Understanding SCOOCS, the all-in-one event platform

If you have been considering hosting an online or hybrid event for your organization, you would have come across SCOOCS when looking for an event platform. So let’s briefly look at what exactly SCOOCS is.

SCOOCS has hosted, through its events platform, global events, including trade fairs, academic & science conferences, and even music festivals. The SCOOCS event platform is incredibly versatile, catering for large virtual conferences with 10,000 attendees down to online courses with 30 participants.

If you thought that the SCOOCS events platform was merely a platform where a presenter talks to attendees & nothing more, then we need to show you that it’s so much more. Let’s delve into the SCOOCS event platform features.

SCOOCS Core Event Platform Product

Event Setup

The SCOOCS events platform allows for an easy setup. Taking the stress out of setting up an event is half the battle won. The following features are conducive to an easy setup:

White Labeling allows for a fully customizable platform supported in multiple idioms & has a separate server on demand. If you’re hosting an event, you want the event attendees to feel that it’s your event, not a SCOOCS event. White labeling so that the attendees feel they are experiencing your event is an important part of elevating your brand and enhancing your organization’s reputation as embracing technology & environmental sustainability.

The SCOOCS event platform allows you to host multiple simultaneous events, host multiple sponsors and have analytics related to specific events. At in-person events, you sometimes need to have different event spaces to cater to numerous speakers, sponsors, etc. The SCOOCS platform allows you to do exactly that virtually to cater to the need to accommodate various attendees & sponsors who will be attending different parts of your event simultaneously.

It’s vitally important that your event’s platform integrates with the systems you use in your business or organization. SCOOCS integrates with CRMs such as Hubspot, Salesforce & Pardot, email providers such as Google & Outlook, iCal & your Social Media accounts.

Effortless implementation at set up phase by giving you immediate access to the SCOOCS platform & giving the necessary technical support you need. The team at SCOOCS knows that it can be daunting when you decide to use an online or hybrid events platform when you have only hosted in-person events in the past. This is why they give you immediate access to the platform to become familiar with it as soon as possible. They also give you the technical support to understand the platform as early on in the journey as possible. A turnkey option is available when it’s appropriate too.

Onboarding attendees can be a nightmare if not done correctly. This is why SCOOCS makes this process as smooth as possible by providing token-protected registration for the attendees and fast check-in. A downloadable attendees list is also a great feature for event hosts.

Engagement during any online or hybrid event is key to allow attendees to feel like they’re part of the event & fully immersed in the experience.

Networking is an important part of any event and is crucial to further the attendees’ business goals by interacting with the relevant people at the event. The SCOOCS event platform allows 1-on-1 networking via chat & video calls between speakers, attendees & sponsors. People often find virtual networking to be less daunting than networking in person. This is because most people are more at ease talking to their computer screen in the comfort of their own office or home. The SCOOCS platform allows attendees to see & speak to their fellow attendees, so it has all the advantages of in-person networking, without the awkwardness of going up to someone in person to network with them.

An important part of an online event platform is the interactive features that allow the attendees to feel part of the event experience. The SCOOCS platform takes care of this by including features such as public and private Q & A’s. This is where attendees can ask the questions they’d like answered by the speakers or event hosts. The platform also gives hosts the ability to have multiple presenters. Another great interactive feature is the ability to have live polls & surveys that the attendees take part in so that the event hosts or the speakers get a good idea of the attendees’ feelings during the event.

Part of keeping the attendees engaged & involved in the event experience is to have features such as gamification, an event feed and notifications, as well as suggesting particular sessions. The SCOOCS platform provides those features & more.

Another feature of the SCOOCS event platform is that it has large, small & 1-on-1 video rooms. The platform can record your video sessions and store them for later viewing & replay. The ability to embed videos & Livestream is also a great feature.

Analyzing event data is a major advantage that online or virtual events have over in-person events. The SCOOCS event platform provides an enormous amount of useful data to analyze, which gives you, the event host, the ability to improve & optimize current & future events.

The SCOOCS platform allows you to track attendees’ behavior and how engaged they are with the event in general & other attendees. The platform also has the ability to track how many meetings have been booked, the duration of certain actions such as how long they viewed a presentation, how long they engaged with a certain sponsor, and so on. This is vital information that allows you to create popular events for your attendees.

Another important aspect is the ability to analyze the polls & surveys to gain meaningful insights into what your attendees want & need. The SCOOCS platform allows you to download the survey & poll results for easy analysis.

SCOOCS also gives you the ability to track sponsor booth interactions and the number of attendee downloads, giving you the ability to show your sponsors how worthwhile their attendance was at your event.

