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The Making of The Bricsys® Digital Summit
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BRICSYS DIGITAL SUMMIT
October 27, 2020 06:30 PM INDIA
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Our Bricsys® 2020 conference was
drawing closer, the date was set, the venue was booked and the Save
The Date emails were ready to be sent. We’d never been this ahead
of schedule before! I guess everything was just too good to be true
because a few weeks later, COVID-19 completely changed our plans.
The Bricsys annual
conference is the event of the year for the Bricsys team. Hosted a
different location each year, it brings CAD and engineering
professionals together. It’s an opportunity for the Bricsys team to
showcase the latest BricsCAD® and Bricsys® 24/7 innovations,
meet users and colleagues from around the globe, and learn about
the latest developments from our partners.
Finding
a way to connect with our partners and customers in the same way,
through a digital event, was a challenge, but I believe, when we
broadcast live
on 27th October, the results will speak for themselves.
This
is how we turned our physical conference into a virtual opportunity
for 2020.
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Why go
digital?
Nobody
knew how long this pandemic would last so we decided, quite early
on, to postpone our annual Bricsys conference to 2021. We did
however, still need a way to connect with our partners and
customers. Skipping a year was simply not an option. So,
transforming this year’s event into a digital conference was the
ideal solution.
Days
later we saw thousands of companies changing their marketing
strategy: webinars, virtual meetings and virtual booths were
popping up everywhere. For us, it became a great opportunity to
learn. By watching how other companies went digital, we could get
an idea of what we wanted and what we wanted to avoid.
Finding
the right partner
We
at Bricsys specialize in developing high-quality CAD software, not
in hosting digital events. For this reason, we chose to hire an AV
partner: Play AV.
This took away our ‘technical’ stress and instead gave us the
chance to focus on the content. And, boy do we have a lot of great
stuff in store for you!
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First rehearsal at the studio – getting ready for
October 27!
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Opportunities
& struggles
A
digital event has its positives and negatives. With a digital
event, we can reach a wider audience, all around the world. People
can watch it on-demand, there is no struggle with plane tickets,
hotel bookings, jet lag etc. However, the organization of a digital
summit is much more time-consuming than a physical event (fitting 2
days in 4 hours is not that easy).
As
going digital was new for all of us, a lot of questions popped up, such
as:
- How long will the
digital summit be?
- What are our main
goals, which topics do people need to see?
- Will we go live or
prerecord everything?
- What time should we
broadcast to cover as many time zones a possible?
- What platform will
we use to stream the event?
- How can we engage
with the attendees?
- How can we work
with speakers living abroad safely?
- The list goes on…
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First rehearsal at the studio – getting ready for
October 27!
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KISS
My
personal motto is always to Keep It Simple.
During the first brainstorming sessions, the team had so many
creative & fun ideas; competitions, quizzes, acts during the
breaks… I cannot tell you how many times we changed the concept.
Yes,
we want to deliver a professional event, but we also didn’t want to
make it too boring or too complex. I believe that the balance we
found it just right!
Social
distancing and staff safety
Ensuring
the health and wellbeing of our staff and those involved in this
year’s summit was at the forefront of our planning.
The
studio is large enough, to allow us to respect the social
distancing and local COVID-19 regulations. Additionally, we made
sure that only essential staff were present on set.
Being
a global company, we are filming the majority of the conference
from a studio close to the Bricsys’ HQ
in Ghent, Belgium. However, we have also set up studios local to
our UK, and Russian offices and our US colleagues will be filming
from home, to minimize travel.
What’s
the takeaway?
I
think that digital events are the ‘new normal’ and I can’t imagine
a future without virtual events and meetings. For us, it is a been
big challenge to get this far. However, we love the opportunity it
has given us to reach so many more people this year. We are super
excited to see how our first digital summit goes on 27th October
and I hope you are too!
That
being said, I believe that there is no replacement for the
networking & social contact you get at a physical event. So,
maybe next year, we can take what we’ve learnt and combine the two.
Let’s wait and see!
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