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54 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | F A L L 2 0 2 0 F or the thousands of you who attended ILTA>ON, thank you. It was ILTA's flagship event for 2020 and the praise we received is humbling. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty we can improve, but for a first go at hosting an annual conference on our own platform, I am very pleased. It proved our decision to build our own virtual conference platform was the right one. This is the story of why that decision was made and what we learned. The story begins in March of this year, when we all realized that conferences would need to move to virtual. Fast forward to June and ILTA is hosting our first virtual conference: LegalSEC Summit Virtual Experience. By the metrics of attendee count, event survey feedback and the finances, it was a success. We learned that virtual conferences do work in our market. We also learned two key points during the post event debrief: 1) virtual conference platform requirements, and 2) costs. Let's start by discussing the latter. Of the overall conference expenses, 83% went to the platform business partner to host the conference. That equates to 45% of the conference revenue. From a strictly profit/loss perspective, that was THE cost to manage. The question became, could we replicate the platform ourselves? Which leads to the second lesson learned; virtual conference platform requirements. After delivering LegalSEC Summit Virtual Experience, Dawn Hudgins and the events team took the time to break out the handful of modules needed to deliver a virtual conference, including conference agenda navigation, help desk, social networking, etc. Each of these modules were grouped into two categories for delivery: 1) a webpage, or 2) a communication tool. That is when they proposed we might be able to deliver ILTA>ON using our existing toolset. In other words, we would use our website, communities and virtual meeting application to host ILTA>ON. From there, it became a straightforward software development project. We evaluated the requirements from a technical perspective, leveraged our business partners' how-to tips, and in 2 weeks, designed a platform solution. In 6 weeks, we built and delivered that solution. Along the way, we had several meetings which I would label user acceptance tests. The conference committee chairs provided a lot of feedback, as well M E M B E R R E S O U R C E S ILTA>ON 2020: Why ILTA built its own virtual conference platform and what we learned by Corey Simpson

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