Aflatoun Grows and Strengthens their Network through Smart Interactions

Aflatoun International is a non-governmental organisation based in the Netherlands. Aflatoun offers social and financial education to children and young people world-wide. They work with a network of 275+ partners and 35 governments, reaching 8.6 million children and young people each year in more than 100 countries.

Menno de Vries and the Aflatoun team are responsible for maintaining and further developing the network of the organisation. Among other tasks, they are focused on building bridges between different societal stakeholders, connecting Aflatoun partners, donors and staff while aiming to raise awareness for the purpose of their organisation. “We create high-quality curricula, for different age groups, which can be contextualised to local needs or specific circumstances. In addition, teachers are provided with training and we conduct research to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of our programmes. We are working towards a world where children and young people are socially and economically empowered – acting as agents of change in their own lives and resulting in a more equitable world”, Menno de Vries.

Challenge

Aflatoun held its Global Social and Financial Skills Conference at the end of October 2019. The duration of the conference was 3 days and it focused on bringing Aflatoun partners, donors and potential partners together to explore the current and future educational trends, share ideas, be inspired and connect. This year’s conference held 250+ participants, from 80 different countries all looking to learn, share and benefit from the organisation’s strong network. As their sessions focused on exchanging knowledge, they wanted to ensure that conversations continued outside the “classroom.”

Thus in order to provide the best conference experience possible, Menno and the team were looking for a tool that would help them:

Grow and strengthen the existing network of stakeholders attending the Global Social and Financial Skills Conference;
Facilitate the ease of knowledge sharing amongst all participants during the conference; and
Create real and meaningful connections during the conference that could be transformed into long term collaborations.

“The strength of our organisation is our network. We wanted attendees to experience and reap the benefits of collaborating with people in their regions or focus areas. Our sessions focused on exchanging knowledge and multiple voices on stage but we wanted to ensure that conversations continued and that real connections could be made”, Menno de Vries

Solution

Aflatoun contacted us with the aim to upgrade their conference’s experience. They were also in search of an easy to build conference app that would ease the work load needed regarding all conference logistics. The app had a quite positive impact on all stages of the Aflatoun conference. Among other Networkapp features, the most used were:

Pre-conference

Aflatoun started building their app way before the actual conference date. They easily mastered the dashboard and put together a nice app on their own.

The first steps in the creation of Aflatoun’s conference app was to give their own look and feel to their app. Our customised design feature provided the necessary opportunities and allowed the Aflatoun team to get creative.
Moreover, Aflatoun went almost paper-free in this year’s conference. Aflatoun created their 3 day conference programme making optimal use of the options our Personalised Conference Book has to offer.

During the conference

Menno and his team discovered that among other Networkapp features, some proved very helpful in successfully boosting participants’ engagement.

A goal of the Aflatoun team was to connect with their conference participants, our share find & connect feature enabled the participants to connect with each other. Using our group chats and 1 on 1 messages, conference’s participants were able to interact online in the app and schedule offline meetings.
At the same time, the Aflatoun team was able to track the real-time interactions between their attendees. They tracked the most active users, checked the amount of messages that were being exchanged and overviewed the connections made.
Moreover, there were some last minute changes of the programme, important updates for attendees and schedule additions. Thus, Aflatoun used our push notifications in order to inform their attendees about various changes and last minute updates.

After the conference

The success of the Global Social and Financial Skills Conference was significant. The success was also depicted in the reports that Aflatoun received by us.

Specifically, after the conference Menno and his team received our detailed data reports showcasing their success in numbers. From the messages that were exchanged between attendees to the meetings that were scheduled, Aflatoun could reflect and come up with new ideas for their next conference.

Results

In addition to Aflatoun’s satisfaction with the use of our app, the success of the conference also reflected in numbers.

Specifically:

The app activations reached a high number of 73.9% of the total registrations;
In addition there were in total 669 messages sent during the conference; and
While there were 211 of unique connections between the conference’s participants.