January 2021

The Global Boardroom: 2nd Edition is a digital conference that has been developed by the FT in partnership with our sister organisation, The Next Web (TNW).
One of our primary objectives was to create a curated and expertly moderated programme, that would help the FT and its journalists to deeply engage with existing FT subscribers and connect with new global audiences, by providing real-time insight and analysis at a time of unprecedented crisis. Another critical objective was to ensure that this event was financially viable.
Across 3 days (11-13 November) and multiple time zones (from Asia to Latin America), The Global Boardroom convened a unique audience of 61,000 viewers from 142 countries, across three platforms (the event platform, FT.com and Linkedin) to hear from 140 leaders from politics, business, finance and academia, for discussion and real time assessment of the long-term implications of the pandemic, lessons learned and the steps required for recovery. This conference was also strategically timed to follow one of the most important presidential elections in US history.
Throughout the conference, we also enhanced our attendees’ virtual experience by providing access to the ‘Global Gallery’, the FT’s first ever virtual gallery, created in collaboration with Electrify 360. The Gallery included FT content and commissioned artworks using multi-sensory displays of FT data, algorithmic art, collages, and videos and deepened customer engagement. The experience included gamification with delegates taking part in scavenger hunts, enabling entry to win a lifetime, all-access premium digital subscription to the Financial Times.

The Global Boardroom: 2nd Edition achieved the goal of engaging with a significant number of existing FT subscribers and attracted new global audiences, whilst also being a commercial success through the revenues achieved.

The delivery of an incredibly timely and powerful agenda ensured a quality audience of senior decision makers (60% of our viewing attendees were C-suite/director level) from around the world. The provocative content also helped to generate a reach of 18.5m through our audience’s social activity.

Feedback from speakers, delegates, sponsors and our journalists, has been fantastic, and the event has attained an excellent Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 65.

In parallel, this event has provided a new way to engage audiences - both known and new - at a brand level through an immersive digital experience, the Global Gallery, which helped our attendees to meaningfully connect with the FT. This particular feature received a 92% satisfaction rating. One testimonial read:

“Informed. Educated. Enlightened. It has made me feel more inclined to read the FT regularly due to the professionalism and relevance of the Global Gallery, making me realise how much the FT has to offer."

We are proud that this timely conference has brought tremendous value in helping our audiences understand the shape of our world and plan for the future.

Further to some of the challenges outlined previously, we have so many learnings from The Global Boardroom, mainly due the size and scale of the event in terms of the programme, number of speakers and sessions, geographical coverage and the underlying technology.

During the 3 days of the conference, a global audience of over 62,000 viewers tuned in to watch the live-streamed sessions, with over 1.4K questions posed throughout.

The event generated 66 pieces of coverage globally, from prominent titles including Reuters, the Financial Times, and CNBC, and our audiences also generated 1.8K tweets and attendees raved that the “quality of the speakers was nothing short of remarkable and the content was current and useful,” “high quality journalism; extremely informative,” and “fascinating A-list speakers. Excellent formats.” This event achieved an NPS score of 65.

In total,130,000 delegates have attended The Global Boardroom, since its launch in May 2020. This has quickly become a substantial flagship event for the Financial Times.

A comprehensive marketing plan was delivered by a global marketing team over 4 months to raise awareness of the event with the objective of driving traffic to the website and converting visitors via one of 3 ticket types:

-The Inspiration Pass - access to live-stream, free of charge
-The Knowledge Pass - access to live-stream and on-demand content for $65USD
-The Professional Pass - live-stream, VOD, networking, 3 month trial FT subscription for $365USD

The marketing strategy included email marketing, PPC, organic social promotion on key FT and FT Live channels, advocacy marketing through our speakers, sponsors and supporting partners, press releases, and contra advertising on CNBC. We also trialled INGO, a social media advocacy tool that enabled delegates to mention their participation on Linkedin.

Within the wider FT ecosystem, the conference was promoted through digital display advertising on FT.com, inclusion in editorial newsletters, mentions within news alerts, relevant content blocks within articles, and print advertising within the FT paper.

With regard to sales, a full commercial plan was created, firstly by mapping out target sectors with the corresponding programme content and then a set of key target milestones that would indicate if we were on track.

Utilising our senior sales team members we allocated content sectors and financial targets based on inventory and industry size. We tracked progress via bi-weekly team calls and slack channels.

Post deals, we worked closely with the marketing and operations team to ensure packages rolled out smoothly and customer services levels were maintained.

Our sister company, TNW, created The Global Boardroom front-end website which was integrated with Bizzabo. Bizzabo provided the back-end for attendee registration, networking and was also used to host sponsor hubs. Slido was embedded within the front-end and enabled audience Q&A and polling. Foleon was also used to create responsive end-of-day summary reports.

With regards to the live-streaming technology, a combination of Zoom and Brightcove was used to stream panels, and Jackshoot (production company) managed the on-the-day broadcasting operation.

In addition to live-streaming on the main event website, 15 sessions were live-streamed on the FT.com homepage and to FT and TNW audiences via LinkedIn Lives, which significantly broadened our reach and engagement capabilities.

Due to the number of technology platforms involved in the delivery of this event, we had to overcome both integration and user experience issues. Other technical challenges faced included managing 140 speakers across 3 different studios (Hong Kong, London and New York) across multiple time zones. Calendly was used extensively by our Operations team to help with the scheduling of speakers.

Further to some of the challenges outlined previously, we have so many learnings from The Global Boardroom, mainly due the size and scale of the event in terms of the programme, number of speakers and sessions, geographical coverage and the underlying technology.

In future, we will look to simplify the tech so that it’s easier for the team to manage. We also would like to improve the user experience by improving the cadence of retention emails, developing the networking functionality and tweaking some of the onsite tools (eg add sessions to calendar functionality). It is also important to mention that the team was pleased with some of the innovations that were introduced including quick turnaround video editing which helped us to increase the number of social videos published throughout the 3 days, and using Foleon technology to publish the end of day summary reports.