Academy Members Conference 2024

The team was tasked with making this year’s National Institute for Health and Care Research’s (NIHR) conference even bigger and better than last year’s.

With more than 650 delegates in total, 300 would be attending in person, while the others would join virtually, and included senior NIHR members, including the Dean of the NIHR Academy, Associate Dean of the NIHR Academy, CEO of NIHR and the Head of Equality Diversity and Inclusion.

We would have weekly update meetings with our client’s event planners, who we have successfully worked with for the past three years, as we hoped to ensure each of the delegates had the same inclusive experience.

Objectives

We had to create a branded registration site for all attendees, with different bespoke pathways for those attending virtually and those attending in person, with communication and registration fields for each.

We also created a mobile app for all in-person attendees to use for a Q&A, polling and as a guide for the event.

Designing a fully branded stage and set was part of our remit too, along with all the lighting, production and sound.

As well as all the above, we provided full venue liaison from start to finish and arranged travel for keynote speakers, set up all the onsite rehearsals, as well as the virtual rehearsals for the remote presenters.

We also focused on all accessibility requirements by implementing live captions and British Sign Language Streams.

And we also supplied and distributed the branded badges and lanyards and arranged and managed in-person, and virtual, breakout sessions.

There was also a poster competition which we helped to bring to fruition and, following the conference, we assisted in the editing of all the footage which included captioning for post event viewing.

Results

We had some great feedback from the event.

Costs were slashed for the client as we were able to reduce overflow bedrooms down to required numbers even after we had already passed the cancellation deadline.

There was a 75% adoption rate on the app and online, 713 people logged in and there were nearly 6,750 page views of the website.

We take pride in taking our own initiative and took on a lot of extra work for our client to ensure they enjoyed another successful event.

Even when potential problems do crop up, the team moves quickly to find solutions.

During the event, snow meant that a lot of trains were cancelled and delegates were either late or unable to attend.

But we had a team member on 24/7 inbox support to assist with any queries, and quickly swapped anyone who couldn’t attend in person onto the virtual pathway.

And speakers who could not attend their sessions were replaced by other members of the NIHR Academy.

These are just more examples of how adaptable we are as a team and we’re already looking forward to working with the NIHR events team on their next event.

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