Technology

Technology is what makes an online events platform good. The state-of-the-art technology used in the SCOOCS platform is what shows that it is world-class.

The fact that it’s cloud-based means that you can access the event on multiple devices with ease.

If your event platform goes down and stops working for even a short time, it reflects very poorly on you as the host of the event. It also means a bad user experience & results in attendees leaving the event early. If we put this into perspective, it equates to attendees at a live, in-person event getting up in droves & leaving the venue. The fact that the SCOOCS platform has a 99.5% uptime means that you are pretty much ensured that your online event will never go down. That gives you, as the event host a great deal of comfort.

Security is of paramount importance to us, which is why SCOOCS has the best technology available to ensure that your event will be safe & secure at all times.

We plan for every eventuality, including infrastructure failures. Our disaster recovery plans are detailed & very comprehensive.

We are an exceptional events platform & we introduce new features to enhance the experience for the hosts & the attendees. Before adding new features to the SCOOCS platform, we do thorough testing to ensure no problems when the features are introduced. This prevents frustration for hosts & attendees.

Privacy

Data protection has been very topical recently, and SCOOCS is GDPR compliant, which means that SCOOCS takes your privacy & that of your attendees very seriously.

New Releases

It’s important to SCOOCS that our customers understand what new features will be released & a timeframe of when these new features will be released. This is why SCOOCS has a clear and detailed roadmap of new features so that you know what exciting new features to expect in the near future.

Support

The world-class SCOOCS support team is there to support our hosts to ensure that your event is a huge success. A 24 hour 7-day live support chat is available on request when it is needed.

The SCOOCS platform has an incredibly intuitive and consistent user interface which makes it very easy to use.

SCOOCS also has a very detailed knowledge base with easy search capabilities that will help answer any questions about the system and even help with basic training on how to use the platform.

When you lodge a ticket with support, you want to have your query resolved in as short a time as possible. A SCOOCS support ticket is resolved in an average time of a speedy 24 hours, so there’s no chance of waiting days to have your query answered with SCOOCS.

Our team of developers is exceptional at custom building features that you would like added to your event. Give us your dreams & we’ll see if they can make them a reality.

SCOOCS Additional Products

We’ve run through the SCOOCS core product and the features that make it a world-class online & hybrid event platform. Now we’ll show you the additional products or add-ons that will take your event to the next level.

Here are the add-ons that SCOOCS offers its customers:

The SCOOCS Remote Concierge service provides live event support for attendees. This lets our support team answer & guide your attendees through any event platform-related queries. The Remote Concierge also provides training for hosts & includes support during the event set up phase.

The SCOOCS Professional Remote AV Broadcasting service can broadcast items such as speaker introduction pages, dynamic content & name tags to give it a special feel for the attendees.

SCOOCS provides a Custom Development service where customers can request features that are not available on the SCOOCS platform & then our team of world-class developers will attempt to add those features for the customer’s event. Communication is the key. Talk to the team and find out if your ideas are possible. If it’s possible, our development team will make it happen.

The SCOOCS team can also facilitate the use of a custom domain for your event, which allows your event to have a unique feel.

Sponsor Booths are an important aspect of an in-person event, which is why SCOOCS has the option of providing virtual booths. The great advantage that a virtual booth has over an in-person booth is that the SCOOCS virtual booths provide real-time analytics that shows the booth holder information, which is invaluable to determine whether the event was a success for them.

SCOOCS provides the option of a white label native event app for IOS and Android, which matches the design of your event platform. This add-on provides that extra wow factor that allows for gamification and other interactive features that are highly recommended to keep your attendees engaged.

For those wanting to host a hybrid event but don’t have the equipment to make it happen, SCOOCS has the solution for you. SCOOCS is able to provide an Hybrid Events Kit, allowing you to stream your in-person sessions to your platform.

What Does SCOOCS Stand for?

In simple terms, our name stands for Smart Customizable Online Offline Conferences for Sustainability, but to really understand who you’d be partnering with if you chose to use the SCOOCS event platform, we need to help you know exactly who SCOOCS is & why SCOOCS should be your online & hybrid event platform of choice.

The SCOOCS Story

To understand why the SCOOCS event platform is the perfect solution if you’re looking to host virtual or hybrid events, you need to understand the SCOOCS story of how it came into existence.

Many great ideas originate from creating a solution for a problem or challenge that you encounter yourself & that’s exactly how SCOOCS was born. When the incredibly smart & innovative group of individuals at the Smart City Innovation Lab of Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics were asked to host the GRONEN 2020 conference on ‘The Sustainability in the Digital Age’, they jumped at the opportunity.

