ON24: The New Chapter of Virtual Events
May 26, 2021
ON24: The New Chapter of Virtual Events
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ON24
Chartwell produces weekly webinars to bring Utilities around the US and Canada together to share best practices and other knowledge. These are typically attended by 20 to 200 utility professionals. When I arrived in December of 2019 we were using a very outdated version of Webex to conduct these webinars. We also produce monthly "council calls," which is more of an open discussion setup, so Webex's ability to mute and unmute over 200 people was helpful as we typically had anywhere from 50 to 200 on the call. After experiencing endless problems with our attendees being able to download, access, and navigate Webex, we searched and searched for a platform that would look and function better. Zoom was off the table since our attendees have strict government regulations on what they can and cannot use. After trying another platform with TERRIBLE bandwidth issues, we found ON24. Since we cannot see or verbally speak with other attendees, we moved our monthly council calls over to Teams. The switch was timely as COVID hit and with the help of ON24 made the decision to pivot our 300-person conference in June AND our 500-person conference in November to a virtual setting.
Pros
- It is completely aesthetically customizable.
- It is very user friendly.
- It has great bandwidth and rarely malfunctions during live events (1 in 100 times).
- It is easy to navigate on the production side.
- It collects fantastic, helpful data.
Cons
- I would LOVE a time warning function in Elite Studio to allow me as a producer to politely let my speaker know they only have 10min, 5min, 2min, etc. and they need to wrap it up.
- Building the console out for various screen-sizes is a challenge. I wish there were a way to have everything built on a small, laptop view expand to fit any larger screen the same way instead of remaining the same size but having awkward blank space.
- It's so small, but I begin every tech-run explaining to my speakers how to minimize the slides in Elite Studio and make it more of a 50/50 split screen. It would be great if that was the default setup. The issue is that when I try to teach them to highlight and jump to a slide they are typically on a laptop and their screen is so small that they need to scroll down to see the "move to slide" (not sure that verbiage is correct but you get the gist.) This is hard to explain remotely to them so most of them give up and don't know how to do it.
- Increased sales leads.
- Increased customer engagement to help with renewals.
- Increased attendance by double by pivoting from in-person to ON24 virtually.
- Track registration and attendance
- Enable sales follow-up
- Other
Not only has ON24 allowed us to maintain our weekly webinars, but it has enabled us to pivot our 2 conferences to a virtual space. On both events, we more than doubled attendance. We were able to provide our sponsors with a Virtual Hall and connect them to our attendees. With the use of the HUB our virtual event allowed us to maintain our agenda as if we were live and give attendees a sense of excitement and ease as they navigated through the session each day. We truly could not have been as successful as we were without ON24.
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