Hopin Hybrid Event Platform [Review]

What Is It?

Hopin is an all-in-one event platform designed to be intuitive and simple to use, Hopin allows planners to create highly customizable online and hybrid events that range from small team meetings to world-wide summits of tens of thousands of attendees.

The Hopin platform works by giving event organizers and marketers control over both the front-of-house design of their events (the tools that they use to organize speakers, scheduling, attendees, and sponsors), and the back-of-house tech that powers them (video, chat, data, email, etc).

By including tools for everything from event marketing and registration to virtual venue construction and onsite support including kiosks and badges, Hopin offers the prospect of planning events around a single platform, without having to stitch multiple tools together.

It also allows event organizers to capture analytics at every level of the event, to get a full picture of what attendees are talking about, what they’re spending time on, and what they’re interested in.

Hopin’s acquisition of StreamYard and Streamable, alongside its more recent acquisition of Boomset, have rounded out its event offering with onsite technology and services, and enhanced the quality of the immersive video experience offered by its platform.

Main Feature Categories

Branding: There are options throughout the Hopin platform that allow sponsors and event organizers to easily customize the look and feel of an event: its theme, font, and colours. Organizers can also use the platform to create fully sponsor-branded feeds and sessions, including overlays, logos, and tickers.

Engagement: Hopin was created to extend the experience of event attendees by overcoming the limitations of standard webinars. Organizers can use the platform to enable question sessions, one-on-one chats amongst attendees, direct messages, and real-time polls. All of this helps drive attendee engagement around key video presentations. The platform can also be extended via in-event integrations like Twitter, Miro Whiteboard, and Kahoot games to further enhance the virtual event experience.

Analytics: Hopin allows event organizers to capture analytics at every level of an event to find out what attendees are talking about and what they’re spending their time on. Organizers and marketers can leverage that data to learn what works and what doesn’t for their event. Event data is available through an overview dashboard that shows organizers in real-time what’s happening: How many registrants do they have? What are the top areas of interest by chat message?

Support: Hopin provides two levels of support. The first is a customer success manager, who is the focal point for onboarding, training, and enablement, and who can answer questions about how to use Hopin effectively, including how to integrate it with other tools. The second level of support is the platform’s Customer Support Team, which provides assistance with incorporating integrations into the platform, as well as mining data produced throughout an event.

Review

The Hopin platform emphasizes ease of use. It promotes engagement amongst attendees by mimicking the feel of in-person events, and is easily extendable via integrations.

Hopin also offers a trove of data for organizers and marketers, available via a Reports subsection that provides detailed, granular data on attendee interactions and behaviour. A booth attendee report, for example, can be shared with sponsors to let them know who showed up, what they chatted about, what polls they responded to and what they wanted to know.

Beyond this, Hopin can collate analytics from virtual events with those on-site to create a more detailed, rounded data picture that accounts for attendees who move from in-person to online, or vice versa.

Finally, Hopin provides organizers and marketers with extensive branding opportunities. Within the Stage area of the platform, organizers can quickly and easily produce fully branded content, from sessions to live-streams to branded feeds.

Who’s it for?

Hopin is for event organizers and marketers who want an easy-to-use platform for producing immersive events like company events, conferences, or trade shows. Hopin’s range of features and customizations have not always been necessarily geared for small events, or those on a tight budget, however, it has just launched a free plan aimed at smaller events of up to 100 people.

Who’s it not for?

Hopin’s range of features and customizations have not always been necessarily geared for small events, or those on a tight budget. It’s exciting to think how that might change with the new free plan. Also, while it does offer features that allow for lead engagement, lead qualification within the platform itself is not yet part of the design but with the acquisition of Attendify, that will change.

Features

Hopin is meant to recreate the experience of in-person events in a virtual or hybrid space. It does this by organizing online events within its Virtual Venue, which allows planners to create immersive events for both digital and onsite audiences. Virtual Venues feature different areas that event planners can choose to enable or disable, including:

Reception Pages: Where organizers can provide a description of their event and  attendees can learn more about it. This is where videos, images of key speakers, schedules, and digital wayfinders to help navigate the event can all be posted.

Stages: intended for broadcasts, such as keynote speeches, CEO welcomes, or fireside chats, all streamable via Streamyard.

Sessions: designed for more intimate, breakout discussions, including workshops, roundtable panels, and virtual tours. Sessions are for dialogue with attendees, in private, moderated, or open conversations that can be configured as event organizers see fit.

Networking: used to facilitate one-on-one conversations and interactions (perhaps prior to the event) and extend the ways in which event attendees can interact.

Expo: where sponsors can have virtual booths, event organizers can present products and services, and attendees can experience virtual trade shows. The booths allow for live presentations and discussions when a speaker is there, but can be switched to pre-recorded videos and demos when they aren’t.

While the Virtual Venue section of its platform is where organizers are likely to spend most of their time, Hopin also offers a variety of other event solutions, all of which integrate with its core event venue area:

Onsite Technology and Services: which provide event solutions including easy registration, ticketing, lead retrieval, and data-driven insights. Hopin’s Onsite event management solutions also include badge and wristband printing, the ability to allow attendees to create and manage their own schedules, and self-serve check-in kiosks.

Studio: which allows hosts the option of leveraging StreamYard’s broadcast studio to produce professional, reliable live-streams. This aspect of Hopin’s platform allows for the sharing of live or pre-recorded videos of any length directly into events. Videos can be streamed in HD with either 720p or 1080p resolution.

Event Marketing: for event promotion to drive registration and ticket sales. Hopin’s Event Marketing pillar allows planners to create landing pages for their events with templates and the ability to import speakers, schedules, and other key information. With the acquisition of Attendify, Hopin will soon enhance its marketing suite with audience CRM and campaign management for powerful, data-driven tools to grow and engage with audiences before, during and in-between events. 

Pricing and Plans

For more information on Hopin’s pricing and plans, visit their website.

In Conclusion

Hopin allows event organizers and marketers to create immersive virtual, hybrid, and in-person events, and it includes a range of features that drive attendee engagement as well as opportunities for organizers and sponsors to easily produce branded content and fully customize and scale their events.

Disclaimer: Reviews are paid for placements. While Event Manager Blog receives a fee to extensively look at the tool and review it in detail, the content of the review is independent and by no means influenced by the company. If you have any questions please use the contact us section.