The Geothermal Rising Conference (GRC) is the geothermal industry’s flagship annual conference, reflecting the global nature of the geothermal industry. The conference is the largest annual gathering of the geothermal community, bringing together people in industry, academia, government, and the general public.
About the Event
Fast Facts
- Geothermal Rising was planning on doing an in-person conference but needed to pivot to a hybrid event just weeks before the event due to COVID
- We began our partnership and built a virtual event platform in less than 4 weeks – with a fully custom visual design that matches the brand style guide we created
- We provided strategic planning and execution support for the Zoom coordination, recording, and editing of all sessions
We have been proud partners of Geothermal Rising (GR), leading them through a rebrand, rename, website redesign, and various marketing and communication campaigns – all over just the past couple of years! With less than a month until GRC 2021 was set to kick off as a fully in-person event, pressures and challenges from the ongoing COVID pandemic mounted and the leadership team decided to pivot to a hybrid event. Taoti rose to the challenge to support GR by quickly assembling a team of hybrid event experts – an event producer, a technical director, a designer and videographer, and virtual event platform website developers.
Our work focused on two main priorities – developing a technical strategy for the event production and developing a custom virtual event platform. For the production, we supported GR in developing a plan for how to produce over 200 technical sessions, with up to 6 happening currently, with a hybrid approach to bring together presenters and audiences who were both on-site at the conference center and participating virtually. This involved a detailed plan for using Zoom Webinar, on-site event coordination staff, on-site audiovisual equipment, and remote staff to coordinate speakers, presentation sharing, and more.
For the virtual event platform, we used our proprietary virtual event platform software with custom functionality and visual design to power the specific needs of this conference. Our team applied the brand and style guidelines created in our previous work with GR to create a look and feel that truly expressed the newly rolled out brand to the community. Given the tight timeline, we were able to make strategic adjustments to our core platform to accommodate the content GR already had available to avoid creating any additional work for their team. We were also able to efficiently import a significant amount of content – including registration data, the agenda, session descriptions, etc. from the technical systems they had already begun using such as Cvent and a Drupal-based microsite.
The live event was extremely successful – with over 600 attendees and 25+ sponsors who were able to participate in this important event, even if they couldn’t travel to the conference center! By leveraging the technical expertise of our event production team and the flexibility of our virtual event platform, we were able to create a seamless, engaging experience that brought together the geothermal community across the globe.
