University of Sydney

Introduction

The Centre for Veterinary Education (CVE) within The University of Sydney focuses on delivering continuing education to veterinarians, internationally and within Australia.

“We found ourselves a little bit stuck at the end of 2020, wondering how we were going to engage with our audience in a pandemic-stricken world. And that’s when we partnered with EventsAir and launched ourselves into the virtual event space,” said Dr Simone Maher BVSc, Director of CVE.

Their highly successful virtual conference entitled What’s behaviour got to do with it? took place from the 15th to the 18th of February 2021 and hosted 350 delegates at 41 sessions over four days.

Challenge

“Our Centre has over 55 years of experience in delivering face-to-face and online Continuing Education, yet this was our first virtual conference,” said Ines Borovic, Marketing and Sales Manager, CVE.

“With only two months to pivot to a virtual event, we started planning this event using an alternative platform, but six weeks out from the event, we discovered that the platform we were using couldn’t deliver the delegate experience that we were seeking. So, we were very excited to find out about EventsAir and the OnAIR platform,” said Ines.

Within just six weeks, the team was able to implement the OnAIR platform and deliver a successful event that exceeded expectations.

The OnAIR platform also helped the CVE to overcome the challenge of how to make an impact in a crowded virtual event market.

“We wanted to maximize the engagement that participants had, and we found that the EventsAir platform allowed us to do this in several ways,” said Ines.

Process

The CVE elected to use a premium turnkey virtual package, which included a dedicated team of virtual event professionals to take care of all the technical aspects of building and running a virtual event using the OnAIR platform.

“The event set up was pretty straightforward for us. We got the full-service package with EventsAir so the majority of the technical set-up was done for us, which was really helpful because it was our first virtual event, and we had never used this platform before,” said Lucy Evans, Education Events Coordinator, CVE.

Excellent technical support
“The EventsAir team was great. We relied on them a lot for technical support, and they were very helpful. No question was ever too hard for our technical director. He was very responsive and went beyond the call of duty to help us get things set up and keep them running smoothly. Overall, we had a fantastic experience with the whole EventsAir team,” said Lucy.

“If I had to pick a favorite feature of OnAIR, it would have to be our technical director, he was just great,” said Simone.

Fully branded virtual environment
The OnAIR platform is fully customizable, which meant that every part of it could be tailored and branded to deliver a professional event environment that reflected the CVE brand as well as the event brand.

“It was easy for us to ensure that the event was on brand,” said Lucy. “Every section of the virtual event environment reflected our brand, which resulted in a high-quality presentation overall.”

Result

Some of the OnAIR features used in the event included the exhibition area and the gamification system.

Resource Gallery made it easy to share knowledge with attendees
“We found the resource area particularly useful. It was great to be able to upload any papers or other resources that speakers had referred to during their presentations into the resource area so that delegates could access them later on,” said Lucy.

Meeting Hub offered new ways to interact and spark ideas
“The Meeting Hub was a great place for our delegates to meet up with each other and with our sponsors and exhibitors,” said Lucy.

“The Meeting Hub was my favorite feature,” said Ines. “It was really exciting to be able to connect with people from all over the world.”

Delegates enjoyed using the OnAIR platform
“Our attendees found that the OnAIR platform was very straightforward to use. Once they had received their login details, it was pretty self-explanatory. Ease-of-use was the number one feature that people really enjoyed about the platform,” said Lucy.

OnAIR opens up a whole new way of running events
“The experience for me using EventsAir was very exciting because as an event coordinator, it gave me the opportunity to learn a whole new way of planning for and delivering an event,” said Lucy.

“The EventsAir experience was very gratifying. It was rewarding to see all our hard work and intense effort, over a short time frame, pay off with a result that was equal to or even exceeded our face-to-face event,” said Ines.

Simone agreed: “I found the experience exhilarating. To go from teetering on the precipice of no event at all to this tremendous production was really thrilling.”