Virtual Event Platforms: vFairs

Covid-19 has put meeting planners in an interesting predicament. They have been left to translate hard skills, developed over years, into a digital and virtual environment. They’ve had to put a temporary pause on being able to walk the floor, bring their teams and executives together for in person rehearsals, and make those fine-tuning adjustments that typically happen days before a live event, and make it all happen virtually. If meeting planning isn’t stressful enough, this new expectation introduces an entirely new set of skills that planners are having to quickly develop. For the less technology-savvy, this could cause a level of stress and fear that could spell disaster. 

vFairs presents a customizable full-stack conference platform that is able to mimic a true conference feel. 

How we Would Rate the Platform

Ease Of Use  - 7/10

Engaging with vFairs comes with agreeing to trust them as your conference partner. For meeting planners, this means using the conference framework, agenda, and objectives to inform the vFairs team of what you are hoping to achieve, and trusting them to come through on delivery. 

Customization - 8/10

vFairs provides a menu of customizable options from location, booth layout, even season and weather outside. While our team perceives this as somewhat “gimmicky”, the positive is that you will be working with a team of developers who will be able to translate some of your “in-person” conference value to a virtual environment. 

Security - 6/10

All content is streamed or pre-recorded through a third party platform. In the examples we were able to review content that was embedded from YouTube, Vimeo, and other sources. What this tells us is that vFairs is happy to use the content you are providing, but may not be putting the focus they need into security. While vFairs does address GDPR compliance, there’s little mention of encryption, and since they are also managing the registration database, I would read through your contract with a fine-tooth comb when it comes to personal data. 

Integrations - 2/10

Let’s face it, in a dream scenario you would be utilizing vFairs for EVERYTHING - registration through post event analysis, but that’s not how the real world works. If you are managing registration through an external platform I see a headache and a half coming from the amount of exporting and reimporting that will need to happen leading up to the event. Without vetted integrations to CVENT or any other registration software you are at the mercy of the developers to get the information you are looking for. 

Price - 5/10

The hard question I would ask your organization or association before moving forward with vFairs is this: “Will utilizing vFairs and customizing a virtual conference experience result in the return on investment we are looking to receive from this event, and be worth the price we are charging to our exhibitors, and receiving from our sponsors?” If the answer to this is yes, then it’s worth the investment, if no, there are much more cost effective routes to go. Also keep in mind that the vFairs pricing structure is based on every customization coming with a price tag, and we’d recommend padding the budget going into planning. 

Overall Rating - 5/10

Ultimately, our team felt that vFairs was more about the virtual environment than the actual content and conference itself. We know that for many meeting planners relinquishing the control of registration, content, exhibit hall layout, and reporting would be a big ask, and would require a lot of trust in vFairs. With the potential increase of accounts and events that the platform has probably gotten in the past 6 months, it may be worth waiting to see how the dust settles, or asking for a few reference calls before moving forward. 

Who would use vFairs? 

For larger corporations and associations that have been planning multi-day conferences annually for some time, and have been put in a position to engage with their constituents virtually, vFairs may be a platform to consider. 

With the ability to mimic an actual conference center and plot and plan a virtual trade show or exhibit hall, the doors open for charging vendors for booths, having event sponsors with custom banner ads, branding, and give you some of those tangible revenue generators that have become synonymous with conference planning. 

User Experience

With the capabilities to pretty much recreate your physical meeting space vFairs has plenty of customization capabilities. From rendering of different booths that would have been present at your in-person meeting, to enabling live streams in place of speaker presentations, vFairs can essentially re-create your conference as it would have been if it took place in person. 

For instance, if you are a university hosting a job fair, each company that would have had a booth at the job fair will be able to have a virtual branded booth within the vFair. This platform also offers the capability of multiple branded chat rooms. Each company can have their own chat room, and students will be able to join the chat room to converse with the company representative, ask questions, etc. 

Unfortunately, all of these customizable capabilities come at an extra fee on top of the base fee. Large in-person events are likely still more costly, but when adding up the base fee plus extra fees for each booth, lobby, room, and more, your virtual event can end up costing more than you need it to. 

Technical Assessment

On the technical side vFairs differs from other platforms we have seen on this series on the fact that event hosts won’t need to worry about setting up the platform or designing room as all this process and any other technical configurations or content upload is done by the vFairs folks. Depending on the the level of customization and number of events per year some of these things will come with an additional cost but would give you the peace of mind of knowing all technical aspects are taken care, the platform goes as far as providing a dedicated support contact and support team to assist with any troubleshooting during the event. 

In terms of live speaker presentations or live feed, the platform's default live feed application is Zoom webinars, making it very easy to use and probably very familiar for lots of users. Video streaming can also come from prerecorded contents in platforms such as Vimeo or Youtube. 

On the user side, joining events hosted on vFairs platform is simple and requires no additional app or plug-ins, their entirely web based interface is very responsive and works with very low connection speeds requirements as low as 1Mbps.

After being able to tour around some of their virtual event demos, the platform is stable, load times are good, pre recorded content played without issues and pre uploaded documents were easy to access and easy to navigate. Some of their 3D shapes and scenarios were okay but not surprisingly great however we would like to think this was done in hopes to reduce load times and bandwidth consumption.