EDUCAUSE

Challenge

Leading the way for its members, EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit organization helping people in dynamic positions who lead, manage, and use information technology to shape strategic decisions in higher education.

EDUCAUSE’s Victoria Fanning, director of hybrid and online meetings, plans five major hybrid conferences, two multi-day online events and numerous online seminars and webinars every year. And she partners with Mediasite Events.

Solution

By way of their desktops, 350 remote attendees from 165 campuses and 8 countries around the world connect to in-person participants during the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Attendees participate in teams that range from 2 to 60, and the estimated exposure is around 2,000. Remote attendees access sessions from the face-to-face meeting including all keynote sessions, and more than 50 featured and themed concurrent sessions streamed with Mediasite.

“This is about member outreach, to allow more people to access the content shared at face-to-face meetings,” Fanning said.

They also participate in exclusive interactive discussion sessions with experts on current topics, and guide their hybrid experience with an Event Planning Kit to facilitate remote discussion.

Results

“We are able to implement a lot of innovative ideas in our programming,” Fanning said. “We’ve got many members who register an entire department or campus site using one registration fee. They have everyone meet in a room and watch the sessions. They literally create their own off-site campus event. We are happy to have established a solid and successful relationship with Sonic Foundry before the inception of our hybrid events. Sonic Foundry has played an important role in EDUCAUSE delivering hybrid events. We sincerely appreciate the work their onsite staff accomplishes at our events to turn them into quality online experiences.”