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RingCentral Events

Score8 out of 10

57 Reviews and Ratings

What is RingCentral Events?

RingCentral Events (formerly Hopin) is an online events platform that provides tools for virtual events, or hybrid events, like ticketing and registration, limitless event rooms, an expo hall, chat, and networking, as well as event branding and attendee engagement tools. Integrations with online registration tools - such as Cvent, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and Eventbrite.

Media

a session of RingCentral Events - with company branding, logo, and colors throughout.
the event venue of RingCentral Events. This page is the reception, that displays the event description, speakers, and schedule. Attendees can navigate throughout the event by clicking on the tabs on the left.
an example of event analytics available with each event. Organizers can see how the event performed but seeing live view of attendance, and see how each attendee engaged.
the production studio available within RingCentral Events. This offers the ability to customize speaker layouts, preupload videos/slides, add or remove speakers from stage, and add branding to the video streams.
the lead retrieval capability that allows for scanning for leads for on-site events.

1 / 5

Hopin' on the Bandwagon!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Hopin to produce and execute events for our client base. They range from large robust multiday events to 1-hour internal meetings. We have run fully virtual and Hybrid Events on Hopin, and the ease of use for both users and attendees always makes it a leading choice.

Pros

  • Collaborative Sessions/Roundtable Discussions
  • Ease of use for Attendees
  • Customization of design
  • Hybrid Events with the use of the mobile app

Cons

  • Group Networking
  • Area for Speaker bios/profiles
  • Streamyard into Sessions

Return on Investment

  • Saving resources because our team is Hopin Certified and experts on the platforms
  • Extending our audience reach
  • Extending the geographical region of the clients we can assist

Alternatives Considered

PheedLoop, Airmeet, Remo and Zoom

Other Software Used

PheedLoop, Airmeet, Zoom

Fantastic Hopin Experience for a LGBTQ+ Student Festival

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilised Hopin for a week long digital festival during the pandemic, a mixture of live and pre-recorded content as well as a multi faceted Careers Fair. We needed a platform which would allow us to run our regular annual offering virtually, catering for 1500+ LGBTQ+ young people from across the UK with excellent accessibility and interactivity. We held the digital festival across 7 days.

Pros

  • Great usability - not overly complicated
  • Accessibility - easy registration, clear interface
  • Multifaceted uses across all areas of the platform

Cons

  • Main chat function can get a little messy when used incorrectly/spammed

Return on Investment

  • Allowed us to maintain and grow our audience of LGBTQ+ young people
  • Sponsors were generally happy with the level and prominence of branding across the platform

Great for presentation based conferences, needs work on showing love to power users.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We primarily use Hopin for online conferences, specifically for medical and professional association clients. The single-stage and closed ecosystem work well for these speaker/education-based events, and the reporting helps us verify CE requirements.

Pros

  • Single Main Stage
  • Closed Environment
  • Session Room Flexibility

Cons

  • Support with OBS users in mind
  • Session rooms need all functionality of Expo Booths
  • Replay functionality limited when using OBS streaming

Return on Investment

  • Increased virtual event revenue
  • Increased virtual event costs
  • Expanded capabilities

Alternatives Considered

Zoom Video Webinar, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet

Other Software Used

Adobe Premiere Pro, OBS Studio, Adobe After Effects

The market leader in online events provision, with some really helpful features, and unbeatable ease of use

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We ran 168 events in 2021 and used Hopin to deliver many of these events to scaling tech entrepreneurs on a global scale. Hopin enables us to easily create multi-stream events, with a selection of panels, networking, and discussion, whilst also keeping our sponsors and corporate partners in a position where they can gain value and access to our community. Hopin enabled us to take our events pre-pandemic from an offline environment and make them available digitally. The ease of setup and strength of product development has made it a pleasure to partner with Hopin for our events.

Pros

  • Awesome for managing several sets of panelists
  • Very easy to manage event attendees
  • Love the chat functionality during the events, enabling the audience to connect with each other
  • Hugely simple for anyone with little tech knowledge to design and run an event
  • Cost effective for the volume of events we run, where we need scale and quality
  • Live streaming an event is also very well catered for
  • Branding across the platform is simple to implement

Cons

  • Would love to see some more analytics from the events we run
  • It would be great to report across events more easily

Return on Investment

  • Significant time saving
  • The ability to continue operating in a pandemic simply and efficiently
  • Great engagement for our events
  • Fantastic learning for the team

Alternatives Considered

ON24, Run the World, vFairs, Cvent Event Management, Remo and Zoom Video Webinar

Other Software Used

Slack, Miro, Balsamiq

Always Improving, But Pretty Great As Is

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Hopin to stream some of our larger virtual events where we may have multiple speakers in multiple rooms at the same time. We like this platform over using YouTube or Facebook to stream because we have more control and more transparency into who our attendees are. Other features we enjoy are the expo areas and networking areas of the platform.

Pros

  • The interface is very clean and customizable. Some of the other solutions I've looked into are not as easy to customize or have a "clunky" interface.
  • Hopin is always improving. Several sticking points for us that existed 3 months ago have been updated and improved so they are no longer issues for us.
  • Hopin has acquired the platform StreamYard, which is a very powerful and simple live studio solution, and they have actively integrated StreamYard into the Hopin platform.

Cons

  • Hopin charges based on number of "registrants" rather than number of "attendees." This has forced us to use a workaround method and not allowed us to use all of the tools available because, especially if we're holding a free event, we don't want to pay for a lot of registrants when only a percentage of them will actually attend the event.
  • The streaming quality is great, but it doesn't perform as well as YouTube or Facebook with weaker viewer connections. We receive many more complaints about the video feed stopping and starting than when we broadcast through YouTube or Facebook. Hopin does give us the ability to use YouTube as the source of the video stream, but that comes with its own set of problems, where users may click on the YouTube branding and be directed to watch on YouTube, outside of the Hopin platform.
  • Some additional options would be nice, such as being able to disable anonymous viewer comments/questions would be helpful.
  • The software is very expensive. It comes with a 5-figure yearly license fee plus cost per registrant fee referenced above.

Return on Investment

  • This one is hard to say. We had a solution before, which was virtually free to use and worked okay for us. I can't really tell if using a high-priced platform like Hopin has increased the revenue brought in over the free solution. We would have to do a true split test where we sent half of our attendees to one platform and the other half to Hopin, and see if the additional spend is worth it. As far as true ROI, it's hard to compete with an infinite ROI since the other solution was free. But using Hopin may result in additional profit, meaning we may have made at least our investment more and then some over what we would have made using the free solution.
  • It is a better solution than our former solution for restricting access only to specific people. When we streamed to a private Facebook group, for example, we had to deal with the built-in distractions of Facebook, and everyone had to have a Facebook account. I feel we may have made it easier for some to attend by streaming these types of events through Hopin rather than Facebook, and therefore increased our reach.
  • Hopin feels like a higher value platform than Facebook to people who paid to attend this event.

Alternatives Considered

Airmeet, ON24, Webinato, YouTube Live and Facebook Live

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Meta for Business (formerly Facebook for Business), Google Analytics