tbd: ‘Mollitiam’ 2021 virtual conference

Our good friend Paul Armstrong from Here/Forth approached us to virtualise the annual conference: Technology. Behaviour. Data. also known as TBD. Normally a large, all-day in-person event each year with mind-blowing speakers, we had to come up with a solution to virtualise the conference this year without losing it’s value and TBD-ness.

We built the entire conference as a website, with our corporate presentation software, EckoEnterprise, embedded within it to create a seamless branded experience for attendees, with branded lower thirds graphics for speakers as well as some interactive elements.

Objectives.

TBD needed to be a virtual conference that was interactive and easy to use with simple features and interactive elements, while looking high-end as they boasted a high calibre of speakers from world renowned companies including Google and The Economist. The requirements for the event included a registration system, presentation software, an agenda with 3 different time zones, and sponsors pages.

What we did.

This event was a mix of pre-recorded and live content played throughout the 2-day conference. Our Project Management team combined the 25+ presentations with content, ensuring the slides were in the right order and played out correctly on the live days. All of the video content was put into our EckoEnterprise software and made available as on-demand individual presentations and videos following the conference. The content was uploaded as chapters, so attendees can log in and choose which speakers or sections of the live stream to watch.

We included interactive elements to the conference, including a poll at the beginning and end of the conference to see how attendee’s ‘resilience to the future’ changed from the beginning of the conference compared with the end. On the webcast page, there is a toggle slide which can be moved to adjust the ratios of video to presentation, and can be locked by a user so it does not change throughout the conference. On the Sponsors page, we created a main sponsor page where a collage of logos displayed the TBD sponsors, as well as a separate Groovy Gecko sponsor page where we displayed our recent case studies, a highlight reel, and some information about our company.

“T.B.D. is like TED, but better. Full of variety, interesting, entertaining and always surprising. I have experienced a lot of online conferences over the last few months, but this one was a cut above. Congratulations.”

Nick Hammond, Founder, The Digital Filter

the results.

Across the two mornings (9am-1pm), there was a total of 424 unique live attendees. Over 150 attendees participated in the live polls each day and the average live view duration was over 3 hours (the entire conference was 4 hours each day), which is extremely high for an online conference with this many live attendees.