vFairs Webinar Recap: Enhancing Your Virtual & Hybrid Events 

Last Wednesday, vFairs CEO, Muhammad Younas, hosted the Enhancing Your Virtual & Hybrid Events Webinar. It covered new vFairs updates along with deep-diving into the changing events landscape. With nearly five years of experience under its belt, Younas also discussed what makes vFairs special. 

The webinar covered the following topics:

• Why vFairs?
• New Engagement Features Revealed
• Hybrid Events 101
• Q&A

Here’s the complete recap!

Why vFairs?

The virtual event platform industry has been exploding since early 2020. With so many different options, how do you choose the right platform for your event? Let’s take a look at why vFairs should be your number one choice:  

• Great feature depth: vFairs has solution-specific features for each of its event types.  Whether you’re hosting a job fair or an exhibition, the platform has everything you need. 
• Scalable events: Whether you’re hosting an event for 50 people or 500,000 people, vFairs makes sure that each event runs smoothly.
• The most aesthetic platform: vFairs events are so memorable that even attendees convert into customers. Each event we host has engaging 3D virtual environments that are unique with custom templates and branding. 
• Largest third-party integrations: vFairs has the most third-party integrations of any virtual event platform provider out there. From real-time translations to games and collaboration apps, we’ve got everything.
• The best customer support: All vFairs customers vouch for the impeccable support vFairs offers. Every customer gets their own project team, with a dedicated project manager and an event coordinator. The entire team works towards delivering a smooth virtual event, designed perfectly for your needs. From event planning through to the live events, vFairs offers 24/7 support. 

Engagement Features 

Next, Younas revealed the new engagement features launched at vFairs. These were inspired by customer feedback and requests and are designed to make the vFairs experience more engaging than ever before. 

1. Slido Integration 

vFairs webinars have always offered polls and surveys. Asking questions during the webinar helps attendees feel more involved and engaged. In a bid to make more options available, we’ve also added a Slido integration to the platform. 

Now, attendees can ask questions and hosts can run polls with the Slido interface. This will also help speakers collect questions in advance to learn more about their audience or post a moderated Q&A feed. 

2. Worldly & Interprefy

vFairs has also improved its language capabilities and made the platform more inclusive and accessible globally. 

The new Wordly & Interprefy integrations provide real-time translation of both your live and pre-recorded webinar content into 16 other languages. Enable your attendees to listen or read the sessions in their language of choice and entertain a diverse attendance from around the world.

These integrations will also let people with hearing impairments access your webinar content more easily. 

3. Customized Webinar Tabs

The webinar experience has also gotten an upgrade. We’ve made the webinar tab customizable to provide you another avenue to deliver information. 

And there’s a lot that you can do with this. Brand your entire webinar tab to strengthen brand awareness or share speaker and sponsor information. You can also add links to the webinar tab to further enhance the viewer experience, like adding LinkedIn profiles for your speakers. 

4. Embedded Chat

We’ve enhanced our chat functionality by introducing the embedded chat option. Let attendees network with speakers, attendees, and booth reps from anywhere in the event. 

Just open the embedded chat, search for your person of interest, and start the conversation. Minimize once you’re done! The conversation stays safe and within your view even as you navigate away from it. 

We’ve also added tags within the chat tabs so you easily see whether the people in the list are speakers, booth reps, or other attendees. 

5. Miro Whiteboard

The new Miro integration lets you collaborate with your attendees in real-time on a whiteboard. This helps stimulate everyone and get them more invested in the event. You can brainstorm with people at the event, collaborate, and bring innovative new ideas to the table. These are especially great for summits and employee events. 

6. Walls.io Integration

Walls.io is a social media wall that collects social posts related to your event and displays them in a tab. This 

Here’s why you should try this out:

• Display feeds from all social media accounts to show how attendees feel at the event.
• Induce FOMO (the fear of missing out) and promote more social media posts. 
• Increase brand awareness by making your event the talk of the town.

