Harvard Business School Global Networking Tour — XPL Experiential Design & Event Production

VIRTUALLY ENGAGING THE MOST POWERFUL NETWORK ON EARTH

In the span of twenty four months, the Advancement team at Harvard Business School challenged its engagement partners to develop and produce a twenty seven city tour that would not only move it’s communities to play a more active role in the school’s vision, but that would also create a rich data depository that could help it understand its network a lot more clearly - a network that just happened to be one of the most powerful on earth.

XPL played a lead role in not only designing and executing on the logistics of such an ambitious tour, but in developing the virtual data capture system by which they would partially measure the tour’s success.

FIRST, FIND THE IN

When you are dealing with a very advanced thinking audience who covets privacy and has an incredible amount of resources at their finger tips already, there is little in the way of “offering” an organization can give to them to entice them to give more information about themselves. As a result, we had to work into our design thinking methods to nudge attendees to provide insight into their wants and needs. This led to the design of the interest-based questionnaire and networking tool. A fully-responsive, fully-digital application designed to bring attendees’ peer groups closer together based on their life goals and values.

TEST, TEST, PIVOT, TEST

Staying true to the data analytical nature of the goal, the team pored over every single round of results as they came in. Time of use, amount of use, soft and hard bounces, follow ups and a myriad of other data points allowed us to make one critical adjustment in the early stages of the tour: move this process out of the live events and into the virtual registration. Engagement with the application tripled and our understanding of best practices with virtual networking tools grew immensely. The tour continued at breakneck speed around the world for the next eighteen months. In that time, we were able to increase our useful data capture while actually saving the client monies from original budget forecasts.

A truly hybrid pivot long before anyone became sick of the words “hybrid” and “pivot.”