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JS World Conference and the impact of digital badges on conferences
The iconic Java Script conference is held annually. Like many other virtual events, the organizers wanted to launch a pre-event marketing campaign to attract more attendees before closing registrations.
The organizers of the event decided to use Virtual Badges as a marketing tool. Once registered, all participants were invited to create and share their badges. These participants had the opportunity to show their activity to their networks and enhance their CVs, while the event benefited from the word-of-mouth marketing created by the shares.
The badge campaign was initiated when the event had 7,000 participants registered.
85% of the badges created were downloaded or shared on the social media of the participants.
Virtual conferences have become quite popular in the last months, but even in the current, pandemic status, online conferences with more than 50,000 attendees are still quite rare. Especially the ones that manage to deliver such a brilliant experience like the JS World Conference.
For developers of the entire world, this conference was iconic: More than 100 speakers covered a total of 20 different topics in areas such as DesignOps, Full-Stack, JavaScript and so on. The idea for the conference started still in 2017, when part of their current organization team was organizing meetups on development topics to which 300 people would attend.
But organizing a conference for such a unique audience has its challenges: How to strengthen the conference's brand even more within developers worldwide?
The JS World Conference happens annually, so it is in the organizers interest to keep on growing and attacking even more attendees and great speakers together. But more important: How to maximize the number of participants and to make sure that the event will be successful?
The java script event took place on the end of February, and a couple of months before that, the organization team put in place a marketing campaign with Virtual Badges. The challenge that they were facing: Could they offer a virtual recognition token to their current participants that would motivate them to share posts on social media about the event and incentive their developer friends to also join the conference? And more than that: Would they do it event before the event has taken place?
To answer both those questions: Yes.
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A Virtual Badge campaign was created for the JS World Conference on December of 2020, while they had around 7,000 participants signed up.
By the end of the campaign, more than 1,000 badges had been created, and 85% of them were shared to the LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook profiles of the participants.
Each badge created was unique: It carried the profile picture, the username, and the company of each participant. The first two information are automatically collected from the participant's preferred social account via an integration, and the last was freely typed by each participant directly, in the format of a custom field.
By making each badge unique and offering the event's attendees the possibility to personalize their badges, the JS World Conference successfully implemented a highly targeted marketing campaign, with benefits for all sides involved.
The participants received their personalized Virtual Badge, which could be uploaded to their LinkedIn profiles as Online Certificates. These certificates are hosted by virtualbadge.io, and can be validated at any time.
The event had a successful, digital, word-of-mouth marketing campaign: The developers who shared their badges, had their posts seen on social media by their network, which usually consists of people with interests in common. These people would have their first contact with the JS World Conference via a recommendation from someone they known, and not via an online ad. These recommendations are deemed more trust-worthy, and have a much higher conversion rate than the ordinary online ads.
If you are looking for ways to interact with your participants online, motivate them to share content about your event, or issue participation certificates, we recommend creating a free account at virtualbadge.io, so you can explore the possibilities that Virtual Badges have to offer.
