Altai Events – Staying Connected Virtually Through Zoom
Microsoft Dynamic Integration with Zoom Executing Zoom Events Within Your AMS Zoom reported their usage skyrocketed from 10 million daily meeting participants to 300 million daily meeting participants early in 2020 and more than likely you were one of them. With the shift to remote work, out of the office, apps such as Zoom, and Microsoft’s Teams, have seen major upticks. At Altai we’ve been big fans of both, relying on them to help our staff communicate since well before the pandemic. With our client’s needs shifting from in-person to remote, we’ve taken the steps to make work even easier for our clients. We’ve always maintained a robust backend event management system that provides the tools to set up, manage, and report on events from a small team or board meetings to massive annual events. Since the pandemic, we’ve worked with our customers to make sure they’ve stayed at the forefront of managing how association events are evolving virtually. One way that we’ve done so has been to integrate Zoom directly into their AMS. Our integration keeps all meetings, webinars, and events in synch with Zoom. The integration also keeps attendance updated and creates leads for non-member attendees. From the web portal plugins that run our customer’s membership portals to the back-end event’s team reporting and workflows. Zoom automatically communicates back and forth with Altai’s AMS and Microsoft Dynamics 365. As a virtual events team, you’ll be able to create your events directly inside your event management platform and it will automatically create the event within Zoom. Conversely, if you create an event within your zoom account, the integration will pull those details back into your AMS. An Event’s Journey with Altai’s Zoom Integration Easily create the meeting or webinar in CRM which automatically creates the Zoom meeting. Publish the event to the web portal Enable membership to register for the event. Invite users to your Zoom meeting or webinar Security, content can be open or closed to nonmembers or only available to specific events. Support for simple webinars or events with sessions Additional Opportunities with Zoom Allow event registration through your member’s portal, creating an event attendee record for established contacts or can create new contacts when needed If a registrant is not a contact in your CRM, a new lead and associated contact record will be created and you’ll be automatically alerted if it’s a duplicate. If a registrant is already a contact, a lead record will be created and associated with the contact already in the system. Once your Zoom event is complete, attendance will be updated in your AMS along with engagement and time attended Attendance records are updated with minutes attended, engagement scores are created and if the webinar allowed non-member attendance, then a CRM lead record is created.
Altai Events: Using Microsoft Teams for Event Management
Microsoft Teams Integration with Dynamics 365 From Concept to Execution to Finance Have you considered that Teams can extend beyond meetings, or webinars to large scale virtual conferencing complete with sponsorships, virtual booths, multiple concurrent sessions, conference-wide or focused broadcasting, as well as multiple moderators and contributors? Microsoft Teams does more than simple chat, collaboration, video conferencing. Microsoft Teams has seen its daily active user count rise from 32 million in March to over 75 million by the end of April 2020. As an app available in the broader Microsoft 365 productivity bundle, Teams is available to all Microsoft 365 customers, it simply needs to be activated to start using it. Lately, Microsoft has been promoting big-name organizations that have been using Teams, which includes the NFL who used Teams to manage the Draft. In March, Microsoft reported that 91 of the 100 largest organizations, a staggering number, all use Teams in the workplace. That’s all to say that here at Altai we are big fans of Teams and use the app daily ourselves. One of the ways we love Teams is its functionality and ability to integrate. Our own team, spearheaded by partner, Mike Frye, has combined the powerful tools found in Teams, with Altai’s AMS built within Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. Together, we’ve created a powerhouse virtual event management tool for associations. Since associations and its members are already collaborating daily with teams, the end result of our integration is a seamless experience for your organization’s membership. In addition, registering for events, purchasing booths, and providing sponsorships are conducted within your member portal before publishing your conference. How it Works: High-Level Functionality The Altai Event Management systems allow users to manage webinars and events using an easy to use template and cloning application. Using the Event template builder you can click on an event or template and create a webinar or full-blown annual event and have it ready for registration in less than a minute. Altai’s event management platform manages the following: Easily creating the Event in the CRM Publishing the event to the web portal Enabling membership to register for the event. Creating the Event in Teams as a secure member portal Inviting the users to both the Team and the Teams Meeting Building a presenter’s area for session discussions, content, handouts, and collaboration Transcribing and indexing the session meeting once it is finished. “Community” enables the content. Security, content can be open or closed to nonmembers or only available to specific committees. Support for simple webinars or events with sessions, booths, committees, What Event Features are implemented/integrated with Teams? Automatically create an event site with member-specific security. Ability to manage many sessions. Ability to sell and manage vendor “booths” Ability to sell and manage sponsorships. Ability to enable broadcast communications to