CONTEXT
Each September, Microsoft Canada hosts their annual Area General Meeting (AGM) to bring together over 800 sales, marketing, and product development team members, along with a collection of key external partners, for a week of keynotes, breakouts, trainings, and networking activities. With only eight weeks to make the shift from live to virtual, Touch worked with the team to redevelop the AGM event for an online audience. The objective? To connect and improve broad-based skills, both technical and sales and marketing in a fully digital space, and to celebrate the team’s win as Microsoft subsidiary of the year.

OUR APPROACH
Touch began with a careful analysis of Microsoft Canada’s prior AGM events to make sure priorities for this new, digital environment were met. Our team assessed different virtual event platforms, looking at user experience, functionality, gamification, technical broadcast capabilities and more, to find the right vendor to use as the new “virtual venue” for the event. 

Working closely with the Microsoft Canada team and our virtual event platform partner, Touch produced a flawless blend of live and pre-recorded content for more than 1,500 attendees over the course of three days. The event consisted of 136 sessions, including an opening and closing keynote and up to five concurrent live sessions throughout each day. All keynotes and breakouts had English captioning, and keynotes also included American Sign Language as an option. Touch also helped create a strategy for how customizable areas of interest and persona mapping appeared during the registration process, and throughout the platform. This helped inform recommendations for sessions, sponsors, and contacts that aligned with each registrant’s interests and supported the client’s agenda building and networking needs.

Touch designed the visual language and branding for the entire event in addition to presentation design templates and a motion graphics package that included an animated show open and closing, bumpers, and lower thirds. Touch also recorded and edited the keynote and “Big Bet” sessions, and edited several of the pre-recorded breakouts.

This first ever Microsoft Canada Virtual AGM event was a huge success, with some attendees saying, “It was the best one yet!”