A Shared Hybrid Event Experience

The Event

• Miller Tanner Associates (MTA) hosts an annual Workshop bringing together its global team from Europe, Asia, North America and South America. The Workshop is designed to provide departmental and company-wide training, skill building, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, teambuilding events, and networking opportunities.

The Challenge

• This year’s face-to-face event was threatened by pandemic travel restrictions. Given the uncertainty of the pandemic’s potential impact, the team decided to shift the Workshop to a hybrid format to accommodate any concerns that could arise.
• By shifting to a hybrid 3-day format, the challenge then emerged as to how to connect and engage the two audiences, virtual and in-person. Such challenges included:
  • Creating a shared experience for both the virtual and face-to-face teams.
  • Strategically planning an event that would meaningfully engage remote attendees located in multiple global time zones.
  • Synchronizing the experience using a hybrid format.

The Results

• With a limited budget and pandemic challenges, MTA used their expertise and creative agility to design an innovative hybrid event solution that would provide a meaningful experience for both the in-person audience and the virtual audience.
• For this hybrid event, MTA designed a focused agenda for both audience types consisting of 4 hours of sessions each day for both audiences, with in-person sessions scheduled for the afternoon in order to maximize engagement and delivery.
• Once the agenda was determined, our team designed a customized virtual platform to enhance the overall quality to deliver a seamless shared experience between the virtual and the face-to-face audiences.
• Interactive agenda with built-in virtual meeting rooms for easily accommodating the virtual attendees during collaborative breakout sessions and departmental sessions
• Gamification – friendly competition for both audiences through gamification, which integrated the Social Wall, quizzes, knowledge assessments, feedback, content collection, and more
• Push notifications for real-time announcements
• Networking and chat functionality
• Skilled Production: speakers’ presentations were live streamed to our remote audience. In turn, the remote audience was live streamed on screen in the meeting room for more interaction with the live audience and presenters.
• Breakout sessions were managed through our experience platform to integrate both audiences.