2020 Mason Gross Welcome and Dance Assembly
Project Date: September 2020
Project Summary
Julia Ritter, Chair & Artistic Director for the Dance Department Rutgers University, came over to ask if there was a way to pull together an event using some type of conferencing tool to help promote networking and engagement.
The mission was to help create an event that would mimic what the Dance Assembly Orientation would do in person. This would welcome incoming students, get them familiar with everyone in the school, and start off the year well acquainted with staff and students alike.
Helping uphold traditions within the art community hits close to home. Converting over to a fully online format as a creative team was difficult. But we made it work. Working with Julia, and researching what she needed, I came up with a platform that would suit her needs. Remo.
On our end, we looked into Remo as a possible conferencing tool for another event. This platform placed heavy importance on visual networking using multiple tables as a virtual conference floor. They also had the presenter feature, which stopped all chatting and placed all eyes on the presenter, perfect for gathering everyone’s attention for speed networking activities. That other event used a different platform but our research was not in vain. Thanks to that research, we were able to pull this off in the span of 2 days.
I worked with Julia for 2 days to plan all her speaking points, how to make those work in the virtual environment, and used some outside tools to facilitate other activities within the event. I used straw polls to help them elect their student year representatives in real-time and was tech and event support throughout the day. The platform also had a timer for timed activates, so I tested it out and came up with a few speed networking activates.
At the end of the event, we had over 150+ attendees and only a handful of tech issues, that the team and I were able to handle.
If I can help out someone using stuff I have either already learned or can feasibly learn within the timeframe, I’m all set to go.
