Exactly one year ago today, Stamford Innovation Week’s last session was done, dusted and in the rearview mirror. It was our best event yet, and we started to think about how to make it better for 2020. We had no idea we’d be a content strategy case study within months.
SiW 2019 produced dozens of sessions hosted by over 50 speakers and sponsors and attracted more than 3,500 attendees over ten days. Someone suggested that we add a digital component to our sessions so that we can attract a wider audience from around the world.
That was a nice thought. Not a priority. What we wanted at the time was an event platform to really get our community engaged during our events.
Who knew that this guy was a prophet?
Stamford Innovation Week Goes Digital
In early 2020, SiW joined the Stamford Partnership. As our committees wrapped up their first planning sessions, the news from China was starting to look grim. In the coming weeks, we would start thinking about how we could still hold Stamford Innovation Week 2020 in the event COVD-19 stuck around in September.
Events moved quickly, and the writing was on the wall. We didn’t have a complete idea of what a digital Innovation Week would look like, but by the time Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed the “stay safe, stay at home” order on March 20, the SiW team knew the 2020 conference would be 100% online.
The idea for L(a)unch – The Innovation at Lunch Show was born.
Step One: Engage the SiW Community
We gathered a team of volunteers, several on the Publio team, who wrote a creative brief outlining the business case and the strategy. We shared it around and the program grew in scope and refined its focus.
The depth of speakers from previous years quickly enabled the SiW team to build a community around the effort. From visionary executives to published thought leaders and high-growth entrepreneurs, everybody got together for 14 weeks.
Flash forward and on September 24 & 25, Stamford Innovation Week hosted almost 100 thought leaders and community leaders for a completely re-imagined digital event. Almost 1000 people from across the country and around the world attended.
Talk about a transformation!
Digital Video Programming Platform
“Events of 2020 are reshaping the opinions, behaviors, and values of a generation,” noted Jon Winkel, Chairman of Stamford Innovation Week and Executive Director of the Stamford Partnership.
“In the depths of coronavirus quarantine, the Publio team collaborated with SiW volunteers to produce a digital content strategy built on interactive video platform technology. The Publio team did a great job producing almost 50 segments – 20 hours of programming,” Winkel added.
L(a)unch: The Innovation at Lunch Show was born, and over the course of 14 weeks, hosted dozens of incredible entrepreneurs, pioneering strategies and technology from empathetic AI to 3D printing PPE for our frontline workers. Speakers hailed from Fairfield County to Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Content Strategy Case Study
The L(a)unch Show is a prime content strategy case study about pivoting in the face of disruption by utilizing innovative digital business strategies. This initial effort led to an entirely digital SiW event in September. Here is our content strategy case study we recorded earlier this spring:
Want to join the New Content Culture? Publio would love to hear from you. Maybe you would like to download our ROI calculator. We’ll be glad to help you build a profitable business model and/or digital marketing plan for your content publishing.