How UNICEF & the UN Population Fund Created Collaborative Global Event to End Child Marriage

The Context

In 2016, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) partnered with UNICEF to launch The Global Programme to End Child Marriage. Today, the programme works in 12 countries to end child marriage and promote the rights of adolescent girls. 

The Challenge

The UNFPA-UNICEF Programme recruited ImpactBasis a company that helps social purpose organizations to make impactful collaboration in the online space a reality to vet event platforms, plan and execute the event. The teams needed to bring together a global community of stakeholders to rally around a single goal: ending child marriage. They needed a platform that could:

• bring stakeholders together to quickly and easily align, share learnings and take strides in tackling a complex global problem
• host all their resources for their event in an organized space alongside all their meeting sessions
• create a persistent space for attendees to access post-event; a central place where attendees could revisit session recordings, materials and connections
• uplevel their experience into an event that was not 'just another Zoom call’ but could also work around the world, even in remote, low-bandwidth locations.

The planning team was not only looking for a virtual event platform, but a strategic partner that could share best practices and strategy advice, as well as support before and during the virtual event.

After evaluating virtual event platforms, the ImpactBasis team knew that Filo was the perfect solution due to previous experiences in the Filo platform.

Bringing a global community together

The planners selected Filo to host the 3-day event, organizing the space into a Floor for every day. A Welcome Floor allowed the community to easily see the agenda, the planners and connect with each other. Note, these aren't forced connections but rather bringing people together based on shared interests and areas of expertise.

We wanted to allow our partners and meeting participants to easily see who else was working on the same issues and type of approaches as themselves, so they could most-easily connect and collaborate, without it feeling forced.
- Kristin Andersson, UNICEF

To do that, they used Filo's Networking feature, which connects members based on selected interests. (When attendees log in they are invited to fill out a Networking Profile using pre-set tags. Filo then matches attendees based on their tags).

Customizing the Event for Engagement

In addition to facilitating connections, the planners also invited stakeholders to connect more deeply with the programme using Filo's customizable Tiles to design their space around the content and community.

Curating Resources for Easy Organization

The organizers structured the event with Floors each day of the event. On each Floor, attendees could select a session to attend. Each session (organized in Rooms in Filo) is customized to uplift the speaker, and share background readings. The Rooms were used post-event for attendees to easily find and revisit the information or watch the recordings.

Sharing Take-Aways with an Event Gallery

Finally, during the event, a cartoonist, Drawnalism, documented key takeaways from the sessions. The planners set up an Event Gallery to house these assets, enabling attendees to quickly view the conversations from breakouts, and return to the material after the event.

The Results

Over 400 attendees from all over the world were able to collaborate more easily, and get more work done in a collaborative global workshop in an easy to use virtual platform.