Summary

The 2021 ACSA Conference hosted by Alberta Construction Safety Association (ACSA) was held virtually from March 15 – 19, 2021. With the theme of Restoring Connections, the conference brought together construction professionals to discuss the importance of health, safety, and wellness within their industry.

The 2020 ACSA National Conference was the last in-person conference held at the Edmonton Convention Centre before COVID-19 health and safety regulations were put into place. Due to this, the 2021 ACSA National Conference was held virtually on the Canadian-based platform, Pheedloop. The event was produced out of the Production World studio in Edmonton, AB.

Our Role

BUKSA was hired to provide virtual event strategy, overall project management, program development and coordination, sponsorship coordination, and virtual event production. Our role involved finding and selecting an effective virtual platform and building it out to fit the requirements of the ACSA Conference, which included unique branding, sponsor profiles, session streams, and networking features. We led the program development, fulfilled all virtual sponsorship benefits, coached the emcee for virtual delivery and managed the virtual Conference registration through a built-in feature in Pheedloop. Our team also managed pre-event coaching for the emcee, moderators, speakers, and attendees as well as coordinated the live production and streaming with Production World.

During the 5 days of the virtual event, our team was responsible for the full technical support, coordinated the session streams alongside the Production World team, and provided strong support to all our program speakers. Our team was on-site with the ACSA team at the Production World studio for the full 5 days.

Value Adds

Pivot to Virtual

As is well known, it takes creativity to design a previously-live conference in a virtual environment. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning events have been done again and again, and our client wanted their Conference to stand out from the rest, emphasizing important innovations in the construction health and safety fields while promoting their audience to have fun and engage. With these goals in mind, our team worked hard to create an event that allowed ACSA’s stakeholders to experience quality learning, engagement, and connection, similar to the in-person ACSA Conferences.

We participated in several program development meetings with the ACSA team, provided recommendations for keynote speakers with virtual experience, maintained the program schedule document, served as the primary point of contact for speakers prior to and during the event, and prepared letters of confirmation for the the speakers. We also consulted on virtual sponsorship strategies to develop a new sponsorship package for our client. Coordinating logistics for the most impactful virtual benefits, we designed and included sponsor videos and banners for display throughout the virtual platform. With thoughtful intention, we helped our client secure speakers, sponsors, and moderators and helped them acquire the necessary skills to engage their audience in a virtual environment.

Platform

In the digital world, an online platform can make or break a virtual event. We approached the platform development with careful consideration of the event experience for all event participants – attendees, speakers, and sponsors. We selected the Pheedloop platform due to its pricing and features, including:

• Highly customizable layout: the platform allowed us to place sponsor videos and banners throughout, create a user-friendly registration form, highlight both a sponsor exhibit hall and a poster hall for live poster presentations, and produce a session agenda with public chat forums and embedded livestreams.

• Networking tools: the platform allowed us to utilize a variety of engagement features, such as session Q & As, session polls using the built-in sli.do feature, public session chats, private messaging with options for external calls, gamification options, virtual matchmaking to prompt individual connections, and technical chats.

In addition to employing these features, we created user guides for the speakers, moderators, sponsors, and attendees so they could access the Conference with ease. We partnered with Production World to livestream our sessions on the platform and incorporated unique branding and technical transitions. Finally, our sponsor booths were presented accessibly, allowing the audience to interact with the sponsors in real-time and view their uploaded video, website, and PDF content.

Interactions

To achieve the goal of audience networking and engagement, we offered a few different options: public chats, one-to-one messages and videos, sponsor booths, hosted networking discussion rooms, and gamification. Our team developed detailed instruction guides to ensure a positive interactive experience was had on the platform, and overall our attendee engagement expectations were surpassed. We also designed a gamification feature which prompted attendees to search throughout the platform for codes, which they submitted in the ‘Gamification’ tab in Pheedloop in order to win prizes. This interactive challenge featured a public leaderboard and pushed the ACSA audience to truly experience the full extent of the platform and Conference materials, and we received great feedback about the challenge.