Delivering a business-critical virtual event - seamlessly

Overview

Our Investor Relations (IR) team are required to report the company’s quarterly results to the wider market – including investors and analysts. It’s a business-critical event that hosts speakers like our CEO and CFO – and it ran like clockwork as an in-person event for years. So, what happens when in-person events aren’t an option?

Our Virtual events service, delivered by our Virtual events expert operations team and producers, stepped in when the event couldn’t be hosted face-to-face. They were confronted with the added requirement of ensuring all presenters had video collaboration capability; audio-only wouldn’t suffice when video calling had become so prevalent in everyday life. Although all three major conferencing platforms can be accommodated (including Microsoft Teams and Zoom Webinar), Webex Webinar was the best tool for the job. 

The challenge

The IR team didn’t have the technical know-how, nor the sheer numbers of people required to run such  high-profile virtual events. These events are unique in their specific requirements for how they’re presented and how their Q&A sections are run. They need to be presented so that attendees can see the speakers and the slide deck simultaneously; their Q&A needs to allow for questions to be submitted anonymously without attendees seeing the questions as they come in, and they need to be moderated to ensure the focus of the discussion remains on relevant topics.

The IR team are also in a high-stakes environment where the profile and importance of the events means thats any mishaps have severe reputational consequences. There’s a significant time pressure to organising and running these events too, and their team’s workload ramps up significantly when the financial results are published. 

The solution

Webex Webinars met all the technical requirements for this use-case and when coupled with our people’s expertise provided the IR team with a reliable, feature-rich solution.

In the run up, they managed the scheduling and invitations for the events, reporting to the IR team regularly on the ever-changing list of attendees. They ran the rehearsal sessions too, testing functionality of the tech and allowing the IR team to perfect the delivery of the content. The presenters also leant on the knowledge of our experts to utilise the technical capabilities of the platform to maximise the impact of their message.

During, the producers professionally introduced the earnings call before handing over to the IR team. Webex was the ideal platform for managing and moderating the Q&A session here as it kept the questions anonymous to attendees. Meanwhile, the producers used their events experience to respond on-the-fly to direction from the IR team as to which questions to respond to and where to guide the conversation. They then closed out the earnings call, letting attendees know the next steps.

Afterwards, the IR team were provided with a comprehensive post-event report that gives insights on the attendance, drop-out rate, the questions that came up, and so on. 

The result 

The high-profile sessions have been executed without a hitch. Allowing the IR team to deliver on time to around 800 attendees, connecting from a range of devices with live two-way audio for the Q&A sessions. The smooth delivery wouldn’t have been possible without the technical knowledge the Virtual events team brings; the IR team would likely have had to hire full-time agency staff with extensive technical knowledge otherwise. 

Because the Virtual events team handled the logistics of running the events, it freed up the IR team to focus on the content – resulting in a higher quality, more engaging session. This is true beyond the events itself too: the end of quarter is an extremely demanding period in terms of workload for IR, so focusing solely on their day-to-day meant they met all their commitments – delivered to a high standard and on time.

To find out more about Virtual events talk to our experts via the link below.