Hybrid 5 Day PA Ignite Design Festival – UK & USA

The project

We were enlisted to help PA Consulting on their 5-day global hybrid event, the ‘Ignite Design Festival’, which was live streamed across three locations in the UK and USA.

As a multi-site hybrid event, happening concurrently in the USA and UK, the main priority of the client was that the event was cohesive and slick across the three locations and with the remote contributors located around the world. The live production at all sites needed to work together to create a seamless hybrid event with a flawless and consistent live stream.

It was also important that the in-person audiences at the three locations were able to interact with each other and with the virtual audience to create a truly blended, global experience to unite the invited employees.

Animated digital assets and transitions from the event:

Challenges & solutions

• Before the event, we needed to work with the complex security and IT infrastructure at the three locations in order to get all of the tech set up and tested. We worked with multiple stakeholders, including PA’s IT team to ensure the necessary bandwidth was available for both the live production team and also the worldwide internal audience. The live event, which had a potential of over 3,000 attendees, stretched this bandwidth to the limit, so our Live Stream Engineer worked closely with their IT team on a solution that mitigated any potential downtime to a minimum.
• To ensure the attendees were able to access the event platform, and we were able to utilise the software and applications needed for the live stream, we had to work with the central IT Management team to make sure that the necessary web services were whitelisted and tested for accessibility.
• We recommended Slido for the event platform not only for its interactive features, but because it is a secure event platform in which you can restrict access to a single email domain (Single Sign-on, or SSO). This meant that only those with an internal email address were able to sign in to the platform to view the confidential event content.
• There were sessions across London, San Francisco, and Boston with both in-person and remote speakers contributing and interacting with the audiences. Throughout the multi-day event, we facilitated live conversations between the hosts of the studio locations to create a slick event experience. To blend the in-person and virtual experience, we facilitated interactive sessions using features in Slido such as live Q&A, polls, and word clouds. We choreographed sessions between virtual hosts and in-person attendees, inviting the attendees on stage to take part in the sessions.

Result

“We knew how challenging this project would be delivering across multiple sites in different countries and coming up with a solution that would meet their security needs whilst ensuring a streamlined experience for their internal audience. We worked closely with their IT & Systems teams to set up dedicated internet connections across London, Boston, and San Francisco.

We also tested key software and applications that we would be utilising within the event. We explored a number of event platforms and settled on Slido which offers great audience engagement capabilities and Single Sign-On (SSO) that was critical for accessibility and security.

There were a number of stakeholders involved across the different offices who we worked with in relation to content, digital assets, logistics, and event engagement to bring the different design studios together to celebrate successes and learnings from internal and external projects. It was a joy to work with the PA team and meet so many passionate people delivering excellence and best-in-class solutions across a broad range of design and engineering faculties.”

– Nick Forster, Co-Founder London Filmed