Discover how Vision Creative is successfully implementing strategies for their clients' recurring events, with InEvent's help.
About
Vision Creative is a company that specializes in the trade association, corporate conference, and convention market. Offering first-rate audiovisual services, top-notch production management, and creative content creation, Vision Creative persists to deliver disruptive solutions for its clients. Vision Creative’s client base boasts up to 5,060 trade associations, encompassing government associations, advocacy groups, flight attendant associations, bricklayers associations, real estate associations, and the cardiologist associations, which host multiple conferences and conventions across the United States.
Challenges
Vision Creative’s clients hold their meetings regularly, accruing to about 123 meetings, yearly. The goal is to connect like-minded people and get them to interact, share ideas, network, and build their businesses within the framework of these live or virtual events. As a production company whose primary focus is live events, Vision Creative needed to channel more focus to the digital space because the pandemic triggered higher importance on virtual events.
"When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, we quickly identified InEvent as a partner to help us pivot our clients from live events (which they were unable to do during the pandemic) to virtual events. And we were very successful doing that with InEvent’s fantastic platform and their great developers."
Vision Creative’s clients began to realize that they could host educational programs, meetings, conferences, and trade shows in a more feasible, practical, and affordable way.
"A lot of our clients are finding that regardless of the pandemic, events can be done in a virtual environment and be just as effective."
This enabled a number of their clients to save costs because they didn’t need to book hotel rooms, cover transportation costs, and hire audio-visual companies to film their events.
"They yielded not only a lot more return on investment for a lot less money, but they could reach a wider audience. An association could have 10,000 members and two or three thousand members are willing to travel for meetings frequently, but here’s a huge chunk of that membership base that doesn’t like the travel or is too busy to travel. So I think this is where the next area of development and engagement lies for those clients who prefer to attend from their homes. It’s a huge area for growth for all of our clients."
Solutions
InEvent’s Virtual Lobby served as the primary place of operation for Vision Creative. James Noble recounts how the easy customization of the Virtual Lobby created seamless virtual and hybrid experiences for their clients. Similarly, Vision Creative has been able to customize their clients’ lobbies, websites and landing pages using custom code. Also, InEvent’s API enables them to extract attendees insights for their clients. “Fortunately InEvent had enough foresight to create a really great API into the platform which allows us to pull reports for our clients, generate analytics and other metrics.”
James Noble highlights the functionality of the Attendee Certificate feature to clients that focus majorly on learning and education.
"It is amazing for our clients to find out that there’s a technology that performs numerous tasks so they don’t need to hire extra staff. And so all that paperwork headache is now being sorted out on the platform."
InEvent also allows them to create and send custom certificates to the attendees. For this reason, James Noble opines that the InEvent platform is an added value to their business, and he’s certain that an InEvent subscription is key to being successful with their recurrent events.
Additionally, some of their clients require Salesforce to be integrated with their event’s registration system. That prompts the use of our Salesforce out-of-the-box integration, together with Vision Creative’s Association Management Systems (AMS), to help them accomplish the desired workflow.
"Also, we use the robust registration tools that InEvent offers, alongside integrations with Stripe and PayPal that have been very successful and very easy to use."
"Clearly the big platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are super useful, but what they lack is that framework, sort of a cohesive kind of tissue that holds everything together in one web space. So people feel like they’re visiting a page without added links. There are higher profile platforms that contain external links to zoom meetings, but what’s really great about InEvent is the fact that we can track everybody that moves into the platform."
Vision Creative is impressed by the Live Studio and InEvent’s Unique pricing structure. “We can actually host meetings in that Live Studio environment. The Live studio is very innovative; it’s a great tool. We can use no other technology to run a meeting other than InEvent on our laptops. That’s it.”He adds, “There are no other third-party subscriptions you need to worry about. InEvent kind of rolls it all together into one large architecture and they sort of take care of all that nuts and bolts stuff behind the scenes. So it makes it easy for us to support and offer virtual conferences.”
Outcome
"The virtual platform has allowed people to travel all over the world from a single location. I think there’s going to be some reflection and then a lot of our customers are going to continue hosting virtual events. Hybrid is a new kind of event that everybody wants to do. It’s kind of that kind of the same thing, except instead of using that live control room, we’d send streams from our convention centers at big hotel ballrooms back into the platform. That way, attendees can still experience the live event without actually traveling through it."
When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, Vision Creative quickly identified InEvent as a partner to help them pivot their clients from life experiences to virtual experiences. With InEvent’s help, they were able to accomplish this task according to James Noble.
"We were able to successfully pivot a lot of our clients to that virtual experience with InEvent’s innovative platform. We have a unique kind of insight into our client’s needs in terms of what they expect from their live event and virtual offerings. We’ve had some of our clients we’ve had for 20 years."
There is also a lot of speculation that virtual experiences will decline gradually as events are returning back to the live environment. Regardless, James anticipates a massive plunge in virtual interactions in the next couple of quarters, when people look back on those virtual experiences and recognize the positives they yielded including return on investment and overall user experience.
Future expectations
"It’s going to be interesting to see where the market goes. Everybody’s kind of relieved that Covid is declining and then going back to live events. And there’s probably a little dip in all virtual experiences. Both with Zoom’s usage reducing because everybody’s a little fatigued. I think the next leg up is going to be when people re-approach that the genie is out of the bottle. People have experienced virtual experiences. They see that it’s a great experience. People are going to kind of come back into virtual events, probably at the latter part of 2022 or 2023."
Vision Creative is willing more than ever to experience a ‘new era’ of virtual and hybrid events and embrace all the developments that come with them. Partnering up with InEvent unlocked new technological solutions for them to offer their clients in both virtual and live events.
I think InEvent is an early innovator in this field, and they are committed to improving themselves. They go where the market dictates, and I believe they’re going to be one of the biggest success stories at the end of the day and we’re going to hang onto them as they continue to stay relevant and become better.
James Noble, Co-founder of Vision Creative
