Meeting for Backstage: Present virtual sessions, captivate your audience

Virtual events have seen immense growth in the last few months—almost 1000% according to one study—and most event organizers and marketers believe they'll remain popular even in the future. This decision to retain virtual events is completely understandable as they come with amazing benefits. They're cost-effective, scalable, and, most importantly, versatile. Of course, this versatility is chiefly dependent on the technology used to host events. The more versatile and fluid the event technology used, the better the event experience.

At Backstage, we believe flexibility is the key to a better user experience. That's why, even though we have our own webcast service, Backstage OnAir, we wanted to give you more choices. You already have the option to add webcast links in Backstage and direct attendees to other third-party webcast services for remote sessions, but a native integration is always better, right? So that's what we did—we integrated with Zoho Meeting, the first of our many integrations for virtual events.

Let's take a look at how Zoho Meeting's web-conferencing and engagement tools can help you host amazing virtual experiences.

Broadcast virtual sessions, video conference with attendees

Reach a wider audience by webcasting sessions with Zoho Meeting. Whether keynotes, workshops, or panels—execute your virtual sessions as flawlessly as you would your in-person ones. Some of the features available in Zoho Meeting include screen-sharing (to show presentations) and screen-recording (to save and download your session for offline use). Also, you don't have to go to Zoho Meeting to start or manage sessions. You can do it directly from Backstage.

After you integrate your Backstage portal with your Zoho Meeting organization in the Integrations tab of your portal's Settings page and make it your default webcast service, go to the Present sessions tab in the event's Conduct dashboard to present it. All sessions will be listed in a dynamic timeline here. To learn more about a session or start presenting it, click that session. The sessions details along with the Start session button will appear to the right of the timeline.

On clicking the button, you will be taken to Zoho Meeting where you can video conference with attendees and conduct sessions. One more thing—only members who are part of the Zoho Meeting organization linked to the Backstage portal can present sessions, so make sure you have the necessary permissions.

Engage your audience, host interactive gatherings

The single most important goal of any event is to maximize engagement and create meaningful connections. Most event organizers find this to be a challenge with virtual events as they don't come with the advantage of face-to-face interactions. This means, without good content and robust engagement tools, your virtual event can quite easily become impersonal (and boring)

Zoho Meeting comes with quite a few engagement tools like polls, real-time chat, and Q & A features to allow speakers and panelists to interact with attendees throughout the event. Also, to make things easier, we've included an option for you to create your polls beforehand in Backstage. When a session begins, these polls will be listed in Zoho Meeting and you can run them at any point during the session.

Once the session is over, the poll results will be saved in Backstage. To manage polls, go to the Sessions tab in the Manage dashboard. Another benefit of virtual events, in general, and Zoho Meeting, in particular, is that you can know how many attendees are present at the session at any given moment.

The Zoho Meeting integration is only available for members subscribed to our Enterprise and Ultimate plans and for events that use the Enterprise and Ultimate add-ons.

Present virtual sessions with Zoho Meeting and keep your attendees glued to their screens. Let us know what you think in the comments below. For product-related questions or suggestions, write to us at support@zohobackstage.com.

Happy organizing!

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