Summary

The IPAC Canada National Education Conference is the long-standing premier infection prevention and control conference in Canada, bringing together health and safety professionals in the medical sector for a week long educational conference and industry showcase. We’ve worked with IPAC for numerous years on their large-scale, in-person event and in 2021 were tasked to transition a large national conference with a major tradeshow component to the virtual world.

Our Role

IPAC Canada engaged BUKSA to provide full project management for their IPAC Canada 2021 National Education Conference. This included months of extensive planning, coordinating with the IPAC Canada team, selecting a virtual conference platform, building the back-end platform settings, recruiting and managing sponsors, selecting a conference emcee, training the speakers, sponsors, moderators, and emcee, building platform support guides, coordinating with the AV team at Infinite Event Services, designing the social event space, providing on-site technical support and managing the session rooms, serving as space guides during the social event, producing high-quality session recordings, and developing post-event evaluations.

Value Adds

Full Platform Training

With hesitancy around a large-scale virtual conference, our client was concerned about attendees’ unfamiliarity with a virtual format as their main demographic was not used to working in a digital environment every day. We knew that we needed to focus on careful training and guidance, coaching sessions, and troubleshooting sessions with each stakeholder group (speakers, exhibitors, poster presenters, and attendees).

Through extensive planning meetings with our team and the client, we established a solid understanding of their goals and their relationship with their stakeholders, needing to ensure that they were comfortable and confident working in a virtual environment, specifically in the Pheedloop platform.

We thoughtfully considered the key details they needed to participate successfully during the event. Then, we hosted multiple group training sessions with the poster presenters and exhibitors, as well as with the speakers, emcee, and moderators. The training allowed for plentiful opportunities for the stakeholders to ask their questions, and we added our solutions to each training session for continuous improvement. Our extensive training also gave us ample time to test the virtual platform and make changes as needed. Overall, we received excellent feedback on the stakeholders’ event experiences, who were pleased with how we troubleshooted the issues and provided solutions.

Seamless Execution with a Large Audience

We created a specific risk mitigation plan that considered all scenarios, no matter how outlandish and unlikely they seemed. The plan included scenarios with pre-scripted responses and action paths as well as additional staffing plans if needed.

We also performed multiple technical tests to test these solutions and clearly and concisely communicated with attendees about the platform’s setup. We created troubleshooting and resource documents along with instructional videos for all the stakeholders and attendees, and provided live technical support on the platform. We carefully planned on-site staffing plans to run the conference and help resolve issues efficiently, through a technical chat box, our event email, and face-to-face calls when needed.

Virtual Race

The IPAC Canada Conference has held a fundraising race every year and with the move to virtual, it was important that this fundraising initiative remained.

We created a virtual race committee to re-imagine what the typical 5km race could be in a virtual world. With health and safety guidelines in mind, we created a fundraising initiative, Online & Active, where participants could choose an activity of their choice, such as running, biking, skiing, and walking and aim for a distance or time requirement. The sky was the limit with what they could do.

For the first time with this group, we introduced an online fundraising platform to make it easy for participants to collect donations. We got creative with the award winners, including Most Creative Activity, Most Creative Costume, and more. This creative initiative saw overwhelming participation and was well-received, and we fundraised far past the client’s goals.

Social Event

Attendees at this conference are a social bunch, so we couldn’t do without an interactive and fun social event! A regular speed networking or discussion room style networking event was not going to cut it.

We opted to use a unique networking platform, gather.town, to create an old-school, video game-style networking platform for an evening social event. We created a customized virtual conference building fit with a classroom, promotions hall, beachfront entrance, grand foyer, entertainment rooms, games and bar room, and a rooftop patio. 

Attendees selected a customized avatar to explore the space using the arrow keys on their computer. When approaching another avatar, you entered into a video conversation with them, allowing attendees to gather and network in a way that emulates the organic social elements of an in-person conference. We hosted a professional magician, musician, and bartender to provide entertainment, and had IPAC Canada representatives and guest speakers set up in the rooms to chat with the audience. Overall, the social event was a huge success - people couldn’t get enough of the space, and even their spouses and children joined the fun!