Learn more about the features of our platform with this quick overview video for first time users!
Transcript:
Introduction
Hello!
Thank you for taking the time to explore the features and functionality of OneVenue! This introductory video serves as a guide on how to get started with creating and customizing your conference and offers a bird’s eye view of some of the features and possibilities within the platform.
Please keep in mind as you watch this video that OneVenue isn’t just the platform, it’s also the people behind it. We have an entire team of professionals who are ready to help you with building and configuring your conference as well as ensuring that the execution of your event goes smoothly. You can choose to be as hands-on or hands-off as you would like during the process.
Feel free to pause, replay, or skip around this video as you explore OneVenue yourself. There’s a lot of features and customization available that this video will only begin to scratch the surface of. For more in-depth information on any specific features, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for further help.
Without further ado, let’s begin!
Basic Navigation
When you first login to the platform, you’ll see a page that looks similar to this. Along the top of the screen we have tabs that allow us to navigate to different places on the platform. Most of these tabs are visible to your attendees, but the admin tab is restricted only to conference organizers.
As an organizer, the first thing we see is the admin tab. From this page we can customize the look and feel of the conference, create and manage sessions, view and modify attendees, create a registration experience, add speaker bios and more.
The conference tab gives us a preview of how the platform will look to your attendees. This will be the page your attendees see when they first log in.
On the right under “My Schedule” your attendees can select the various tracks and see the sessions they’re registered for, with dates and times displayed in their local time zone. Sessions can be conference-wide, such as this general session, or specific to a track, such as “Design – Day 1” here.
“Announcements” shows a history of all announcements made during the life of the conference, and “My Profile” allows your attendees to manage their profile information, including preferred time zone and language, and whether they’ll join sessions within the browser or with the Teams standalone app.
The sessions tab is an optional page available for open-schedule conferences that allows your attendees to easily find and register for the sessions they want. They can filter by time zone, audience, or session type, as well as search for a specific session by name.
The expo hall, speakers and leaderboard tabs are part of features that we’ll explore later in this video.
Customization
Let’s head back to the admin tab and see how we can start customizing our conference. Clicking customization in the left menu brings us to this page where we can start to brand our conference.
Session type labels are custom categories for our sessions, such as Live Event, Social Hour, or Session. Click Add Label to create a new category, give it a title, and assign a color—either by the quick selections on the left, a color picker, or color hex code. The colors help your attendees easily differentiate the different session types when browsing the schedule.
We can also manage audiences and levels here, allowing us to provide more information about the intended audience or difficulty of a session and allowing your attendees to more easily filter sessions and find exactly what they’re looking for.
On the right we can add a logo for the conference as well as modify our support information text and support link. Both of these can be seen on the footer, and if I scroll down, you can see the logo and the support link here.
We can also enable a Teams text channel for the conference where you and your staff can communicate directly with attendees to help answer questions or provide support, and you can customize the hero image for the conference page as well. OneVenue comes standard with three generic images, but you can easily upload your own branded image.
Scheduling Sessions
Clicking Scheduler on the left menu brings us to this page, where we can view, create, and manage sessions.
This bar here shows us the month and days of the conference, allowing us to see the sessions scheduled for each day at a glance. The sessions shown are filtered by which track is selected here. Conference-level events like this general session will show no matter what track is selected.
We can create an event by clicking “Add Scheduled Item” and selecting the type of event we want—in this case, “Add Session”. On this dialog, we have several tabs. The general tab is where we enter basic information, such as the session title, start and end times, the time zone (these are set up when the conference is created), and a description.
The audience tab allows us to further specify what type of session this is, who should see this session and who the intended audience is. The session type label is a custom category that we can specify to help sort our events, which in conjunction with audience and level can help our attendees make the right choice about whether this session is right for them.
The session type specifies how this session will be delivered. “Live Event” refers to a Teams Live Event—a session where you have one or more presenters who can share their video and screen, but the audience cannot. These sessions have a private chat for the producer and presenters, and allow the audience to interact with a moderated Q&A panel.
“Teams Meeting” is a regular collaborative meeting in Teams where anyone can share their screen or video, and everyone has a common chat area. “Breakout” utilizes Teams’ breakout room functionality to create several small rooms for smaller discussions, and “pinned” is used to create a non-time-specific session that gets pinned to the top of attendee's schedules.
Under session visibility we can specify if this is an event-wide (conference-level) session, or a track specific session. If we select track-specific, we can select the appropriate track below.
The speakers tab simply allows you to set one or more of your speakers as the speaker of this session, and the links tab is where you would enter manually created links for sessions, surveys, or other things. The Join URL is used for Microsoft Teams links, Survey URL is for attendee survey links, and the activity URL is for any other external links.
Once complete, click Create Activity to create the session. Note that you can change any information after creation except for the session type. If you want to change a live event into a team meeting, for example, you would have to delete and re-create it. This is simply due to how the platform is integrated with Teams.
Registration
A registration page is an opportunity to create a great first impression and lock in a potential attendee, and OneVenue gives you the tools to create a highly customized and perfectly branded landing page and registration experience.
