BA Life
BA Life Hosts Massive Virtual Conference with Attendees from 28 Countries, Using RingCentral Events
28
countries represented among the attendees of the BA Life 2024 virtual conference
98%
attendance rate among the online event’s hundreds of registrants
85%
engagement rate at the virtual event’s numerous Expo Booths
Our online conference draws people from many countries and as such, we must ensure we consistently deliver outstanding value and a great experience to all delegates, which extends to our speakers who also join us from all over the world. With RingCentral Events, and the support team behind the solution, we can plan, promote, and host events with confidence.
Linda Parker
Co-founder and CEO
Training and coaching Business Analysts worldwide
Business analysis has always played an important role in bringing together business and technology, and with the rapid pace of change in modern technology, organisations are becoming more dependent each year on the profession.
Recognising both the ongoing importance of the field and the lack of a true conference for Business Analysts (BAs) in their location, several successful BAs based in Scotland co-founded BA Life to produce informative conferences for members of the profession around the world. The company’s name, BA Life, is an acronym for Business Analysis Learning & Innovation Festival Everywhere, with “festival” drawing inspiration from their hometown Edinburgh, the home of the world famous arts festival.
BA Life’s annual online conference, “BA Festival in a Day”, features dozens of subject-matter experts and connects BAs with peers, organisations, and potential job opportunities. It also delivers valuable industry insights and innovations to professionals in several countries worldwide, with delegates from 28 countries attending last year. The company has become so successful and trusted that BA Life earned a finalist slot in the UK’s 2022 “National Startup Awards.”
INDUSTRY
Professional training and coaching
HQ
Edinburgh, Great Britain
YEAR FOUNDED
2020
EMPLOYEES
Team of 8
An analysis revealed their previous platform’s shortcomings
“The biggest challenge we had with our previous events solution was its lack of flexibility in licensing,” says BA Life Co-founder and Director David Strachan.
“As a small organisation, we are careful with our budget, and we need to be able to add volunteers to our events platform for a short time–maybe a month prior to a conference–so we can train them on the solution, and then end those licenses post-conference. Our previous vendor allowed this at first, but then took that option away. Without that flexibility, we couldn’t run these events as cost-effectively as we needed.”
BA Life’s CEO Linda Parker–named European Business Analyst of the year in 2019–describes another concern her team had, and how it led them to RingCentral Events.
Between the rigidity of the licensing and a very noticeable drop in customer support quality, we had the impression the vendor was becoming interested only in big enterprise customers. RingCentral, by contrast, took time with us even though we’re a small company, and their team helped us keep our costs low. That’s one reason RingCentral Events was very attractive to our team.
Linda Parker
Co-founder and CEO
Key requirements narrowed the field to RingCentral Events
As David points out, RingCentral Events topped the team’s list for other reasons in addition to its affordability.
“The flexibility of RingCentral Events was key. Our conference is complex and has four tracks running simultaneously. This year, we had 25 presenters and attendees in 28 countries, and our speakers used several different formats to run their sessions. We leveraged a lot of RingCentral Events functionality, including speaking sessions, breakout rooms, panel discussions, lounges, Q&As, and expo booths. We even streamed recorded video content during the lunch break.”
In addition to RingCentral’s highly responsive and helpful support team, Linda explains, her team credits the user-friendliness of the RingCentral Events platform with enabling them to implement so many of the solution’s capabilities.
“The platform was very straightforward and easy to get familiar with, both for our presenters and for our team internally. In fact, we decided to switch to RingCentral Events just a few weeks before our annual conference. David and our other tech leads expected the migration would take a long time and create challenges, as IT implementations often do, but this turned out very easy to set up and start using.”
Co-founder and Director Julia Newell adds that as BA Life began experimenting with new content formats for its 2024 conference, RingCentral Events helped make those new sessions successful as well.
The flexibility of RingCentral Events also shows in the platform’s integrations. We introduced a more hands-on ‘workshops’ track to our annual conference this year, and our speakers were able to use several RingCentral integrations, including Miro, to increase audience engagement and interaction in those sessions.
Julia Newell
Co-founder and Director
Linda describes yet another way the BA Life team has found to leverage the flexibility of RingCentral Events to create an outstanding experience for its presenters and attendees.
“Some of our speakers set up lounges in RingCentral Events, and when they finish their speaking session, they move the conversation to a lounge, where they can essentially face-to-face video chats with attendees. Those transitions are great for keeping attendees engaged because now they can communicate directly with the presenter they just heard.”
Sponsors have also benefited from the interactive nature of the platform. With BA Life’s conferences drawing attendees from dozens of countries, organisations eagerly sign up to sponsor these events as a way to connect with BAs.
RingCentral Events delivers what every BA wants: data
David adds that, in addition to providing valuable insights into what’s resonating with attendees at BA Life’s conferences, the data in their RingCentral Events platform offers another important business advantage.
“The reporting and analytics dashboard showed us that our sponsors’ expo booths received an overall 85% engagement rate,” he explains.
As Julia explains, the RingCentral Events reporting dashboard has also revealed a very positive data point about how successfully the company persuades registrants to attend the live event.
Looking through our reports in RingCentral Events after our 2024 conference ended, we learned 98% of BAs who signed up actually came to the event. We’re thrilled with that number. When I compared it to 2023, that percentage was also in the low 90s. So, we’re enjoying a consistently solid turnout rate, and I attribute a large part of that to the quality of experience we’re providing through RingCentral Events.
Julia Newell
Co-founder and Director
World-class technical support
As Linda notes, customer support represents another stark contrast between BA Life’s previous events vendor and RingCentral.
“I can’t stress enough how amazing RingCentral’s support is. We had a few technical questions on the day of this year’s event, and the frontline support team at RingCentral Events were more responsive and helpful than anyone on our BA Life team has ever experienced from a technology provider.”
Anticipating a long relationship with RingCentral Events
BA Life’s co-founders have been so pleased with the results of running their global conferences using RingCentral Events that Linda says the team expects to use the platform to power more virtual events throughout the year.
Right now, we’re hosting just one global conference annually, but we’re planning to add topic-specific virtual workshops as well. Knowing we have such an intuitive and flexible events platform backed by a first-class support team will make it that much easier to continue expanding our portfolio of online learning initiatives.
Linda Parker
Co-founder and CEO