About
The HiiL Innovating Justice Forum is a yearly event focused on making justice accessible, affordable, and easy to understand for everyone. It’s hosted by HiiL, a foundation dedicated to justice innovation. HiiL’s mission is to achieve equal justice for all by 2030.
At the Innovating Justice Forum, HiiL showcases their research and work and facilitates discussions on innovation in the justice system. Promising startups focused on improving the justice system also compete against each other in a pitch competition. HiiL then selects a winning startup by determining which one has the best idea to innovate justice.
Challenge
Traditionally, HiiL held the Innovating Justice Forum at the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an in-person gathering was impossible for their 2021 forum.
That’s why HiiL chose to host their first-ever fully-virtual Innovating Justice Forum.
HiiL’s 3 primary goals for the 2021 Innovating Justice Forum:
- Reproduce the atmosphere and experience of an in-person event.
- Build a branded virtual experience mirroring the look and feel of prior, in-person Innovating Justice Forums.
- Offer live language interpretation from English to Arabic and from English to French inside the virtual event interface. This was a key feature for HiiL as the event was in English but many attendees spoke only Arabic or French.
Solution
HiiL chose Hopin as their virtual event platform, because Hopin met all three of these goals. “We moved to Hopin, because we wanted to really recreate as much as possible the experience of an in-person event. We felt Hopin was the platform that would allow us to do that,” Michelle Ton, Project Manager at HiiL, says.
Hopin features used:
- Stage: Keynote speakers spoke from a Hopin Stage.
- Sessions: Attendees could join interactive breakout sessions on specific topics inside Hopin Sessions.
- One-on-one networking: Attendees met 1-on-1 to meet and chat with each other.
- Expo: Inside the Expo, 14 startups pitched their ideas for innovating the justice system.
- StreamYard: HiiL used StreamYard to live stream branded video content to the stage.
On top of that, HiiL used Interprefy, integrating it with Hopin to add live language interpretation to the event.
With the Interprefy and Hopin integration, attendees were able to access live translations of English talks into Arabic and French, directly inside Hopin via a widget. Attendees simply clicked in the interpretation widget and selected their language. Then, they could immediately hear a live translation in their own language from real interpreters.
Pro tip: You can add the Interprefy widget to the Hopin Stage, Sessions, and Expo areas.
Interprefy’s live language interpretation widget
I think it’s a great tool,” says Ton about the Interprefy and Hopin integration. “And for the interpreters, it was easy to use. They gave us positive feedback.”
Result
Over 1,000 people from around the world attended the virtual Innovating Justice Forum. “We found that having the event online really opened it up to a whole new group of people who would otherwise not be able to join us” says Ton. “I would recommend Hopin to international organizations, because it offers a really great alternative to organizing a physical event.”
Hopin is a very user-friendly platform, and the support was outstanding.
Originally published Sep 01, 2022, updated Nov 03, 2023