organizes its hybrid trade show and showcases its partners with inwink
“When we were looking for an event solution, our fear was that we wouldn’t be able to customize the site ourselves, and that we’d be stuck with a model that didn’t necessarily fit with our brand identity. With inwink, everything can be customized to our colours, our domain name, our email server…”.
Chloé Depuydt, Communication and Marketing Manager, Wikipreneurs
Wikipreneurs is a Belgian company based in Brussels, whose mission is to help entrepreneurs by providing them with essential tools: articles, educational sheets, Excel templates, ready-to-use templates…
The company has also developed a coaching and training service for entrepreneurs on subjects related to management, digital marketing, sales, human resources, and administrative help when setting up a business.
For 6 years now, Wikipreneurs has been organizing the “6 Days” trade show (formerly known as “6 days for”) to highlight its activities to the Brussels and larger Belgian entrepreneurial ecosystem, and to generate business opportunities.
The common thread running through this 6-day event is the promotion of a series of practices that entrepreneurs should implement to create and sustain their businesses.
Before using inwink, the Wikipreneurs team hosted the event on the company website, then on a dedicated WordPress website.
The development of this website by an external digital marketing developer was very time-consuming and tedious, prompting reflection on the need for an external solution dedicated to digital events.
We realized that digital events were a business and that we needed the right tools. So, we looked for an event platform, and quickly realized that it would be faster and easier using inwink.
Setting up inwink met 3 objectives:
The inwink platform’s ease of use, with its CMS (Content Management System) and ready-to-use blocks, enabled Wikipreneurs to develop the 6 Days website quickly and without the need for any specific code.
Once I’d understood how the platform worked, which is generally intuitive, all I had to do was arrange the existing blocks as I wished and customize them. No need for lengthy exchanges with developers to provide specifications.
The Wikipreneurs team also attached great importance to the white-label aspect of website customization.
When we were looking for an event solution, our fear was that we wouldn’t be able to customize the site ourselves, and that we’d be stuck with a model that didn’t necessarily fit with our brand identity. With inwink, everything can be customized to our colours, our domain name, our email server…
After quickly getting up to speed, Chloé, who was the only person at Wikipreneurs in charge of the events site, received very regular support from the inwink team:
Once the onboarding was over, I had 2 sessions a week with my CSM (Customer Success Manager): one dedicated to strategic brainstorming to decide which actions to take, and a more practical one to cover areas where I was getting stuck.
In the interest of giving the event an international dimension, the Wikipreneurs team decided to broaden its scope of participants, by targeting a Dutch-speaking audience.
In order to do this, a Dutch-language version of the website was edited directly in inwink, the platform that enables multilingual versions to be created quickly and easily from the back-office.
Sessions with speakers in Dutch were also planned to maximize participation from this audience.
In the programme and the list of speakers published on the event website, participants could filter sessions by language, to find only those in French or Dutch, for example.
Historically, 6 Days was a 100% digital event. For the 2022 edition, and in response to customer requests, the Wikipreneurs team decided to add an in-person component, with a day of physical meetings.
This day included:
For the 5 days of digital sessions, presentations were broadcast live from a production studio in Brussels.
In 2021, all sessions were live, but we gave partners the option of participating remotely during the broadcast. As a result, there was too great a difference between the quality of the studio and the webcam of certain speakers. So, this year in 2022, we’ve encouraged them all to come and join us on set.
During the live sessions, chat and question tools were used to encourage interaction between speakers and online participants.
To facilitate the management of the event’s 50 partners, a dedicated space was made available to them within inwink. In their partner space, they could not only enter their own information, but also organize business meetings with participants.
Business meetings were part of the offer that we made to our partners, so that they could make appointments with participants, whether face-to-face or online.
To onboard these partners and maximize their use of these appointment opportunities, video guides and tutorials were created by the Wikipreneurs team.
At the end of the event, these trade show partners were able to retrieve the lists of all participants who had consulted their live sessions, as well as the replays. In fact, replay sessions remained available for 2 months after the event, for a certain category of participants with a paying ticket.
For the Wikipreneurs team, the choice of inwink simplified the set-up of the event’s website, the management of partners and the broadcasting of live sessions.
The support received from the inwink teams enabled Chloé, who was solely responsible for operational follow-up on the platform, to achieve her organizational objectives.
The big advantage was that I always had someone on back-up at inwink to help me. The CSM on the strategic side, but also online help and support. They were super responsive and made a big effort to find answers. It was very reassuring, especially for me as I was alone on the project.
The collaboration between Wikipreneurs and inwink will continue in 2023, with the organization of the 7th edition of 6 Days, scheduled for next September. Setting up the new website should be fairly quick and straightforward, as the team will be capitalizing as much as possible on the 2022 version, adapting only the content.
For the 2023 edition, we’ll start from what has been created and duplicate the 2022 event.
