Follow 

Share

Archived reviews are more than 24 months old, and aren't counted towards the average five star ratings or percent recommended.

Outstanding Collaborative Partnership Spanning More Than a Decade Of Online Conferences

Attendee Experience
5
Average: 5 (1 vote)
How satisfied are your attendees with the platform?
Admin Experience
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)
How satisfied are your administrators with the platform?
Customer Service
5
Average: 5 (1 vote)
To what extent are your customer service experiences timely, helpful, and resolved to your satisfaction? To what extent do you consider your vendor to be a true partner in your organization’s success?
Stability & Reliability
5
Average: 5 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with the platform's uptime and technical performance?
Integrations
3
Average: 3 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with the platform's ability to integrate with other technologies?
Exhibit Hall
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with the functionality for a virtual exhibit hall?
Sponsor Recognition
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with the functionality for recognizing sponsors?
Attendee Interaction
5
Average: 5 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with the functionality for supporting attendee-to-attendee interaction and communication?
Reporting and Analytics
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)
How satisfied are you with your ability to access platform data in useful ways?
Overall Rating
5
Average: 5 (1 vote)
What is your overall rating of this platform?
Job Role: 
Director
Organization Type: 
Professional association or society
Number of Attendees at Largest Conference: 
1,000 to 2,499
Geographic Focus: 
National
Highest Number of Sponsors: 
30 to 59
Highest Number of Exhibitors: 
50 to 99
Highest Number of Sessions: 
60 to 99
Highest Number of Concurrent Sessions: 

TLDR: I'd highly recommend them.

We've been offering online conferences for more than 15 years, during which time we've probably hosted 50+ online conferences. They've been the highest revenue generating product category in our learning portfolio for nearly a decade (this doesn't include our org's annual event). Our online conferences are also the highest rated learning experience we offer (and this does include our annual event, which sets the gold standard for excellence in our education space).

I use the word collaborative partnership in the title because that's exactly what the relationship has been over the years. The platform as it exists now has changed, in part, because of our feedback and collaboration. I'll also add that we use iCohere for production services (i.e., they record our presentations, help on live session support) and event support and in that capacity, we've learned and grown together too.

Our events include a combination of live and recorded content, spanning 13 days, inclusive of 2 weekends, and generally including around 30 hours of educational content.

After practical content, our online learner values convenience most of all, so we design our online experiences to deliver on that value. Most educational sessions are recorded in advance and available 24/7 throughout the event. We also have a dozen or so live sessions, during the full week of the event, which usually expand on a topic from a recorded presentation, in the form of Q&A and discussion. These live sessions are recorded and made available immediately following.

We have an event welcome (1st impressions, orientation, and sponsorship), daily announcements (to convey a live event feel, what's happening, how to plan ahead, reminders, sweepstakes opportunities, etc. - these can also be configured to go out as external emails), presentation areas, live sessions (text chat and webinar integrated), an event calendar, exhibit hall, rotating sponsor spot ads, branding, and the flexibility to create myriad other spaces for peer learning, resource sharing, a poster hall, CE information, and so on, as well as a helpdesk, internal message center, the option of external web links, a learner directory, platform settings, attendee chat, and those are just what we've used, but I don't think even covers all of the options.

This review is dated January 7, 2021, which I call attention to, because the landscape of online event platforms is rapidly changing. New event platform products are popping up almost weekly and established ones are experiencing significant investments in development. Some platforms have made huge leaps in short periods of time. With that in mind, I'll focus this review on an area that I think iCohere gets very much right, where many other platforms don't.

Namely, community.

In some ways, it's particularly odd that so many new platforms seek to visually mirror a physical event space (why, exactly?), rather than focusing on what's great about in-person meetings, bringing people together. Don't make it look like an in-person event (it doesn't), help me feel like part of my community and connected to my peers.

I can't speak to the exact origins of their platform, but I've always thought of iCohere, principally as an online community platform that has expanded to an online event platforms (and LMS, I believe, although we don't use it for that). As such, community and interaction are baked into the core of the platform. Much of the content areas take the form of a discussion space. For every presentation, it's easy for learners and speakers to participate in asychronous discussion. In fact, outside of any live sessions, our speakers don't even need to log into the platform to participate substantially. All comments and questions in their discussion space also come to them as emails and simply clicking reply on their email, typing up a message, and clicking send routes their response back into the conference platform. Learners have more direct access to speakers in our platform than they do in-person, since there, everyone has to rush to get to their next session. How many online events have you done recently where there is good conversation in the chat with speakers and other attendees, but it disappears the instant the session is over and there is no obvious or easily accessible place to continue the conversation? I hate that! Our conference hall has rich discussions around presentation topics. We also focus our exhibit hall experience on interaction, using sweepstakes to incentivize direct engagement with vendors (e.g., visit each vendor and post your name, email address, and some reason why their program product or service could be useful to you). In the same way that we make it easy for speakers to participate, exhibitors receive an email every time someone posts a comment (name, email, reason - sounds like a potentially good lead). In many of our online conferences, for as many comments we see in our conference hall (>1,900 comments at our summer event), we see even more engagement in our Exhibit Hall (>2,400 comments at the same event).

In the iCohere platform, community is center stage and it's easy for learners, speakers, and exhibitors to participate and engage in meaningful ways. That's especially important now, nearly a year into the global COVID-19 pandemic, where we can't yet be physically together.