Bringing the event industry online during the COVID-19 outbreak

Jublia’s Virtual Connections facilitates event organisers in hosting virtual events

The entire eventsindustry is grinding to a halt due to the COVID-19 outbreak. But firms are not going down without a fight, such as global event technology company Jublia which has moved its operations online to cope with the challenging times.

Jublia, founded by three NUS graduates — NUS Arts and Social Sciences alumnus Errol Lim and NUS Engineering alumni Tan Kuan Yan and Chinab Chugh — facilitates structured networking and content presentation at conferences and exhibitions, and provides event organisers with analytics of the events.

To address the ban on large gatherings due to the pandemic, Jublia has made some innovative changes to its existing platforms which were initially designed for face-to-face events. The company has changed its entire attendee networking and content discovery solution to a fully virtual experience.

“We want to do our part to help our clients and partners create continued value for their customers despite cancellations or postponement of their events.” said Mr Lim.

How it works

The solution is called Virtual Connections and supports the hosting of a virtual event. It provides a robust gated platform that is accessible by registered attendees only, an engagement campaign that is facilitated by a Jublia manger, an extensive content discovery platform, as well as networking opportunities between attendees of the virtual event.

“We hope to lessen the impact faced by event organisers with an online solution that augments the event experience online for exhibitors and attendees who have committed to the event. We want to help our partners facilitate as many meaningful virtual interactions as possible, keeping events-related business activities high,” said Mr Tan.

The team hopes that their innovation would allow for continued value creation especially in the B2B events space amongst key event stakeholders such as Buyers, Sellers, Sponsors, Delegates and Visitors.

Furthermore, the team wants to keep event organisers constantly engaged with their clients through the collection of interaction data that can be analysed into actionable insights. This ultimately prevents the loss of business dealings. It also allows committed international attendees, who may be unable to attend the events, to continue engaging with the other participants.

Feedback for new system

The Jublia team estimates that around 10 per cent of their own projects have been converted to the new fully digital solution and expect the number to rise as more event organisers turn to a digital alternative.

“We’ve shared our innovation-adaptation to existing clients and partners, it has been well received and our team is currently aiding a number of them to transit affected events into a full digital experience,” said Mr Lim.

“We are focused on listening to the needs of our clients and partners. They give us first-hand information about how the market is moving and what tools we need to build to help everyone in our industry achieve the best outcome despite any situation.”

The team made these changes due to personal experience on the setbacks that the pandemic has brought about. “Our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected, especially organisers who are experiencing an insurmountable challenge to postpone or cancel their shows. Our business isn’t immune to these external forces either and we had to make tough joint decisions to cease operations with our event partners for a number of projects despite the tireless investment of time and resource in the months preceding,” said Mr Chugh.

“Everyone has to do their part to ease the situation, and Jublia would like to do the same.”

Mr Tan added, “Ultimately, we believe that event organisers will adapt to these challenges and bounce back very swiftly once the situation is under control. This hurdle is temporary and our industry needs to band together and support one another.”

From left: Mr Tan, Mr Lim and Mr Chugh in 2013 when they first started Jublia

Background of Jublia

Jublia was started about seven years ago by the three co-founders and currently partners organisations from over 50 countries across over 30 industry sectors. Incepted while the three founders were in the NUS Overseas Colleges programme, the company was meant to address the inefficiency the three founders saw at the events they attended.

To date Jublia has partnered thousands of events worldwide and has won consecutive Singapore Tourism Awards for Best Event Service Provider, in 2018 and 2019. The local startup continues to partner flagship events globally including the World Islamic Economic Forum, Interpol World, World Future Energy Summit, the Singapore Airshow as well as the Singapore Fintech Festival.

The firm’s AI-Powered Engagement technologies allows for structured networking and meaningful content discovery — key for time-pressed corporate head honchos trying to squeeze out as much as possible when attending those events. The company also provides analytics services to event organisers, helping them to drive additional revenue opportunities.

“Busy working professionals attend events to find business contacts as well as learn new content about the industry. We provide a business matchmaking and knowledge discovery experience that is unified across various platforms with the key aim of helping event organisers meet the content contact needs of their attendee clients,” said Mr Chugh. “This is done through an end-to-end solution that supports AI-Powered people and content recommendations.”

Said Mr Lim, “Events are cited by marketers as generating the most quality leads when compared to other channels. However, with the high cost-per-lead, they are also considered one of the most expensive channels, which puts pressure on event organisers to achieve a measurable return on investment (ROI) for their customers. Jublia was founded to put the power of engineering the attendees’ ROI in the hands of event organisers.”

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