Case Study: The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists 52nd Annual Scientific Congress 2022

Who 

RANZCO is the dedicated college for ophthalmologists working in Australia and New Zealand.  

What 

RANZCO’s Annual Congress is attended by Fellows, practitioners, researchers, students, clinicians and nurses from across Australia and overseas. The Congress and provides the delegates with a rich program of educational sessions, lectures, e-Poster modules and keynote addresses by prominent individuals. The Congress also includes the sub-meeting for RANZCO’s Practice Managers Conference. 

Our Challenge 

After the 2020 and 2021 congresses were postponed due to the pandemic, the RANZCO and TBE teams were committed to running the event in early 2022. Hopeful the congress could go ahead in person, with only 8 weeks to go the collective agreement was that it was still too risky to forge ahead as a hybrid event, and like many before it, was changed to fully virtual.  

This was particularly challenging as RANZCO had not run any kind of virtual-only program prior to this. With a huge number of delegates and a complex program, the pressure was on.  

In hindsight this ended up being the correct decision as the week of the Congress many northern parts of Australia experienced terrible flooding and the event would have been a wash-out anyway.

How we did it 

• Working directly and collaboratively with the RANZCO Board, Program Committee and Chair
• Implementing all the knowledge and experienced we had gained from two years of running purely virtual conferences
• Included interactive elements to engage the delegates and allow speakers to feel as though their presentations were being watched and absorbed, included the use of Live Polling which gave symposia and courses an exciting ‘real-time’ feel. Further there was Live Chat and Q&A functionality, resulting in high levels of engagement and interactivity between speakers, and amongst delegates themselves.
• Offering on-demand content for 90 days post-conference including all concurrent sessions and Practice’s Managers Conference that was running simultaneously on Day 

Key Learnings

• Teamwork really does make the dreamwork; with four teams (Think Business Events, RANZCO, Cvent and The Gilded Wing (AV)) putting in a huge amount of work we managed and executed one of the most well-received Congress’ in recent times.
• Ease of movement between sessions created a new level of flexibility

Feedback on the virtual platform included exclamations such as;  

• Surprised how good the virtual set up was  
• Ease of use and navigation  
• Easier and cheaper to attend  
• Professional  
• Reliable  
• Flexible  
• Liked having access to on demand content