Let’s click Registration on the left menu. Here there are multiple tabs for configuring the different registration page features:
On the Landing tab you can modify the overall characteristics of the registration page, including color palettes, where you could use company colors to help you brand the page, a hero image for the top or background of the page, a text editor for the event overview, and options for the page footer.
On the Track Info tab, we can add descriptions for the tracks available as part of the conference.
On the Registration Form tab, we can configure the form that attendees will fill out when they sign up for the conference. Attendees will always need to provide their name and email, but we can also enable pre-set form fields, such as country, job title or company, or we can create our own custom fields. These custom fields can be a text box, text area, or a dropdown list of options that we can specify.
Additionally, we can add a registration confirmation message that will be shown to the attendees after they submit the form.
The Consent Messages tab allows us to specify common policies that users may have to accept in order to sign up for the event, such as a privacy agreement or terms of use. Any of these messages can be enabled or disabled, and if we check required the attendee must read and accept it before they can complete their registration.
On the Registration Emails tab, we can compose emails that will be sent at different stages of the registration process: The confirmation email will be sent once an attendee is confirmed for the event, the waitlist email will be sent when an attendee has been placed on the waitlist, and the not approved email will be sent if the registration requires approval, such as in a non-open-enrollment class.
And finally, the Settings tab allows you to copy and preview your registration link, enable registration approval, schedule or open your registration, and limit what email domains you would like to allow or deny. This could be useful for private or company-restricted conferences.
And, of course, once you've made changes remember to click the Save button.
With a little bit of time and some exploration of the features available, you can make a perfectly branded landing page that will make a great impression on your attendees!
Attendee Manager
Let’s continue with a look at the attendee manager. The table in the center of the page shows a paginated list of every attendee registered in the conference. By clicking on the column header, we can sort and filter attendees, as well as enable or disable what columns we’d like to see. At the right of each row, we have icons that allow us to edit the attendee or delete them from the conference.
The edit dialog allows us to adjust basic information as well as specify a date that the attendee will be removed from the conference. We can modify an attendee’s track by clicking the select box on the row, selecting a track below the table, and clicking Proceed.
To add an attendee, we would simply click “Add Attendee” and enter in their email address. After it’s entered, we’ll click “Lookup”, and the system will try to pull information if it’s available. If not, we can simply enter it manually. This dialog is useful for adding your presenters or coaches, as well as staff members or sponsors, as you can make sure they’re added with the correct role from the beginning.
You also have the option to import attendees with a spreadsheet if you’re using an alternative registration solution or are giving access to a specific team. If using this feature, make sure to download the template first to ensure the spreadsheet is in the correct format. You also have the option to export all attendee information as an Excel file at any time.
Reporting
The Reporting page gives you access to a bunch of metrics that can help you gauge the success of your conference.
The overview section gives you a quick insight into the health of your conference by tracking daily attendance, session registrations, unique attendees, meetings joined, and sponsors visited.
There are also graphs for attendance per day, conference registrations, session registrations and meetings joined, and expo hall engagement.
With each of these sections, you can drill down further by clicking the details link on the top right. For instance, Sessions Details gives us a detailed table of every session, the number of registrations, and the number of attendees who joined it. We can sort this data by clicking the column headers, or filter by clicking the filter icon. And of course, all this data can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet.
Additional Features
OneVenue also has a host of other features available to further personalize and set your conference apart. While we won’t be covering any of these features in-depth in this video, you are free to experiment with them yourself and bring any questions to your customer success manager.
The Speakers tab is an optional page that allows you to highlight your presenters with pictures, social media links and a full bio, and the platform will compile a list of sessions where the speaker will be presenting.
The Swag Bag is a digital gift bag that you can offer to your attendees, allowing you to give away gift cards, discount codes, exam vouchers, or other exclusive offerings or supplementary course materials. You can upload a spreadsheet of codes and the system will track and distribute them to your attendees.
The Resources tab gives you an easy way to provide downloadable resources to your attendees, such as course material, user guides, brochures, or support documents.
The Expo Hall highlights your sponsors by showcasing them on a central page and giving them a virtual booth. Booths can be personalized with high-impact visuals, videos, and social links, and can be used to showcase products, scan attendee badges, and meet with qualified leads.
And finally, gamification is a way to increase attendee engagement by assigning points to completed activities and allowing attendees to gauge their progress with the leaderboard.
For example, an attendee could earn 100 points for attending the conference, 1000 points for visiting a sponsor, or 300 points for taking a survey. All the points are customizable and individual sessions can be set to different point values, allowing you to highlight important events like keynotes or sponsor panels.
Conclusion
This video is only an introduction to OneVenue, so please feel free to play with the demo conference to get a feel for the platform and how it can be customized and set up for your needs.
There are more features available than just the ones we covered today, and if you’re interested in learning more about a particular feature or how we could set up the platform to best serve the needs of your event, please reach out to your customer success manager and set up a call.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about OneVenue!