BSG Conference 2021 – Virtual

Date: February 2021
Virtual Platform: Hopin

About

The British Sarcoma Group annual conference attracts over 300 delegates and includes an exhibition, poster displays, streamed sessions, international key note speakers. The conference runs over two days and this year took place virtually.

Echo’s Involvement

For this virtual conference we used Hopin as it provided the professional feel required to make this event look polished and slick. It included a ‘green room’ for speakers and a virtual exhibition.

We hired a studio room in London to stream the conference from and enlisted the expertise of Big Purple to manage the live streaming and filming aspects of the conference. The echo team managed all the virtual speakers (over 30 across one day) this included pre-conference test rehearsals and pre-recorded presentations to ensure smooth running. The event included a stream room for the Nurses and AHP strand of the conference. This ran simultaneously to the main meeting. The conference was well received with many attendees commenting on how well they were able to engage with other attendees despite it being virtual.

Conference in numbers:
• 312 people logged into the event (85.5% of the total people registered)
• There were 74 direct messages sent between attendees
• There were 599 chat messages sent (464 in the main stage area and 114 in the NSF stream)
• The average time spent watching the conference was 623 minutes (that’s about 10 hours!)

Feedback

“Very good meeting, a good sense of contact with colleagues even though not in person.
Big thanks to Andy for shouldering the ‘hosting’ of the meeting for the last two days, and to Echo for doing an amazing job generally, pre-recording the talks was a master stroke.”

“I want to offer a huge personal “thank you” to Claire and the whole team at Echo for making the event such a success.”

“I felt the organisation of the day was very good- having the green room prior to the talks and the way the person speaking would go full screen or split screen with the chair.”

“It went on without hiccups. Somehow it felt like being in the conference.”

“It was a pleasure to attend the conference virtually. Everything was well organised, be it the podium presentations, posters and talks”

“It had a nice, engaging, relaxed feel. Sometimes virtual conferences can feel too cold or inaccessible but this one didn’t.”