Ruben Haring: “Well… we all sat on the sofa in the middle of the day….”
By Adriana Dancu and Thomas Ansell
Let’s Get Digital is an online platform used by Make it in the North (and others) to host career events, meetings, conferences; and more. The platform was created by EventInsight, a company in Groningen, and was launched at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic.
What is EventInsight?
EventInsight was founded in 2017, and focuses on career events, providing a place for networking, and where people can make relevant connections. The company also tries to provide unique insights to make events relevant for participants, and provides event consultancy services.
Among the many partners that the company has, notable are the Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat, Bosch, UNESCO, and Nationale Nederlanden.
Let’s Get Digital
The Northern Times spoke with Ruben Haring, Sales Director at EventInsight to discuss the new platform Let’s Get Digital, how the pandemic affected their work, and why the new platform is a great solution for hosting events during lockdown.
TNT: How did Let’s Get Digital come about?
Ruben Haring: “In the first weeks of March this year, EventInsight lost about 95% of its outstanding assignments. We were constantly in close contact with our most important clients and came to the conclusion that everybody wanted to continue doing what they loved most; organizing events. That’s when we started developing an online event experience, with the motto: digital that feels like physical. At the end we grew 4-5 times faster than expected last half year.”
TNT: How does the platform work in non-technical terms?
RH: “The most important thing that we provide is an event experience. People love to come together, meet each other, enjoy the content and love the fact that good care is taking of them during a day. This is exactly the thing we supply digitally, the full event experience, with a great ‘wow’ factor, where people keep talking about for the oncoming weeks.”
TNT: What sort of events do you think it is most suited for?
RH: “I think the Let’s Get Digital platform is most suitable for business-to-business events with more than 200 attendees. Also, it’s important that it’s really an event, and not just a webinar of 30 minutes. In that case you can better use Zoom, Teams and so on. When people want to really organize something, give their attendees an unforgettable experience and give them the event feeling where they will be talking about for weeks onwards, you are a good fit to Let’s Get Digital.”
TNT: Does it interface with other EventInsight products?
RH: “In the spring we went on a self-created COVID-19 quarantine with our whole team. For two weeks we were on the “Drentse Hei” and finished Let’s Get Digital. We were able to move this fast, because we already heavenly invested in networking opportunities and data insights over the last couple of years with EventInsight. We build Let’s Get Digital on the existing backend for EventInsight, so it also seamlessly integrates with the EventInsight mobile application.”
TNT: How has it been received by your clients and what sort of events has it been used for?
RH: “All our clients were very enthusiastic about the possibilities to keep on organizing their events. Also, we gained a lot of attention from different platforms. We hosted all kind of events, from small client gatherings for a software firm from Groningen with 80 people up to large trade fairs with 6.000 people attending!”
TNT: How do you keep remote/online events feeling like they are real life events?
RH: “We try to integrate the live elements in the online events as much as possible. Next to that we let people really come together, so that they know at every moment that they are on the event with a lot of other people and have this event feeling! We integrate a personal welcome, a lobby where people gather during the event.”
TNT: Does Let’s Get Digital have any non-event benefits? (I see an excellent green claim on the website!)
RH: “We see as one of the biggest advantages of organizing events digitally that the enormous amount of travel for events can be reduced. Isn’t it ridiculous that a speaker flies to New York for just a 15-minute keynote? We make sure that the environmental savings of your event by hosting it digitally are clear in numbers of impact. Next to this, we also give way more people around the globe access to crucial information, they were not able to get before. By this we give more people around the world a chance to be equally successful.”
TNT: How has it been for EventInsight in general during the Coronavirus pandemic?
RH: “We have shifted partially to working remotely. We have a rather large pressure on us for all the events hosted in the platform, and sometimes working together is the best way to host these events. We created Let’s Get Digital by putting ourselves in a 2-week quarantine in the spring, and right now we are just back from our second quarantine, now just to launch Let’s Get Digital 3.0, our newest version. We see that working together is always a large benefit for all the people around our company, but especially for the people in our team who live on themselves. We had people who only saw people at the supermarket for 2 weeks and they would (sometime literally) kill to be able to start working from the office again.”
If you have an event that you think would fit Let’s Get Digital, check out the website!