7. Photobooth

The new virtual photo booth is as interactive as a real-life photo booth. It offers a social activity that all your attendees can partake in. 

The vFairs photo booth comes with photo, boomerang, and gif functions. You can also view all the photos of people at the event from the photo gallery. 

Take things up a notch by introducing prizes and draws for picture-takers! Again, this helps promote FOMO and improve engagement at the event. 

8. Kahoot Integration

Amp up the entertainment with a game of Kahoot! Kahoot offers an interactive way of learning and competing. And of course, raise the stakes with prizes!

9. Spin the wheel

Hand out your prizes with a lot more thrill and excitement! The vFairs spin the wheel is customizable and dynamic. Attach prizes with each segment and keep your attendees on their toes.

10. Hybrid improvements

We’ve also improved the hybrid experience with better reporting and live streams. 

• Landing page update: Ask attendees whether they’d be attending in-person or online when they’re registering from the landing page. This improves reporting and helps you customize and scale your efforts based on the demand for each event type.

• AV partners: Get in touch with our AV partners based in various countries for a seamless and crystal clear live stream.

Hybrid events 101

After the feature announcements, Younas ventured into the world of hybrid events. 

He noted that the tide of virtual events has shifted. vFairs customers still want to keep a virtual element in their future events, whether or not they host a physical component. And it makes sense. Virtual events take your events to a global audience and help you tap into a market you just couldn’t get to before. 

That’s where the rising popularity of hybrid events comes in. 

What are hybrid events?

Hybrid events are events that have both a physical and virtual component. They’re a great way to combine the benefits of both event types. Hybrid events help organizers scale at a lower cost, tap into global audiences, and provide convenience to their attendees.

What’s a hybrid event platform?

It’s a technology offering that empowers event organizers to run a live in-person event with a limited audience while hosting a virtual event to host online attendees, cap-free.

Benefits of hybrid events

Here are six major benefits of trying out hybrid events. 

1. Get higher attendance by engaging both in-person & virtual attendees. 
2. Increase engagement by enabling networking between in-person & virtual visitors.
3. Deliver live streams of physical sessions & consolidate discussion via QnA & polls.
4. Reach Global Audiences with no need for commute/travel.
5. Create digital sponsorship opportunities alongside physical event placements.
6. Measure engagement, turnout & ROI with detailed reports

Types of hybrid events

Hybrid events have come a long way. And it’s not easy to run virtual and in-person events together. That’s why there are three different types of hybrid events so you can always choose the one that fits your needs and bandwidth the best. 

1. Lite Hybrid: Broadcasting just the live stream into the virtual platform.
2. Sequential Hybrid: Virtual event on one day and physical event on a different date.
3. Complex Hybrid: Physical event happens at the same time as virtual.

The lite and sequential hybrid event types are the most requested ones at vFairs. They’re also easier to execute for organizers. The complex hybrid type often requires a lot of manpower and hence, isn’t as popular. However, the vFairs hybrid event feature set is primed for all types of hybrid events.

Questions from the Enhancing Your Virtual & Hybrid Events Webinar

The session ended with an interactive Q&A session. Here are our favorites:

Q1. Can vFairs customize avatar clothing?
Absolutely yes. All our avatars are customizable. We’ve also hosted events with avatars based on real representatives and diverse age and ethnic groups.

Q2. Does vFairs onboard speakers?
Yes. We do group onboardings and even individual ones based on our customer’s requirements. We always run tests before every event to make sure that all stakeholders are comfortable with the platform and there aren’t any glitches. We’ve recently organized an event with 600 speakers and we onboarded all of them. Younas believes that our biggest strength is our event management and customer support.

Q3.   How many engagement features does vFairs offer?
We have 17 in total, probably the most out there. 

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! Let us know what you’d like our future webinars to cover and shoot us an email if you have any questions. 

Check out the full webinar here!