Image credit: Attendify
Just last month, London-based virtual events company Hopin acquired onsite event solution company Boomset. Today, the company has announced its 5th acquisition in the past year, and several impactful company updates.
Hopin acquires Attendify and launches Illuminate
The event company is now enhancing and expanding its event marketing suite with the acquisition of US-based Attendify – a SaaS-based in-person virtual & hybrid event platform.
Recently, the winners of the 2021 Future Hamburg Award were announced.
Besides, Hopin has also announced several impactful company updates as part of Illuminate – an hybrid series bringing together thousands of professionals to highlight innovation in the events industry. It will feature guest speakers including Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Laureate, and co-founder of Malala Fund.
Bridging the gap between event and digital marketing
California-based Attendify was founded in 2011 by Michael Balyasny. The company claims to be reimagining event technology by making it more accessible, intuitive, and data-driven. The company believes event data is the key to unlocking results for event planners, marketers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees.
With an aim to bridge the gap between digital marketing and event marketing, Attendify provides tools designed to help event managers deepen audience engagement as well as collect data and surface insights to optimise events (along with marketing and broader business efforts).
While Michael Balyasny, CEO and Founder of Attendify, mentioned, “At Attendify, we’ve always believed not only in the power of events to bring people together to forge meaningful connections but also, in the massive potential that lies in unlocking event data to further enhance the attendee experience. Unifying our products and merging the minds of our talented teams will be invaluable to our customers.”
The SaaS-based event technology company has clients including Google, PayPal, and TedX.
How will Attendify fit in Hopin’s platform?
With Attendify’s intuitive and data-driven technology, Hopin looks to enhance its offerings for organisers to better market their events and reach more audiences. In a statement, Hopin says, Attendify’s products will help them in various ways including Audience CRM – that is soon to be introduced on Hopin – this will automatically capture engagement from attendee data platform, identify intent signals, and use event data to drive growth.
With Audience CRM, event organisers will have a 360 degree engagement database to understand which attendees visited a sponsor, voted in a poll, or engaged with a session. These will help organisers to understand their audiences and keep them coming back for more.
Moreover, Attendify will also allow Hopin to soon introduce Campaign Manager – to help event marketers leverage an email engine to drive registrations, get important information out to registrants, and engage audiences between programs.
Johnny Boufarhat, CEO and Founder of Hopin, says, “As we continue to help our customers navigate a reshaped events industry, our focus remains on investing in Hopin’s all-in-one platform, including augmenting it with intuitive marketing tools. With the addition of Attendify, our event marketing suite gets even better and we can deliver more meaningful tools to organisers that drive growth. And now, access to our platform is even easier, no matter the event budget. With our new free plan, anyone can create events, wherever they are.”
Hopin’s free event management plan
Besides the acquisition, Hopin has launched a new plan to help create an event for free. This free plan unlocks access to organise smaller gatherings of up to 100 people invited by the organiser wherein the events could last up to two hours.
This free plan will help create immersive experiences for small webinars, internal meetings, meetups, personal events, and everything in between. In addition, organisers can also activate audience interaction with networking, Q&A, polls, and whiteboarding, amongst other features.
A brief about Illuminate
Illuminate is a hybrid event series that brings together industry leaders to spotlight innovation and the future of events. It has been created in collaboration with Marriott International, Catapult, GoFundMe and encore and with sponsors Prezi, Sendoso, snapbar, KUDO and HubSpot.
In this event, attendees will be treated to “A Conversation with Malala” and a special interview moderated by Hopin CMO, Anthony Kennada, the Nobel Laureate will talk about her life and how participating in corporate events can drive impact.
The event will include thousands of professionals to hear additional live sessions with events, marketing, and community leaders from Salesforce, Pinterest, Gap Inc, Gainsight, and more.
During Illuminate, Hopin will be revealing its first-ever global brand campaign – to be debuted on 12th of July. The campaign aims to set the creative benchmark for the brand’s advertising efforts going forward.
Hopin partners with GoFundMe
The event company has also partnered up with GoFundMe to make it easier for companies, conference organisers, and Hopin users to incorporate social impact into their events and engage audiences with an in-event donation experience.
With this development, Hopin organisers will be able to select a GoFundMe fundraiser, charity or GoFundMe Cause to add to their event. Both the companies will work together to inform about the important causes and fundraising opportunities for organisers as they set up their events.
For the Illuminate event, Hopin has chosen to support GoFundMe’s Learning and Education Cause, and today’s attendees will experience the new integration first hand. This will also be an opportunity to donate to the fund that helps give teachers and students the tools they need to find success in the classroom and create brighter futures.
Hopin will match all donations made during the event up to $5,000. By coming together, Hopin and GoFundMe hope to make it easier for companies and organizers to make a difference and engage audiences in a new and meaningful way.
Hopin’s recent acquisitions
As part of its multi-product strategy, Hopin acqui-hired the mobile app development team from Topi in 2020, and acquired the video streaming company StreamYard, adding StreamYard’s 3.6 million video content creators to its base.
