Here’s What I Learned Using Hopin For A Virtual Conference

An amazing platform with a steep learning curve.

Hi all, I thought off the back of Hopin’s recent funding round I would give you an update on a virtual event we ran back in September 30th. Hopefully it will give you a bit of a useful insight into the Hopin platform, and whether it is something you could utilise for some virtual events you may be planning. Please note, this is purely my opinion and experience with the platform!

Background

First of all, some background. I’m part of the leadership team at Vizibl.co a B2B Enterprise SAAS platform that helps both buying and supplier organisations manage all aspects of their relationship more effectively to deliver mutual value. We’ve been through Series A and are planning for a Series B next year. Prior to this I was part of the HubSpot team and went through an IPO with them in 2014.

At Vizibl, we target the Enterprise B2B space, companies such as Vodafone, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Barclays etc. For us, in the past, roundtables and events worked very well due to the fact that we have a long sales cycle, complex value prop and a new category we were building. So these events, where got to meet people face to face, were quite important in terms of building rapport and pick up those qualitative queues from prospects. Obviously now that is no longer an option. Which brings me on to Hopin!

Choosing Hopin

At the tail-end of July we made the decision to hold an Annual Summit virtually on September 30th. We had initially planned it to be a small ‘basecamp summit’ but I thought, why not just bite the bullet and go all in. So we lined up 19 sessions, 47 speakers/panellists and decided to get it all done in 8 weeks with very limited time resource. As you can imagine, time was at a premium and we needed something that just worked.

I had attended a Tech Nation event on Hopin and weirdly enough, felt that it replicated the Event/Conference experience quite well. So, although we trialled a few more platforms, we settled on Hopin pretty quick and went about getting this up and running.

Here were my big learnings from the process…

Details:

Date/Time: Wednesday Sept 30th // 14:00 BST — 19:00 BST (5 hours)

Budget: $350 event software cost and our time

Format Setup:

• 1 Main Stage with 7 linear main sessions
• 2 further ‘Stages’ that were essentially ‘Sessions’ arranged at certain times — this is important to note, because in Hopin, as far as I know, you only get one main stage, the rest have to be sessions.

Tech: Zapier integration with HubSpot as there is no out of the box integration yet, but I imagine that will change soon.

Learnings:

It’s a steep learning curve:
Hopin takes a lot of practice and time to get proficient with, which becomes more complex you build out more stages, session etc. My learning here, would be start on a smaller event and work your way up — you need to have somebody on the team that knows the platform inside out.

Preparation — single most important thing:
I was extremely worried about additional stress on the day in terms of people not being able to access, having clashes with tech etc. So we literally had tech prep calls, as well as panel session calls, with each and every participant. It equated to around 2–2.5 weeks solid on these calls alone.
Was this a hell of a lot of work? Yes.
Was it the single most important thing we did? Yes.

Do not even think about not doing tech prep calls with everyone. The platform works perfectly, but you cannot legislate for all the corporate firewalls, old IE browsers etc. etc. that you have to take into consideration. There is simply nothing else to it, other than to ensure you sit down with each and every person and go through it all until you get it to work on a test with them.

We tested…a lot!

Sessions setup can be tricky:
The main stage setup is straightforward, it’s linear with a backstage area to have people join at their time slots. Setting up ‘Sessions’ can be a bit more tricky.

Essentially ‘sessions’ are like a room, once a host and panel is in there, they can start and stop whenever they want. This is great from the point of view that they can overrun and not impact everything else, but not great in terms of organisation and directing people to these rooms.

So what we did was that we basically drew it up so that we viewed these sessions as simply 2 more stages if you will, and hung these sessions off the timings around these ‘stages’.

Then it was very easy for attendees to find their way around, and for us to hype and direct people to them at the right time. This also took a bit of autonomy from the panel hosts, so as part of the panel prep we outlined the responsibilities of the chair and what that actually entailed for the session. It all worked perfectly well!

I think you can still see the schedule setup, with sessions here: https://hopin.to/events/vizibl-collaborate-2020#schedule

Attendee Experience:

The attendee experience is excellent. I can say this both from my own first hand experience and from the feedback we got. What I actually really like about it is the fact that when you land in there, you actually need to orientate yourself around a bit and feel a small bit lost (maybe too strong of a word, but you get me), just as you would at a regular conference. But within 5–10 mins you have fully orientated yourself and then can jump from session to session and dip in and out of talks, panels etc. Weirdly enough this small disorientation at the start allows people to explore more freely I feel and get into the platform quicker. We had plenty of the rest of the company on chat to answer questions and guide people to areas, but this tended to be mostly in the first 10 mins or so.

Having the stage and sessions running concurrently means that there is always something from attendees to jump into and listen for a while and then if it’s not resonating, they can go off and wanders somewhere else, once again, just like an IRL event. Some quick pieces of feedback we got on the event included:

Reports and Recordings:

Full reports available including chat logs:

All stage recordings available for download immediately, and held indefinitely as far as I can make out.

Expo Booths & Sponsors:

There are options for booths and sponsors. Quite frankly, the booths didn’t get the stream of traffic we expected on the day. I think this would be one main area of improvement for Hopin going forward.

Conclusion 👍

Hopin is a great platform for virtual events or conferences. If you are planning on running one, I would highly recommend utilising this platform to do so based on the experience we had as organisers, and the feedback from attendees. We will most definitely be using Hopin for anything we do online event-related for the foreseeable future.

This was quite a shallow and summarised view of the platform, there were hundreds of other small little things that factored in that I haven’t covered off. So if you have any questions or want more detail on certain aspects, just ask in the comments below or ping me a message ✌️