Like most DMCs, Malta-based EC Meetings has been hugely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in a drop in demand for its services and the majority of live events postponed and cancelled over the past 12 months.

Rather than sit back and wait until live events returned, managing director Mark Gatt set about adapting to client’s changing needs and EC Meetings developed its own virtual events platform, Evowk. We caught up with Mark, who talked us through the journey from destination specialist to virtual events expert…

At what point and why did you decide to develop a virtual event platform?

I remember it very clearly. I got back from a holiday in the mountains with my family just over a year ago in early March, and Covid was beginning to spread. We have been in business 20 years – we have been through September 11 and the financial crisis and this one looked initially like it was going to be something similar. We started to see postponements from March to June, so during March I started reading and researching a lot about virtual conferencing to see how we could move the clients that we had to online events.

In April, I asked the team to start looking at alternative options of services we could offer as a business. We had a quite a few ideas ranging from running a beach club to food trucks and we shortlisted two. Virtual conferencing was one of those. By May, we had found the partner who we were going to work with on development, and we started at the end of May. It was quite a journey from then to mid-December, which is when we had our first event on the platform.

Why develop your own rather than partnering with a supplier/platform already out there?

Maybe because we’re crazy?! The reality is that during our extensive research, which included looking for potential partners, that perfect fit was not found. Being event managers and a DMC ourselves – we wanted to replicate life, to bring it as close to live as possible. We felt there were a lot of tech companies out there offering virtual event platforms but the element of flexibility and coming at it from an event management perspective when you bring in clients who don’t really have any knowledge of the virtual world and hold their hand throughout, that is what we felt was missing in the marketplace.

We didn’t want to try and compete with Teams or Zoom. The gap we found was more in complex events, where there is a lot of functionality where you are trying to recreate a physical conference with an auditorium, break-out rooms, expo areas and networking.

How did you go about building the platform?

In the research we did, we picked out the best bits of other platforms and put them all together. We had a brief which we sent out, but we always had in mind a visual effects company that works on Hollywood movies and also has a sister software development company. So we engaged them because it allowed us to embrace the two together from a visual and technical perspective. There was a lot of internal learning so we can operate the platform with very minimal development support because it’s been designed so we can manage it from the back-end. Our team has transformed themselves in the past nine months from  event managers to tech experts.

What is unique and different about Evowk?

I would say the individualisation. The the platform has been built to cater for large numbers and every delegate has their own individual agenda, which is linked to a notification system.

They will receive a pop-up notification telling them where they need to be, for example on a particular booth or in break-out room, and when they click on that reminder it takes them directly into that room. From what we have seen, that is a pretty unique feature. Our platform is a one-stop-shop that is completely flexible – you can have a unlimited number of break-out rooms, unlimited number of booths, networking availability on video or on chat, he booths offer a video calling option as well. These functionalities all together make it pretty unique.

The name Evowk is also to show it’s a personal approach we are taking – every event is individual and it’s not just a software that we sell to clients. We try to make is as much as real life even as possible.

Have you had to hire in new virtual events/tech expertise to manage the platform?

We have mainly reskilled. We went at working 110% to zero and all of a sudden our team became idle as we had no events to deliver. There was a lot of time on our hands to reskill. Everyone did courses and we built it together with the developers.

You recently ran your first large-scale exhibition and conference on Evowk. Can you talk us through the event?

The event was for a company in the medical devices industry. We had 1,200 people registered – 500 were suppliers and 500 were buyers and the other 200 were management. The buyers are from the medical device company and they were getting training from the suppliers.

We had 40 supplier booths and they had a rotation system where buyers were put together in groups of six or eight people in different languages, moving along the booths in 20-minute rotations. That was particularly challenging from a development point of view because every 20 minutes for a whole week, we had 1,600 changes. The platform was doing it automatically and pushing the delegates from one area to another through the notifications system.

On top of that, it was also their annual sales conference, so they had various auditorium sessions and break-out sessions, fun networking where they brought int a band and we had an awards dinner as well. For our first big event it as a major challenge, and achievement at the end because we had great feedback, and the client was very happy. The objectives were met, and we had 85% engagement, so it was a very successful event.

How do you see the platform sitting alongside your existing DMC services?

The good thing about the platform is that it has helped us maintain a lot of our client base. It’s provided us with a reason to keep in touch with them and offer something new, so that has been very positive. We have just delivered our first hybrid event, and moving into the future, we anticipate there will be more hybrid events and hopefully more fully live events too. Once we see both virtual and the live side of the business growing again, I foresee that we’ll have two separate departments managing virtual and managing live ideally with people trained in both areas and working closely together.

Do you think clients will continue to use virtual and hybrid formats once the pandemic has passed?

My opinion is that I think there will be a lull on the virtual side at the end of this year and beginning of next year, because people are desperate to get back to meeting in person. Then I feel the market will stabilise. We won’t go back to 2019 when it was 95% live and 5% virtual. There will be more of a balance between live, hybrid and virtual.

How much of your business do you expect to be virtual/hybrid versus live in the future?

We are a DMC/event management company, and we want the DMC business to thrive and to continue being relevant. However there are certain realities which we are going to have to face. Seeing the feedback from our last event – a large percentage of delegates said they enjoyed the event but they would still prefer live.

I think 70/30 live and virtual is a fair estimate. It could grow to 60/40, but I still think live will be a larger proportion than virtual or hybrid.