On April 14, we organized PowerUp! Country Final of Turkey 100% online. The event was almost 2 hours long but the preparation of it was a huge new experience for us as organizers.
In this blog post, I would like to sum up how we turned physical events, we have been organizing for 3 years, into virtual ones because of the coronavirus pandemic. You can find all the tools we used for our online training, mentoring sessions and virtual Country Final.
Let’s start with who we are?
We are Sabancı University Inovent, Turkey’s first technology commercialization/accelerator, seed fund company, and EIT InnoEnergy’s only official partner in Turkey since 2017.
And… What is PowerUp!?
The PowerUp! Challenge is one of the biggest energy-focused startup competitions in Europe organized by EIT InnoEnergy in Central & Eastern Europe. It is organized simultaneously in 14 CEE countries. The thematic areas are energy, mobility, cleantech, and smart cities.
Coming from 24 countries, out of a record number of 425 applications 362 startups were qualified for the evaluation process. As Hub Turkey, we got 75 eligible applications and we are the second country regarding the number of applications after Poland. After the application period between January 15-March 10, we had the online interviews. Then, in our case, 11 startups were selected for the Bootcamp (2 days) and the Country Final.
In normal circumstances, we would have physical events for both Bootcamp and the Country Final. But, because of the coronavirus pandemic, we needed to turn all of these events online.
Here are some photos from PowerUp! 2019 Country Final of Turkey:
EIT InnoEnergy is a co-creator, smart investor, and industry catalyst for entrepreneurs who want a global impact and a sustainable world. Companies which succeed to join the InnoEnergy network get: product enhancement, development, and pilots, commercialisation strategies, international market introduction and expansion and further funding opportunities.
What happened when the coronavirus threat became a pandemic?
On March 13, we have been informed by InnoEnergy that we need to make online events. Because, in all countries, there have been restrictions about the events including Turkey. The new setup is like:
- All the countries need to make their Bootcamp online and they can use whatever platform they would like to.
- For the Country Finals, startups make their pitches online, the jury will listen to them, decide the winner online and we need to organize all of these online. For the CFs, there will be one platform for all countries and it would be announced later.
*InnoEnergy gave us an option to postpone our events until the end of May. But we didn’t do it and continue with April 11–12 for the Bootcamp, April 14 for the Country Final, which made us the first Country Final of PowerUp! 2020.
Let’s continue with the Bootcamp — How did we work out the Bootcamp?:
We decided on the date of the Bootcamp in November 2019. And of course, we had no idea that it needed to be an online one. We have already had reservations for a meeting room and informed our mentors and coaches about the physical Bootcamp of ours.
Normally, we need to bring almost 30 people together in a meeting room…
Here are some examples, how was our physical Bootcamp look like in 2019:
- So, we started with canceling our reservation for the meeting room & catering.
- We informed our coaches and mentors about the online setup and asked them if they still wanted to participate in Bootcamp.
In our Bootcamp, firstly, there are training by mentors and then, startups have mentoring sessions with the mentors they want to meet with.
For the training:
We started to search for which platform to go for the training. Our primary choices were Zoom and Hangouts:
Because we have a Business account on Gmail, we could use the Hangouts but the system of Zoom was more professional and easier, also the quality of the screening is better on Zoom. That’s why we decided to use Zoom but also have a backup meeting at Hangouts.
Then we needed to decide which Zoom tool to use: Webinar or Meeting. Because we have a specific list of participants consisted of 30 people at most and we would not share the link anywhere publicly, we continued with the meeting tool. Also, this tool was better, because startups could easily contact and ask questions to mentors.
Differences of Webinar and Meeting tools on Zoom:
- At the Webinar tool, only the speakers have videos. This one is better for events with +100 participants and when you have public events. Participants can only ask questions on chat and raise hands.
- At the meeting tool, everyone can turn their cameras on but the owner of the meeting has the option to turn all cameras off and mute all the participants. There is a “waiting room” option in which people need to be accepted by you to enter the meeting.
