Virtual Events Platforms and is it worth to develop one?
These couple of COVID-19 years has brought a halt to the MICE industry. While companies in all industries will feel the effects of COVID-19, events companies in particular are extraordinarily impacted because of the stop to tourism, travel, and social gatherings. This means that events not only slowed to a trickle, but literally dried up. This naturally forced event companies to look to the next best alternative, Virtual Events.
However, virtual events via Zoom are dry and boring, and events companies look further to see how virtual events can be spiced up to reflect natural real-life meetings better. As a result, virtual or hybrid events solutions started to pop up. One such example is Vfairs: https://www.vfairs.com/
Even though there are many virtual events solutions out there like Vfairs, we still received a number of enquiries from events companies who were looking to develop their own virtual events platforms. Their reasons were because the existing ones in the market could not really do exactly what they wanted to do.
After researching into this area, we decided that it was ultimately not recommended for events companies to invest into developing their own virtual events platforms. The reason is simple: developing such platforms is akin to developing a whole product on its own. Companies like Vfairs live and breathe 247 to develop that ultimate virtual events product. They have huge teams and probably millions of dollars in budget to develop that perfect product that serves as their livelihood. So while it may not be impossible to develop a virtual events platform for your business, you would really need to consider the investment required, and whether it would be worth it.
It would be wishful thinking to be able to develop a complete virtual events platform with just a $100,000. Thinking of it the other way round, if it really was so simple to develop such a platform at such a low budget, we would be seeing thousands of platforms like Vfairs popping up.
Our advice would therefore be that it would not be worth it to develop a virtual events platform for yourself, especially since this COVID-19 period may not be forever, and there are indeed many competent solutions already in the market at affordable prices. It would be a wiser decision to compromise your work methods to suit the existing solutions in the market for now, knowing that once this is all over, you could be back to your old self in no time!