“At Forbes, we’ve become known across industries for hosting extraordinary events that bring the world’s most influential business leaders together,” said Leann Bonanno, Group Vice President, ForbesLive. “When the pandemic hit, we had to completely reimagine the business. It was critical for us to develop a unique virtual platform that provided a seamless experience for our attendees, marketing partners, and the high-profile speakers that join Forbes iconic events.”
Leveraging Zoom for collaboration & connection
Some teams at Forbes were already using Zoom to collaborate and communicate internally. When Forbes transitioned to a fully remote work environment during the pandemic, its teams began exploring Zoom’s potential.
“There were pockets of people using Zoom before the pandemic,” Bonanno said. “We started to use Zoom more for our meetings once we were remote, and now many of our internal meetings are on Zoom, along with other collaboration technologies. As we worked closely with our production team to explore how we could best produce our events, we learned that we could also leverage Zoom as one of our virtual event platform solutions.
Creating a scalable, engaging & frictionless experience
Forbes leveraged Zoom’s features to create seamless experiences during its virtual events for both its audiences and speakers, hosting 66 virtual events with over 50,000 attendees from 188 countries in 2020 alone.
“We are pleasantly surprised by how virtual has allowed us to scale these experiences. For example, last year for our Women’s Summit, we had over 20,000 attendees register and over 12,000 check-ins, so being able to scale that conversation virtually allowed us to bring more people into the conversation and create a more inclusive community surrounding the summit was great,” Bonanno said. “Zoom’s [webinar] green room feature and Breakout Room functionality has also been very useful for our back-of-house production teams. For our virtual summits, we often have multiple speakers that all go on at different times, and it’s been helpful for our production teams to be able to create that seamless experience before pushing speakers to the virtual stage.”
The teams at Forbes also use Zoom to engage with attendees at their events, creating forums for dynamic conversations, fellowship, and connection.
“We’ve used Zoom Webinars to create structured discussions where we’ll have our speakers present, then promote certain attendees to panelists and host a curated roundtable with 20 to 30 people,” Bonanno said. “The various tools within the Zoom platform have allowed us to structure unique programming formats based on the goals of the event.”
Zoom also empowers Forbes to coordinate its efforts in tandem with its clients, creating an atmosphere where close collaboration is seamless.