So, we went with the meeting tool and shared both Zoom and Hangouts links with our startups, mentors and told them if any problem occurs with Zoom, we will continue with the Hangouts link.
For the mentoring sessions:
Normally, we have specified time slots for the mentoring sessions and mentors have their tables where startups can join them and ask questions.
- But this time, before the Bootcamp, we created a Google Form and ask the startups which mentors they would like to meet. On the other hand, we asked mentors their time slots for these online mentoring sessions.
- Then we created 3 Hangouts links for 3 mentors, shared these links with both mentors and startups.
- We shared the time slots, they could meet the mentor they selected before, with the startups and asked them to enter the link at the given time slot.
- We didn’t invite anyone to the Google Calendar event of these mentoring sessions. Every time someone tries to enter the room, Hangouts asks us before let him/her inside. This way, we avoided the problems that may occur if a mentoring session delay or any startup shows up earlier than the given time slot.
What happened at the Bootcamp?
Actually, everything went perfectly. We didn’t even need our Hangouts link. No one had any technical problems (Even my colleague who has a bad internet connection at his home).
The only problem we had with the mentoring sessions was that one of our mentors had a problem with Hangout and couldn’t hear us. That’s why I created a Zoom meeting for this mentoring session and e-mailed every startup, she will meet, the new link.
One of our entrepreneurs used his pitch deck background as his Zoom background. :)
Country Final: How did the Country Final change?
Actually, it changed entirely! Everything became online and I will try to sum it up as much as I can:
Every detail, I will mention starting from here is the product of a hard work of Proidea and InnoEnergy. We just followed the guidelines they provided us.
- Startup pitches were recorded before the event by Proidea. Entrepreneurs reserved time slots for the recordings. For recording, they used Hangouts and Teamviewer.
- Tools we used for the Country Final:
- Zoom:
We used Zoom for the backstage of the event. We had two different rooms, one is the jury room and the other is the speaker room for the startups.
Also, we created a Whatsapp group with our entrepreneurs just in case.
For both rooms, there was a screening of the main event. Thus, jury members and the entrepreneurs didn’t need to watch the Vimeo broadcasting.
At the speaker room, entrepreneurs waited for their turn to the Q&A session. When it was their turn, they left the meeting on Zoom and went to the Hangouts link.
2. Hangouts:
We used Hangouts for the stage. When a startup’s pitching recording was live, that entrepreneur should have gone to stage for the Q&A session. Just after his/her pitch, MC asked the questions from the jury members.
3. Google Docs:
We used Google Docs for the live jury questions. Jury members didn’t appear on the screen and MC asked all the questions came from the jury. But the thing is pitches were just 3 minutes long and jury members needed to start asking questions while they were watching the pitches. That’s why there was a need for a fast tool to get the questions from the jury members and we used Google Docs for this reason. Jury members wrote their questions to the shared Google Docs and our colleague from Proidea, shared these questions with the MC.
4. Vimeo:
Vimeo was the main link in which the participants watch the event:
5. Slack:
We used Slack for networking. All the jury members, entrepreneurs, InnoEnergy team and the participants were invited to a Slack channel. People could easily chat with a person they would like to meet.
6. my.meetu.se
We used my.meetu.se, again, for networking. Every startup had a room at my.meetu and all participants were informed before the event regarding the link of the rooms.
What happened at the Country Final?
So happy to say that the event was a big success for all of us! We just had little technical problems:
- At the first Q&A session, the voice of the entrepreneur went off. So, we connected him after the end of all startup pitches and MC asked the questions one more time.
- One of our entrepreneurs had a technical problem at the Q&A session, too. In this case, we shared the questions with the entrepreneur via Whatsapp and then shared the short answers with jury members on our Google Docs.
If you would like to watch the PowerUp! 2020 Country Final of Turkey here is our link:
This was our journey at our very first online event experience. It was both exciting and tiring at the same time. :) But I am so happy being a part of this huge experience. I hope our case will help you to figure out your own online transformations.
Take care & be safe!
Sabancı University SUCool
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