UK VA Conference
Virtual Event hosting support for UK VA Conference #VACon21 Online
Introduction
Get Ahead successfully provided tech support for the UK VA Conference, #VACon21 On-line.
Virtual Assistants, outsourcing experts for office administration and more (!), regularly attend the event for professional development, sharing best practice, ideas and increasing their business networks. The UK VA Conference also hosts the annual UK VA Awards, recognising the outstanding professionals in the Virtual Assistants business support industry.
This event, established in 2007, has in recent years been held at London’s largest exhibition centre, ExCeL. Respecting the restrictions of the pandemic, for 2021, the event had to be staged on-line.
The Solution
We worked closely with the client to make sure that the event technology options matched their exact requirements. We concluded and agreed that ZOOM would fully meet the client’s needs.
Each day and session hosted different speakers, so we had to test connectivity and functionality for each session. For example, some sessions were dependent on the chat function, while others required screensharing or breakout rooms. We worked with each speaker, listening to their plan and finding the tech solution to make their session as productive and interactive as possible.
Get Ahead provided tech checks for every speaker, and we met with them before the start of their session to make sure everyone was fully briefed. This additional, behind-the-scenes preparatory work was essential for the smooth running of the event, and keeping things running to time.
For the delegates, we released the links to each session and all attendees were given our contact details so they could liaise directly with us if they were struggling to access a session or had any other tech issues restricting access. This enabled our client to concentrate on their own role and responsibilities for the conference, safe in the knowledge that we had control of the tech platform.
The Challenges
The UK VA Conference organiser, Storm Media and Publishing, had the need to deliver a flawless series of virtual events for long-standing, established, virtual professionals – an audience that would pick up on any mistake and mishap! Regularly the format had been a ‘one day’ event, however, demands of the lockdown restricted the availability of the potential audience (dealing with home-schooling demands etc.) The most popular solution was to deliver events over 4 consecutive days. The client required reliable, consistently solid hosting and technical background support for the essential success of the online sessions, so they approached Get Ahead to ask for our help.
Why Get Ahead?
The event has been very well received, indeed reviewed as a great success, and the Get Ahead team were very proud to be supporting the profession. Our client, Storm Media’s CEO, John Palmer, said:
“Rebecca and her team supported the delivery of the UK VA Conference 2021 #VACon21 Online with our innovative 4 x 4 format over 4 days. The Get Ahead team facilitated the registrations, waiting rooms, live sessions, managed the Q & A and chat functions, reliably supporting the efforts to keep our ‘show on the road’! Get Ahead have impressed with their focus towards the detail, tech agility and the team’s confident ability to manage both speakers and delegates, whilst being mindful of keeping things running to time and budget. Delighted that Rebecca has added top class online event management to Get Ahead’s growing portfolio of services.”
Many thanks to John for his kind words!
