Bringing a virtual event series to life for Citrix

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses everywhere to rethink their operations. Citrix, long known for its flexible remote work solutions, was a key ingredient in the way many companies responded. In the Fall of 2020, Citrix was excited to share its learnings with customers and prospects through a virtual event, showcasing technologies that could help businesses increase their agility while spotlighting customer stories. The question was how to do it effectively.

Willis Collaborative was brought in to help them think through the approach. Working with the CMO, the Communications team, and other members of the executive leadership team, we developed an agenda for a three-day event to be held throughout October called the Citrix Summit Series. Each day of the event focused on a core need of businesses not only during COVID-19, but beyond that as they aspire to increase agility, flexibility and security of their operations. Three programs were set: Cloud Summit, Workspace Summit, and Security Summit. Each Summit was to feature 10-15 video segments from Citrix executives, thought leaders, subject matter experts, partners and customers, all available on-demand for customer and prospects to digest the topics of most interest to them.

Willis Collaborative worked with Citrix to identify the most appropriate Citrix speakers, and collaborated with the Customer and Partner teams to source relevant participants.

With the agenda set, Willis Collaborative worked with the Comms team and various execs and subject matter experts to script out vision and strategy content, product discussions, and demos. In parallel, we collaborated with Citrix’s main production partner Bellwether on studio scenic and logistics for the shoot days. With scripts finalized, our design team developed presentation graphics that would be used in the studio and taken full screen when needed, and additional on-screen graphics for call-outs.

Although the Summit Series would air over three separate days in October, we shot all Citrix presenter content back-to-back in studio. Bellwether was onsite in a highly controlled environment, while we could see all camera feeds and provide direction as needed virtually. Customers and partners were recorded virtually with camera, ring light and green screen kits shipped ahead of time to participants.

With footage in hand, we turned to post production including an opening sequence, lower thirds, mortises, an assortment of demo sequences, and of course editing to remove any flubs. For customer videos, we edited substantially and used b-roll, stock and music to pump up the energy. All told, across the three Summit events, we delivered 40 videos with a total runtime approaching 6 hours — an unbelievable amount of content to script, design, produce and get through executive, customer, and partner reviews and sign-offs in the short time we had. It was a Herculean effort but well worth it considering the results. Citrix was thrilled, and the customer participation and feedback was off the charts.

Below is a promotional video we produced ahead of the first Summit event to help encourage sign-ups, some examples of our design work, and a couple of the Workspace Summit segments. The full Citrix Summit Series is available here: https://www.citrix.com/digital-summits/