Volta Foundation
RingCentral Events Helps Volta Foundation Host the Battery Industry’s Largest Online Meetups in North America
Each month, we host our industry’s biggest virtual event. That’s a big responsibility, and we need to ensure those meetups deliver massive value and create the best experience possible for our attendees. Fortunately, RingCentral Events gives us so many extremely useful features and so much valuable user analytics that my team and I know we can fully deliver on that promise.
Michael Liu
Managing Director, NA
The world’s largest independent association of battery professionals
The battery industry plays an essential role in literally powering modern civilization. And to support those who keep this industry thriving and innovating–the battery technologists, manufacturers, investors, and researchers–there’s the Volta Foundation.
Founded in 2019 to promote a vibrant battery ecosystem globally, the Volta Foundation has quickly become the world’s largest battery industry association, counting more than 50,000 industry professionals and 4,000 organizations as members.
An events platform running low on capabilities
Michael Liu is Managing Director of the Volta Foundation’s Battery Forum, a monthly series of conferences that brings together battery professionals from around the world to discuss important industry topics, share knowledge, and network with other industry professionals.
In fact, Michael explains, the Volta Foundation itself started as a “Battery Brunch,” a small onsite meetup series in San Francisco. But this was 2019, and in-person gatherings would soon become nearly impossible to host.
And when Michael’s team launched the virtual Battery Forum–which quickly became North America’s largest online virtual conference for battery professionals–they found that their technology was holding them back.
“We started by using the video conference app we had in place for our organization’s meetings,” Michael says. “But that tool wasn’t built to run the world-class events we wanted to deliver to our association members. It capped the number of attendees we could host, and it didn’t offer much in the way of data reporting and analytics.”
With our old video conferencing solution, we had to take screenshots of the names of people who logged into an event, so we could check that against the number who registered. Then we’d take screenshots of each breakout room to see where our attendees were going. It was difficult to do any real analysis on what was working, what our attendees cared about, or which topics were getting engagement.
Michael Liu
Managing Director, NA
INDUSTRY
Professional Association
HQ
San Francisco, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
2019
EMPLOYEES
50+
The platform to power Volta Foundation’s 1,000-attendee meetups
Researching purpose-built web-conferencing platforms, Michael’s team found the functionality, ease of use, and scalability they needed in RingCentral Events.
As Michael explains, one of the key features that his team has deployed to enhance the value of their Battery Forum events is the ability to create banners and other calls-to-action within a session.
“With our old platform, the best we could do to make an announcement during an event was to drop a long URL into a chat. As people added to the thread, the announcement would disappear, and we’d get little engagement. With RingCentral Events, we can prominently place a banner announcement right in an active session, and our attendees can click on it to open a new window. That helps us guide attendees to valuable information, such as new speakers’ sessions or resources to download.”
Another RingCentral Events feature that has proven valuable to Volta Foundation, Michael adds, is the automated event recording. Because their previous conferencing app didn’t offer this, Michael’s team had to remind every speaker to activate the record feature before their sessions – and if they forgot, those sessions would be permanently lost.
With RingCentral Events, we don’t need to think about recording our events anymore–as we did with the old platform. RingCentral does it all by default, and captures everything, even multiple breakout sessions running at the same time. That’s so important, because many of our speakers are industry thought-leaders, and we can now easily repurpose their recorded talks as high-value video content.
Michael Liu
Managing Director, NA
Gaining valuable insights to continually improve their events
Michael also points out that the data and analytics capabilities built into RingCentral Events are creating tremendous value for his team as they work to continually improve the Battery Forum experience for their members.
“Now we finally have the detailed visibility into our viewership that we need–things like which speakers or topics are gaining the largest attendance as well as what our attendees care about, based on the data we get from polls and chats. And we’re able to put these learnings to work and keep making every event better than the last.”
Using our previous video app, we started feeling trapped by the growing success of our events. Those conferences were becoming the most attended monthly in our industry, and the platform couldn’t support us as we passed 300, then 500 attendees. But as we move towards 1,000 participants with RingCentral Events, we’re still able to make each one the highly professional, world-class event our members deserve.
Michael Liu
Managing Director, NA