Turning AIESEC’s International Congress Virtual — A virtual conference success story

When the global pandemic struck, the whole core business of AIESEC was shaken to its core. On 1st of April, only a few days after Tokio Olympics announced postponing the Olympic games, we were facing a tough decision of our own.

This summer, we have had scheduled our 72nd annual International Congress to happen in India. AIESEC’s International Congress is a global event, that welcomes all of our leadership teams of the more than 110 territories where we are present, gathering around 700 people from all over the world for nine days in the same room.

The event is crucial for the organization, as we use this space to discuss global strategy, set up objectives, and make decisions to define the organizational direction. At the same time, this event is always a great opportunity to develop skills and competencies for our leadership body, having them network and interact with each other, as well as with our guests and partners.

This year was special, as we were launching our midterm direction, AIESEC 2025, and everyone in the organization was excited for the opportunity to get together. And then the global pandemic happened, forcing us to completely re-think how these objectives are to be met.

A story with which we opened the event, of how the transformation of the conference went.

I was given the opportunity, together with a couple of colleagues, to completely re-imagine the way we do our events and come up with something AIESEC has never seen before.

Ultimately, this was the most challenging and the most exciting project I’ve had a chance to work on in 8 years of my work with AIESEC. We turned 700 people event into an event with more than 12000 attendees, engaging third of the whole organization, delivering an experience which it’s participants rewarded with the NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 89 and average event satisfaction rating of 9.2/10.

Even today, a couple of weeks after the event has finished, I am still overwhelmed by the response we’ve got from the participants and what an awesome impact this event was able to generate.

Picture 1: We asked event participants to describe their experience using 1 word. This is how that looks like turned into a word cloud.

Here is 4 most important lessons that I took out from organizing this huge virtual event:

1. Approaching the virtual event
2. Adapting the content format
3. Building a community
4. The team behind

Approaching the virtual event

We’ve done physical events for 72 years. It’s something we are really good at. But when on April 2nd we started drafting a plan, we had no idea what would a virtual event look like. There was what seemed like an easy choice, to try to just replicate the way the physical event would look like online, but the best decision we’ve made was trying to imagine the conference completely from scratch.

We used event canvas methodology, and from 0 built up how all of the interactions and experiences of all the participants involved would look like. That gave us the opportunity to truly utilize all of the opportunities that having an event happen virtually gave us:

• We were able to make event super-inclusive, going from projected 700 participants to over 12000
• We completely changed the content formats to provide a more efficient and better way to engage both delegates and partners, resulting in average content rating of 9.1/10
• We’ve been able to bring a number of different guest speakers and lecturers, that we would probably not have the budget to afford flying all the way to India, bringing the value of the event for the participants high up!

Picture 2: An early sketch from my desk, trying to imagine the event experience in the completely new format

Adapting the content formats

As mentioned earlier, we early acknowledged that what works in the physical environment (9 days, 10 hours of content a day) would not work for the virtual event. Adding to that, our audience was across 19 different time zones.

So what did we do?

• We’ve opted for using Prime Time and On-Demand content as 2 complementing formats
• Prime time content was LIVE content delivered for 3–4 hours every day, tightly packed, high-quality set of spaces we absolutely wanted everyone to participate live
• Outside of the prime time content, we’ve had 3–4 hours of additional content tailored to the time zones and specific needs of the different audiences
• We added multiple different content formats to the agenda, ranging from LinkedIn training, to Yoga and cooking classes, making sure that we keep the engagement high throughout the event
• We’ve given unique behind the scenes insight into the event to everyone, by hosting live recaps and daily warm-up spaces, where people could get to know the insights and thoughts that would in a physical event be almost impossible to provide.

It resulted in us having a pretty stable audience engagement from the beginning to the end of the conference.

Building a community

One of the key success aspects of the event was building a community. To ensure that we facilitate connection and community with such a large audience, we had great support from the event hosting platform Hubilo, which provided us with a perfect set of features to build the strongest possible online community.

• We used event feed for constantly interacting with the participants
• We’ve run different engagement quizzes and contests every day, to reward the most active participants
• Our social media team did an epic job of ensuring that communication during the event is great
• We hosted catch up spaces where we facilitated participants to connect in person (Zoom breakout room feature was golden for us during the whole event)

Picture 3: Some of the posts on the event feed during the last day of the event

The team behind

Would you believe me if I told you that behind all this, there was just a team of 6 people?

But one thing that was important was to understand the unique skillsets needed for this type of event to happen.

I will try to highlight some of those skills while introducing you to the team behind the conference

Picture 4: The core team of the International Congress 72

David Lesmes was together with myself responsible for the content and agenda of the event. The key skill needed for that role he brought to the team is an innovative and research approach towards solving the problems of adjusting content formats. To turn the event virtual, you need people that will be able to think differently and look at the problems from different angles.

To build the community and put together such a large audience, the key person behind was Rares Man. His unique ability to interact and connect with a large audience was key for all of the great feed and platform interactions, and his ability to delegate and engage virtual teams helped us recruit a large number of support volunteers that were crucial for the success of our content and promotion campaigns.

One of the key skills that enabled this conference was practicality. Being able to immediately translate ideas into actions, and proactively solve problems is what Noelle brought to the team. She was behind able to turn our office into a recording studio, with almost no resources. At the same time, she coordinated the whole delegate experience and logistics part of the conference. Look for people that are extremely proactive when putting together the team for an event like this!

One of the key objectives of this event for us was connecting with partners and bringing revenues. That was the responsibility of Franco Perez. Being the first time we are putting a conference like this together, it took great deal of creativity and flexibility to get all the partners on board.

Lastly added, but definitely the key part of our team was Miguel. For organizing a virtual event, the key skillset you need in the team is technical knowledge and the ability to produce digital content. Working with his support team, he enabled us to smoothly stream 7 days of content. He was essential for all of the technical setups we needed to bring this conference to a home of over 12000 people.

I hope these lessons and tips help you prepare and organize best virtual event for your organization. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn.