How The Family added a virtual version to their in-person events with Hopin

About The Family

The Family is a community of European entrepreneurs whose mission is to support purpose-driven creators in their efforts to bring value to society.

The Family began as an offline community with frequent in-person conferences and dinners. Two years ago, they transitioned to an online-first community with in-person events every other week.

Challenge

The Family wanted to create better event experiences for their members and community. To do this, they had a few specific goals:

Increase the reach of their events to people outside their network.
Attract better speakers from anywhere around the globe.
Create more interaction with and between attendees.

On top of that, they needed to quickly transition an upcoming in-person event to a hybrid event that could handle both in-person and virtual attendees.

Solution

Using Hopin, The Family hosted a series of hybrid events with a small gathering of dozens of in-person attendees and hundreds of online attendees. The events entailed a 30-minute presentation for all attendees, followed by live Q&A, with networking before and after.

For the Q&A after the presentation, the organizers took questions from both in-person and online participants by having a moderator at the physical event ask the speaker the questions coming in from online attendees. This style of interaction delivered promising results.

Result

The Family reached a new audience of people with their hybrid event. In fact, 60% of the participants had never attended one of their events before.

They also received a higher volume of questions than they typically saw at exclusively in-person events. The organization ended up transitioning fully to virtual events due to the onset of the pandemic.

The lockdown forced us to focus all of our attention on online event formats. And the first results have been so encouraging that we've actually decided to close all our offices and go full-remote.