Case Study: Mambu Turns Virtual Kick-Off Event Into a Global Celebration
About Mambu
SaaS. Cloud-native. API-first.
These all describe Mambu’s market-leading banking and financial services platform.
Virtual Event Technology
Mambu used EventMobi’s:
- Event Space
- Full-Service Registration
Meet The Person Behind The Magic
Participants
Attendees included internal employees from
across the world.
Event Objectives
Mambu had two primary objectives for their February 2021 “We Own This” Virtual Kickoff Conference:
- To share their 2021 company strategy and vision
- To build community, unity, engagement, enthusiasm
Planning The Event
To celebrate their new status as a unicorn startup and share the 2021 company strategy, Ioana Grapa, Global Events Lead at Mambu was tasked with the mandate to plan and run “We Own This”, a global internal kick-off event.
They’d never run an event of this scale virtually and, as a team, looked at a total of 40 platforms before selecting EventMobi. Ultimately, EventMobi was one of the only vendors with proven event expertise and met Mambu’s data privacy regulations.
“It was important for us to go with someone who has been in the industry and who knows a bit more about the event world. Reputation was important when choosing an event platform.”
— Ioana Grapa
Leading Up to The Event
Ioana knew that their employees had attended many other virtual events, and she didn’t want to settle for “another platform, another link.” Instead, she and her colleagues brainstormed internally to create a unique, fully-branded experience that encouraged attendee engagement.
EventMobi Event Success Manager Pirkko Sprengel assisted the Events Lead with project management,
onboarding, best practices, and queries. Ioana was particularly impressed with the turnaround speed when it came to collaborating with EventMobi on the platform.
The EventMobi Event Space offers versatile live streaming, video conferencing options and native streaming options, which allowed Mambu to work with their audio-visual provider of choice, a third-party production studio in Amsterdam.
“Putting everything into a Virtual Event Space requires a completely different mindset,” Ioana shared. “We wanted to be very daring and creative and come up with some cool interactive elements. I liked the fact that we could fully brand the space with our identity. The platform itself looked great with our colours”.
How Mambu Used The Event Space to Build Community
From broadcasted panel discussions and keynotes from well-known industry leaders, employees shared that the event felt like “watching their favourite TV show with their family.” Ioanahad also brought in a live illustrator whose screen was visible throughout the day while he worked on visualizations of key points in the event content.
Throughout the event, the Live Session Chat was buzzing, and attendees were firing off questions to ask panelists via the Q&A feature; in short, achieving Mambu’s goal to build a sense of community.
Event Space Highlights
Live Stream Broadcasts
To showcase keynotes, panel discussions, and other individual presentations from internal and external presenters.
Session Chat
“We were quite curious to see how well it would work, but the chat option was amazing. It was buzzing all the time; I think in part because it was an internal event, and everyone was comfortable to have fun and banter,” shared Ioana.
Q&A
To collect questions from the audience to ask panelists, and upvote which ones to prioritize.
Live Polling
To ask attendees which songs they wanted the DJ to play during breaks.
Virtual Event Analytics
“For us, it was useful to see who joined which session,” Iona added.
“We Own This’ was one of the best, most beautiful events I’ve ever run; it just worked really, really well. The feedback we got was amazing…from speakers, attendees and the production team. It was a complete success.”
— Ioana Grapa
Measuring Event Success
95% of invited employees logged in and were present throughout the entire event.
When asked how to advise other planners on how to pull off such a unique event, Ioana reiterated the importance of being creative about the event format and willing to take risks. She emphasized: “Planners need to stop associating live events and virtual events because they’re two completely different formats and require different approaches.”
Ioana’s Recommendations
- Start the live stream by playing some music to build up the excitement.
- Front-load the day with the most important, coolest sessions. “You need to start with this momentum to catch your audience’s attention.”
- Incorporate different interactive elements throughout, “otherwise they will just drop off and not come back throughout the day.”
- Consider a shorter format and changing up the session format. “Attention spans are shorter in a virtual Event Space, so it’s key to have a nice rhythm between different styles of sessions.”
