The annual Research Support Community Day(s) went fully virtual in 2023 using Zoom Events. The conference, held for the benefit of research support professionals from across Australia and New Zealand, aims to connect colleagues, share ideas, and encourage skills sharing in the higher education sector.

The organising committee for the 2023 conference, with members from six universities, took guidance from AARNet Zoom specialist Geoff Lambert, and chose to leverage the Zoom Events platform to simplify registration, coordination, speaker and session profiling, as well as the delivery of conference webinars and meetings over the three day event. Structuring the conference program with shorter, part day sessions that were suitable for attendees in multiple time zones and countries, helped achieve over 500 registrations and an attendance rate of almost 75%.

Lambert said the flexibility of Zoom Events is ideally suited to the higher education market as it allows different co-editors from several institutions to contribute to the set up and configuration of each event, and for validated participants to attend from any institution, regardless of whether they already use Zoom as their preferred platform.

“The technology’s strong branding capabilities, integrated registration, self-completing speaker biographies, and the multi-day, multi-session event structure that was accessible to attendees via a single link simplified tasks for the organising committee. It freed them to focus on attracting the best speakers and maximising participation,” Lambert said.

The inbuilt analytics of Zoom Events also provided an instant profile of participation post conference, including which sessions were most popular, how people interacted, and what connections were made.

Lyndelle Gunton, Coordinator, Information Research Skills at Queensland University of Technology Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and member of the organising committee, said, “I quite enjoyed the setting up – Zoom Events was very intuitive and simple to use, and the analytics are great”

While the committee agreed that it was harder to make personal connections at the virtual event than at a physical event, this was offset by the benefits of being able to reach a much broader audience with a high participation rate.

For more information on Zoom Events, or to discuss the delivery of best practice virtual and hybrid conferences, contact the AARNet Customer Relations team or your local Zoom administrator who can make the introductions to AARNet’s Zoom advisors.