Growing the DPP during times of disruption

DPP had thrived on in-person and invite-only events that provided high-quality networking opportunities by bringing together content providers, service providers and tech firms.

It was clear that the organisation would have serious business continuity problems during the Covid lockdowns. So Spork was asked if we could help.

As it happened, we’d been working on the minimum viable product (MVP) for our own product, 4forty.io – a streaming platform that allowed clients to easily incorporate live video content into their current ecosystem. 4forty.io had already been trialled successfully during live streams of the English Chamber Orchestra, so we relished the opportunity to tweak the platform for conference events as well.

In this case, data was as useful to DPP as the functionality to provide events virtually in the first.

1. Ticketing/gatekeeping to be managed within Salesforce directly.
2. Streaming content could be bolstered with content from CraftCMS.
3. Analytics data from virtual events from 4forty.io could be sent straight back into Salesforce for further processing.
4. Live two-way communications between attendees and panel members were made possible via a live Q&A interface, real-time demo requests, post-stream surveys, and live text captioning.

Curated catch-up video-on-demand was made available to DPP members via Brightcove, allowing users to virtually discover the seminars that were of interest. Again, usage stats were all fed back into Salesforce.

Aside from the obvious benefit that DPP could continue with events during Covid, it also found that events did not need to be limited by venue capacity or geographic location. This allowed DPP to expand – invitations could now be sent to non-members at little extra cost for acquisition purposes. And panellists could be pooled internationally more frequently.