GURU Media Hub

To deliver on these big promises year after year for all of its industry-leading virtual events, the company needed a highly reliable and customizable virtual events platform. Stania Antoine, GURU Media Hub’s Director of Events, explains that the logical choice was RingCentral Events.

“We scoured the industry and researched every platform out there, looking for a solution that could turn our big vision into reality,” Stania says. “We needed lots of functionality and customizability, a huge app library, the ability to easily integrate our own custom apps into the platform, an intuitive interface, and a great team behind the platform to support us. We found only one provider that offered all of that under a single roof. The choice was pretty easy.”

Customization and engagement lead to world-class conferences

As Stania explains, her team works hard to ensure each GURU Media HUB event delivers valuable content but also a unique experience. That’s one reason they find the RingCentral Events platform so useful.

“It’s important that each of our brands show up exactly as we envision for each event, so we lean on RingCentral Events’ skinning capabilities and other customization functionality. For some events, we’ll integrate a third-party app like Kahoot! to give attendees games or quizzes. Other times, to encourage attendees to connect with our sponsors, we’ll integrate a custom app like our Supermarketing Sweep game, where attendees compete to download as much sponsor content as they can in five minutes.”

GURU Media Hub has found so many ways RingCentral Events improves their workflows, Stania adds, that the team now uses five distinct areas of the platform. “We’re definitely RingCentral super-users, because building our events takes us everywhere in the solution: Reception, Stage, Sessions, the custom app area, and the Expo area.”

RingCentral Events has proven so customizable, Stania adds, that her team has been able to use the platform’s standard features in unique ways. “We wanted to use the Expo area not for booths but instead as networking spaces for our sponsors. When we brought the idea to the RingCentral team, they said what they always say: ‘Sure, we can figure that out.’ They made it easy for us to leverage that functionality in a customized way, and it worked beautifully.”

Another way GURU Media Hub leverages the customizability of RingCentral Events, Stania says, is by using their own branded landing pages for registrations. “We could’ve used a templated registration page in RingCentral Events, but we wanted to develop our own. So we customized a page for registrants to sign up for an event, then we used RingCentral and Zapier to automatically move that registration data into both RingCentral Events and our CRM.”

RingCentral’s team proves to be support GURUs

Stania notes that the help, collaboration, and creativity her team has experienced with the RingCentral Events support team is one of the best things about partnering with RingCentral.

“Even a super-user needs help from time to time. It’s been so great to know we can always get high-quality support from the team. Every time we ask for help, even in real-time during a live event, the RingCentral support experts are right there, right away with a solution.”

Stania adds, “When we need more creative help, like integrating a custom app or repurposing a feature for a different use, the support team is so positive and collaborative that we know they’ll find a way. We try new and yes, sometimes crazy ideas. We did a 1980s Costume Contest for a recent conference, and we needed to integrate a custom app for the event. The RingCentral Events team said yes, we’ll figure it out. And they did. They always do.”