated with any changes, they also wanted to be sure that attendees could communicate freely with the organizers and each other. 

3. Securing strong ROI for sponsors: Organizers wanted to ensure that sponsors received the same visibility from attendees as they would at an in-person conference. With vendors not having the same physical presence, organizers needed to find a way to ensure they were providing substantial opportunities for visibility and strengthening their ROI.

4. Managing registration for thousands of attendees: As one of the organizers’ first multi-day events, they were faced with the challenge of accurately registering  thousands of attendees virtually. Additionally, organizers need to ensure that they could seamlessly manage attendee information collected during registration.

5. Tracking attendance for Continuing Education credits: Organizers needed a way to keep track of whether attendees were actually attending and staying for the duration of an online event that qualified them for credits. Since there was no in-person check-in, this needed to be done virtually.

Solutions

1. The Whova app supports both live-streamed and pre-recorded sessions, and to make sure each session ran according to plan, the organizers had presenters pre-record the presentations. The Whova app supports both video hosting and embedding links from other platforms, allowing organizers to present live or upload pre-recorded video directly to Whova or through platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, etc, while attendees engaged with the session through Whova’s session chat features and submitted questions for the speakers through Q&A.

Speakers submitted pre-recorded videos that were embedded into the platform 

2. Organizers created resources and walk-throughs and utilized Whova’s many pre-made guides so that attendees would get familiar with the platform, allowing attendees to be completely engaged and get the most out of the conference using Whova features. One of these features was the Community Board, which supported the thousands of messages sent during the event, facilitating accessible communication between organizers and participants. The announcement feature allowed organizers to communicate with attendees by sending out emails and in-app notifications to keep them informed and engaged.

Attendees loved the platform, and it gave Sepsis Alliance precisely what they needed for the virtual conference without unnecessary bells and whistles. Getting attendees to sessions, engaging them, and connecting them with educational resources in the easiest way possible was extremely valuable to organizers.

3. Sponsors were thrilled with the high visibility and number of leads they received from the event’s digital booths and gamification. Using Whova’s Sponsor and Exhibitor Centers, organizers provided digital booths that displayed sponsor photos, videos, brochures, and more. With Whova’s exhibitor lead retrieval tools, attendees could interact with the sponsors by leaving a like or comment to be counted as a lead. By the end of the virtual event, sponsors were very happy with their leads, with over 850 generated over the three-day conference.

Sponsors and exhibitors were displayed with in-app digital booths

The organizers also leveraged Whova’s Passport Contest to increase booth traffic through gamification. With the Passport Contest, attendees can compete to win a prize by collecting a virtual “stamp” from each participating booth they visit. This contest doubled booth traffic, increased leads, and improved sponsor visibility.

4. Whova’s affordable online registration allowed organizers to register 4,500 event attendees through the same platform they were using to manage the rest of the event. Sepsis Alliance Summit’s organizers could easily collect attendee information with a customized ticketing form, with different questions for different ticket types. 

That information was instantly integrated with the rest of the platform, so if an event has benefits for VIP ticket holders or had attendees register for specific sessions, that information syncs along with the attendee list.  With Whova, organizations can also create multiple tickets, discount codes, and add-ons during registration.

The organizers ran registration right through Whova with a branded ticketing page

5. Whova’s Attendee Activity features keep track of which event-goers attended what sessions and how long they stayed there. Organizers could check attendance for each online session by downloading the sheet. viewing attendance information, and distributing CE credits based on that.