| Applicable packages |  Applicable to all Symposium packages |
This article is for event organizers. If you are an event participant, please see our Resources for Participants section.Symposium by ForagerOne is a platform for hosting engaging virtual and hybrid events, with a wide range of capabilities for showcasing content and facilitating meaningful interactions synchronously and asynchronously.
In this article, you will find an overview of the platform and a list of helpful resources to help you explore the broad functionality of Symposium and get started hosting your virtual or hybrid event!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why Symposium?
Symposium prioritizes three key features in its design: visibility, flexibility, and meaningful interactions.You can control the visibility of your event by making it either Private or Public. Making your event Private allows you to restrict viewership to a specific list of registrants and/or organizational affiliates. About half of the events hosted on Symposium have opted for Public viewing, which has enabled organizers to increase engagement and broaden participation, increasing viewership by tenfold in many cases. With this option, we’ve seen that organizers are able to significantly extend the accessibility of their event to people who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend in-person events, such as donors, corporate partners and recruiters, alumni, friends and families of presenters, and even prospective students.
We understand fundamentally that students, faculty, and other presenters represent a broad range of disciplines, fields, and industries and use different presentation formats and media to convey their content. For this reason, Symposium was designed to be highly flexible to accommodate these diverse needs while retaining a simple interface focused on promoting deep engagement with content.
Lastly, the core design and elements of Symposium center around facilitating and fostering meaningful interaction among event participants. This happens both synchronously, via Live Sessions, and asynchronously, as participants view, comment and respond on presentations.
If you haven't already, you can see how all of these elements come together on Symposium by scheduling a live demo with a member of our team.
How to host an event on Symposium
When you first purchase a package on Symposium, you will be able to begin setting up your event right away. Here are a list of tasks you will want to complete before the launch of your event.
TO DO BEFORE LAUNCH:
- Create your new event.
- Build your Welcome Page.
- Apply appropriate access settings according to your needs.
- Customize your Presentation Submission Form and distribute to presenters.
- Set up Live Sessions.
- For competitive events, set up Judging and invite judges.
- For non-profit organizations, set up your donations widget.
- Invite attendees!
If at any point in this process you experience difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact us via the chat box on our website or our support email (support@foragerone.com) with any questions.