One of myriad lessons that can be drawn from the past year is that things don’t always go to plan. A recent EdQuarter endeavour helped drive that message home.
Our mission: to deliver a free, quality virtual event dedicated to the UK universities sector, tackled newsworthy subjects such as the challenges facing university professional services, the future of online learning, and the needs of tomorrow’s student. It was the third virtual event we’d run in the last 12 months, and this one was a real doozy!
After a weeks-long refinement process and countless team meetings leaving no stone unturned, our moment had arrived. We were ready to roll and, with two well-received digital conferences already under our belt, we were confident that we could deliver something better, brighter and bolder than before. But in a cruel twist of fate, the tech let us down just moments before we went live. ‘Third time’s a charm?’ Hmmm...more like, ‘Third time’s a challenge’ – so it’s a good thing that EdQuarter is never too shy to lean in and think on our feet.
We carried on with the day, as planned, recording our discussions (which were, typically, among the best we had done yet) so we could stream the event at a later date. Every person in our valued team pulled out all the stops to ensure we could still deliver what we had promised and that’s exactly what we did. It may not have taken shape in exactly the way we had planned, but things rarely do. And plus, it wouldn’t be an authentic live broadcast experience without the odd hitch here and there!
Regardless of the hurdles we met along the way, we still pulled off an event we can be proud of. In the words of Booker T. Washington: “Success is measured by the obstacles which we have overcome to reach it”, and this was an obstacle we still managed to knock out the park.