GRONEN is the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment. It is a global network of scholars researching various dimensions of the natural environment and management trying to contribute to society’s progress while the world where environmental changes happen rapidly in a complex & non-linear way.

When Covid-19 restrictions & lock-downs meant that the in-person event could no longer go ahead, the organizers had to pivot fast if they wanted the GRONEN 2020 conference to go ahead at all. They decided to turn the in-person conference event into a virtual or online conference event. This change actually made the ‘The Sustainability in the Digital Age’ theme very fitting as the actual conference was thrust into the digital age thanks to a global pandemic.

The challenge the organizers faced was that they did an enormous amount of research to find a virtual events platform ideal for the GRONEN Conference but were unable to find one that created the immersive experience they wanted it to be. So what did the geniuses at the Smart City Innovation Lab do? They built their own virtual events platform, of course, and that’s when SCOOCS was born.

The GRONEN 2020 conference was a huge success & the SCOOCS team realized that they have a duty to bring their virtual & hybrid events platform to the world.

SCOOCS Embracing Sustainability

Sustainability in relation to conferences and events has always been a hotly debated topic amongst scholars & the public at large. When the organizers of the GRONEN conference, who are very serious about sustainability (they actually have the word ‘Sustainability’ in their name), started to analyze the data, they realized how much more sustainable online events are compared to in-person events. Because they had been involved in events as attendees & now as organizers, they were in a unique position to understand how much more sustainable an online event is for both hosts & attendees.

The SCOOCS team found the following sustainability benefits of online events:

Environmental Sustainability

In-person events have attendees, speakers & out of town staff traveling to the event venue location. The GRONEN conference highlighted the fact that many academics had to take long-haul flights on a regular basis to attend conferences, workshops & summer schools. In terms of environmental sustainability, aviation emissions have an incredibly negative impact on the environment.

If the GRONEN conference was not affected by COVID and remained an in-person event, it would have had 130 people fly into Lisbon, Portugal from all over Europe, Asia-Pacific & the Americas. The environmental impact of the participants traveling to Lisbon was estimated to be, on average, 1,67 tons of CO2 per participant. The organizers were astonished by these incredible facts and realized that virtual events could play a major role in saving our planet.

When the SCOOCS team developed the online events platform, they knew that environmental sustainability needed to be at the core of what SCOOCS stands for. They wanted to show people the positive impact they would be making to our world if they used the SCOOCS events platform to host their events rather than in-person events.

The brain’s trust at SCOOCS came up with the ingenious idea of developing a CO2 calculator to calculate how much CO2 you will be saving by not attending an in-person event. The calculator is very easy to use; you tell the calculator where the event is being held, where you will be traveling to the event from & what mode of transport you’ll be using & then the calculator tells you how much CO2 you’re saving by attending an online event rather than an in-person event. If we consider that, on average, a conference spanning two days with 150 attendees produces 30,000kg of CO2. The fact that we would need 2,400 trees to compensate for these emissions is a frightening thought.

The SCOOCS calculator brings home just how much you’ll contribute to saving the environment if you hosted or attended virtual or hybrid events rather than solely in-person events.

Financial Sustainability

The financial sustainability of events is another hot topic. The organizers of the GRONEN event realized that an in-person event has many fixed costs, such as venue hire, catering & various other expenses such as name badges, printing & stationery, etc.

When they had to pivot to host a virtual event, they realized that an online event saves a ton of money for the person organizing or hosting the event, which makes it far more financially sustainable.

What they also realized is that an online event saved the participants a lot of money too. It meant that the participants didn’t have to lay out cash for flights and accommodation in Lisbon and any other expenses they would incur to attend the conference.

The other aspect that makes it more financially sustainable is that the participant’s time away from their jobs was reduced because they didn’t need to be out of town for a while. The time away from their jobs would have affected the number of productive time spent doing their actual jobs.

The fact that the costs to host the online conference was less than the in-person event also meant that the organizers could reduce the conference ticket cost, which was an additional financial saving for the participants. All in all, they realized that online events are much more financially sustainable for everyone involved in events.

Conclusion

It’s clear that SCOOCS is an online & hybrid events platform that has sustainability as part of its DNA. The team has developed an event platform that has incredible features and gives any organization the ability to host a sustainable event with ease.

If you want to host events that are environmentally sustainable and give your organization the ability to do it’s part to save the environment while reducing the financial pressure by creating financially sustainable events, then speak to our team to see how we can help you create a sustainable event experience for your participants.