About the event:

Altium hosts an annual three-day event which offers participants the opportunity to learn, connect, and get inspired by showcasing innovative ways to approach their work. With a focus on providing valuable experiences for attendees at every stage of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design process, Altium's event features live workshops, professional development courses, and industry keynotes - all for free.

Held as an in-person event since its inception in 2017, the conference had to take a virtual avatar once the pandemic kicked in.

The company’s initial tryst with virtual events was encouraging as it enabled better access and cost-effectiveness. However, the limitations of their existing event tech left a lot to be desired. For instance, they had to depend on additional integration requirements and external networking tools - which needed them to manage multiple tools and overheads.

Which is why, in 2022, Altium turned to Zuddl to make their virtual conference a memorable one - for all the right reasons.

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‍Event objectives:

• Educating and inspiring the engineering community
• Improving networking opportunities
• Building a positive company perception amongst attendees

Here’s how Altium pulled it off:

By setting up 5 topic-based meeting rooms for better knowledge sharing

With this event being a great professional development opportunity for young engineers, attendees were keen to hang out with session speakers post sessions, and this is where meeting rooms came in super-handy. Based on their topic of interest, attendees could join the Supply Chain room, PCB Manufacturing room, etc for focused interactions. 

By incentivizing participation in an out-of-the-box and effective manner

Altium managed to get the leaderboard buzzing thanks to their really thoughtful giveaway that worked as a perfect incentive - a drone! 

Clearly, the company knew their tech-savvy attendees would love to geek out on a giveaway like that, and the leaderboard served as the perfect feature to facilitate healthy competition amongst attendees, with the live Q&A capability turning out to be a standout hit in the meeting rooms and polls driving interactions at booths.

By providing quality networking opportunities as part of the entire event experience

In the previous virtual editions of AltiumLive Connect, the company relied on tools like Discord to overcome the limitations of their previous virtual event platform, in order to provide networking opportunities. Understandably, this added a sense of hesitation amongst attendees as they had to sign up in order to network, resulting in a lower quality of networking opportunities. When asked for feedback on the networking experiences, attendees gave the event a 35% rating.

Fast forward to 2022, the company saw a significant improvement with a 17% increase in the rating that attendees gave to their networking experience on Zuddl. Not just that; when attendees were asked to rate Zuddl for ease of use, attendees gave the platform a 4.3 rating out of 5. 

The event team at Altium credited this improvement to the seamless networking feature that was part of the overall event experience, allowing attendees to interact in free flow with fellow attendees and speakers. The team also called out the valuable live support that was crucial in the smooth running of the entire 3-day event.

The outcome

As the numbers suggest, Altium successfully delivered an impactful 3-day virtual experience that not only resulted in improvement in the quality of interactions and networking opportunities but also brought about a positive company perception amongst a majority of attendees. 

From depending on multiple tools for each aspect of their virtual event in the past two years to streamlining their entire virtual experience in 2022, Altium’s journey is a classic example of mastering the art of going virtual.