Aventri officially has launched its virtual event platform, the company announced. The platform is integrated into the company's traditional event management solution, enabling users to manage virtual, hybrid and in-person meetings on a single platform.
The company began beta testing the product in June. "Since our beta launch, we've added powerful capabilities based on [customer] feedback," said Aventri CTO Shane Edmonds. "In focus groups, surveys and one-on-one conversations, customers have said the most important thing is the ability to pivot from virtual to hybrid to in-person events."
Some of the new features added during the beta test include a navigation bar, which allows users to offer questions, polling, ratings, event information, an attendee directory, sponsors, ads, a news feed and an activity feed.
When the beta test started, a collaboration function was available, but only for small meeting rooms with a maximum capacity of 500. Now, Aventri has added a presentation function and expanded the attendance maximum to 5,000.
Also new for the general release is the ability to feature sponsors in virtual event sessions. Previously, sponsors were featured only in the event lobby, according to the company.
One Aventri client, the Exhibition & Event Association of Australasia, used the virtual platform in early beta for an event, and the polling and questions were available only through a mobile app, "so some people were on the app, some people were on desktop, which was a little bit of a challenge to manage," said EEAA chief executive Claudia Sagripanti. By the time the organization held another meeting through the virtual product, those features were built into the platform.
Another new benefit is the ability to offer moderated Q&A sessions. "One, you can make questions public. Two, you can allow people to vote on them. And three, [we] provide those questions on a different screen to the speakers," said Aventri VP and general manager of Asia-Pacific Alan Ivory. "So they're not inundated with 50 questions, they're just answering the three most popular. It enables moderation for the moderators within the platform."
Sagripanti also noted that "where the Aventri platform is really good is that as an organization, you can basically run the whole thing yourself, without needing a full production team behind you." Still, Aventri provides training on the platform, especially for first-time users.
In addition, by offering all its services on one platform, "we have all the information in one platform," said Henrik Dyhr, senior consultant with Crone & Co., a Denmark-based event management firm and consultancy that participated in the beta for an association event in late August that went from in-person to virtual, with just one month to pivot. "That is beneficial to both us as a company, and also for the organizer of the meeting. We don't have to transfer information from one IT system into another one."
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