Empowering speakers at a major corporate event

An enterprise cloud solutions provider hosting a 60,000-person corporate event wanted editing review and brand QA for approximately 2,500 breakout session decks. They also needed onsite content services that would allow their employee, customer, and sponsor speakers to make approved last-minute changes to their session presentations and help ensure that breakout production ran smoothly throughout the event.

Brand integrity, content quality, risk management, and version control had to be maintained while over 3,000 speakers made changes to 2,500 sessions at 6 different venues across 6 days. Additionally, approximately 15% of the sessions were approved to include information about new offerings that would be announced during keynotes and designated breakouts during the event, so additional guardrails needed to be in place to ensure that this information remained confidential prior to launch.

We created a PowerPoint template that was consistent with the event branding and functional at scale so that speakers of varying experience levels with PowerPoint could easily produce consistently branded slide decks. Our editing review included formatting and brand QA checks to improve accessibility, brand adherence, and visual appeal on top of copyediting so that speakers could receive an up-leveled review experience.

To accommodate onsite changes, we designed and managed a content governance model for the event, which included workflow and chain of custody policies, content risk management and escalation procedures, and 5 speaker ready rooms with expertly sourced content staffers and A/V technicians.

Speaker satisfaction scores for our pre-event editing and onsite services were >4.8/5 on all data points surveyed, the highest in 4 years. Out of 2,500 sessions, there were fewer than 10 presentation deck–related escalations, all of which were quickly resolved via our established escalation procedures.