Brief
Our brief, for what was intended to be a live event, was to create the first ever whole industry health & wellbeing conference for the rail sector in the UK. As early planning was underway for this major event and exhibition, to be attended by over 1,000 people, the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK. The result necessitated an immediate shift to online, prompting the ambition and scale of the project to grow hugely.
Challenge
The biggest challenge was what had become a quite tight timescale, and the ambition for the event which ended with a challenge to register 10,000 people, spread throughout more than one hundred organisations.
An additional challenge was the scale of the content, the event programme finished being spread over two days and five programmes, with eighty sessions and well over one hundred speakers!
Solution
As the event developed we formed a team to focus on the key delivery areas of event design, communications / marketing, and event production.
This was a brand new event, so first stop was for our creative team to design event branding, photography and messaging.
With such a huge programme the content planning started early, with five different programmes designed to focus on both personal and professional aspects of health and wellbeing. Our team sourced and contracted 140 speakers to deliver 80 sessions, including some amazing keynote sessions from the likes of Ruby Wax, Dr Rangan Chatterjee, Dr Dawn Harper and Andy Cope.
Alongside the content work, a major communications campaign launched to drive delegates to the event, and this included developing an industry wide network of internal comms professionals, regular email campaigns, the design and production of a website, and the development of a now regular series of monthly livestreams called Wellbeing Wednesday.
Delegates registered for the event on our Cvent registration website and were able to browse the full agenda and construct their own pathway through everything on offer.
The technical delivery of this project was a huge undertaking, with our qVirtual studios at the heart of it all streaming professional livestreams into a Cvent Virtual Attendee Hub platform. Approximately 40% of the content was pre-recorded as live, with the rest presented live on the day. Given we were in the middle of the pandemic, with many people having to work remotely, all presenters came in from home or home based studios. We were really at the mercy of home internet connections, but our diligence in pre-production, along with a technical checkout session for every speaker ensured absolutely flawless delivery across both days.
This event was a huge success, hitting the target of 10,000 delegates taking part in the event and kick starting a major new health & wellbeing initiative within UK Rail.