the sessions, booths, and members. Allow a member in securely and also block/remove them. Allow speakers and moderators to collaborate privately Allow registrants to see video content at a later date. (Coming Oct, but YouTube for now) Allow for the automatic transcription of the meeting. Ability to allow registrants to discuss and collaborate on content or session. The Altai Microsoft solution has all the features required to put on an event. Teams has a fantastic ability to allow those producing an event or a session to collaborate on the best ways to achieve this educational content and deliver it to the right members at the right time. What are the advantages of using Microsoft Teams? Today Microsoft Teams is the number one collaboration platform in the world. It is free with Office 365, and it has all the functionality you need to bring your members closer to your events and programs. Teams is perfect for learning and Teams is also very extendable. You can configure a webinar or event with over 200 apps that allow your members to learn and collaborate better. Here are a few of the features: Ability to invite members without paying a per-user license fee. A community can be built around the content. Extreme reliability and scalability. Today 75 million users log onto Teams daily. Not only does Teams automatically scale, but it is also ultra-secure. The content is captured forever and is available to the membership as an additional benefit and an additional revenue stream Security, you can control each portion of the event, the presentation, and the availability of that meeting to members at a very granular level. A very easy and familiar interface. Very flexible to extend and automate. One can automate any aspect of an event from registration to one-click wallet pay to automatic surveys to task management with only a few clicks.
Platform v Product and Selecting the Last AMS You’ll Ever Need
Your First Step What to do when you’re considering cutting your losses and selecting a new AMS? The first step should be to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your current solution based on the requirements you have today. Has your AMS been able to bridge the gap between previous and current requirements? If not, there’s a decision to be made in terms of your next solution. There are essentially three approaches to association management solutions: 1) Product, 2) Build v Buy, 3) Platform-based solutions. 1) and 2) are very similar; they’re both a set of tools from one company that comes in a single package, let’s call them a suite, which means each application is designed by the same company. The components in the suite are designed to work together but can never provide the interconnectivity to software applications outside their closed environments. Suites start out with good intentions: lower risk, cost, and the time associated with enabling major functions of an association’s technology. And they’ve developed and commercialized to be everything to everyone; a veritable one-stop shop for multiple, complex, and important components. Inevitably, associations realize that the suites they’ve chosen will never evolve to reach a level of adaptivity that can be extended and scaled. Associations are now at a crossroads: they must start the RFP process all over again, or worse, live with an application suite that is increasingly inflexible. How to Break Out of the Vicious RFP Circle and Love Your AMS On the surface, platform-based solutions may appear similar to suites. They both offer a wide range of features out of the box to provide greater access to your biggest asset: your data. But if you drill down just a bit, you’ll see the difference lies in the inherent openness of the platform. The open nature of a platform will give you the ability to add functionality and capabilities you don’t even know you need yet. Platforms broaden your association’s ecosystem by evolving as your business changes. There are so many good reasons to select a platform-based solution, but one of the primary purposes is to lay the foundation of a technology framework that can be easily extended to add new members, new products, new events – the sky’s the limit – without risk or disruption to the business. Think about the e-commerce framework Amazon built to sell books. Over time and without any disruption to their business, they’ve been able to scale and expand their operations to the degree that you can now find everything from soup to nuts on their site. How many times has Amazon been “down”? The Altai Systems’ AMS is built within the Dynamics 365 platform (the Altai Business Platform), so each module, from Membership to Events, to Finance to eCommerce & Credentialing, and everything in between, taps into all of the cutting technology Microsoft spends billions of dollars developing every year. Would you like to know whether someone with 100+ followers tweets about your association? That’s easy! Create a workflow! As your association grows and requirements arise that have been previously unconsidered, the suite that worked for you once is very likely not working now. And what is it costing you to upgrade and update, to support and maintain, to customize? How long are you waiting for an enhancement because you have a requirement the solution can’t meet? If the goal of your association is stability within a diverse and ever-changing technology and competitive landscape, then either an AMS suite or platform will help you achieve that goal. But if the AMS you’re running today isn’t helping you achieve your strategic vision you need the Altai Business Platform. You’ll restore confidence in your data and free up your staff to create new, exciting revenue streams. Imagine if the very solution critical to running your association were within reach! Imagine that your association platform solution was so comprehensive, easy to run, and future-proofed that you’d never have to change again. The Altai Business Platform is the last AMS your association will ever need.
