Aleksanteri conference 2021 Eurasio and Global Migration, Virtual event

Aleksenteri institute of Helsinki Univerisity organized a virtual event on the Liveto platform. Event was Aleksanteri institutes 20^th annual international conference called “Eurasia and Global Migration”.

Aleksanteri institute

• Part of Helsinki Universitys’s humanistic society, which as an department is focused on social and humanistic sciences
• National research department of Russia and eastern Europe
• Founded in 1996
• Research, education and social communications

Virtual event

The idea of the Aleksanteri institute was to organize the conference as a tree day event in Helsinki in October 2021. In the summer 2020, conference was decided to be postponed to a fall 2021 because of the pandemic. Shortly afterwards the decision to postpone the event, the institute made a decision to held the event virtually. The event gathered together over 250 attendees from 39 countries.

The goal was to get an event platform which looked professional and was a user friendly for the attendees. Event organizers chose Liveto virtual event platform because the conference needed a platform which could engage the attendees for the whole event. The platform was visually designed with brand colors and pictures. The goal was to create a recognizable and stabile conference platform just like in a live event. The platform offered attendees side-events and networking possibilities amongst the conference’s viral program.

The event platform consisted of the following elements:

• Home – This was the landing page for the event after signing in. Home page included materials about the Aleksanteri institute, welcome video and guidelines for the viral social media hashtags of the event.
• Stage – From the Stage page attendees were able to follow the live stream. The live stream was provided by the technical partner and the program was saved to the page after the live stream so the attendees could come back and see the program whenever they wanted to.
• Panels – Panel discussions are the heart and soul of the conference. Aleksanteri conference had nearly 40 different panel discussions. These panel discussions were divided to different rooms on the platform. The panel discussions were held on the video meeting tool. Attendees were able to join those panel discussion straight from the platform without any more log ins.
• Book exhibition – Book exhibition included academic publishers’ book exhibition. Exhibition was built using different kind of elements: texts, pictures, embed PDF-files and videos.
• Student posters – The posters made by students created an exhibition of their own. Posters were embedded as PDF-files to the platform for reading.
• Conference bag – Many different kinds of materials were included to the platform for the attendees to search and read. On this site of the event were materials about University of Helsinki, Virtual Helsinki tour and also a keen workshop!
• About us – Basic information about the Aleksanteri Conference and the ones who were there to provide the event. This page gives the event platform the face and known about the organizers for the attendees.
• Info desk – Guidelines and help for the use of the platform, video meeting tool for questions from the attendees.
• Chat – The platform had many chats for different kind of purposes – for example panel discussions and the live stream.
• Polls – The attendees were activated with different polls on the platform throughout the event days.

Working with Liveto

In the event organizer’s experience, they felt pleased with the customer service of Liveto. All the meetings and advice were needed and important when looking back at the process.

Event organizer felt that Aleksanteri Conference was successfully organized on the Liveto event platform for the 20^th anniversary of the conference. Networking and communication between colleagues on the platform went amazingly well virtually according to the event organizer, even though some of the attendees experienced networking virtually being a little too restricting. Many of the attendees informed that they found new partners for them projects in the future.

 “Many of the attendees informed that they found new partners for them projects in the future.”

Specific analytics are being able to turn out from the virtual events. All the data and feedback from the event are very valid information to the event organizer for planning the next conference. Same kind of information and data would be really hard to collect from live event – even possible.

Read more Liveto’s costumer experiences from here!