Wiz-Event

Wiz-Event Logo

Inspiration

Have you ever been a panelist at a virtual event and spoken into the void with the cameras turned off?

What about hosting a virtual event? Setting up your Google Slide, a Slido for audience Q&A, a Spotify playlist to share during breaks, and a feedback form to share with all participants... only to realize you forgot to open one of those tabs, forcing you to screen share your entire desktop with your spicy dms to your significant other while looking for your other tab.

As executives in student organizations such as Toastmasters and Computer Society, where we prepare virtual events for 70-100 students every week, we are constantly confronted with these pain points. For our virtual events to be successful, we must screen-share 3-4 different platforms on a regular basis. We also need to get creative with how we engage with event participants, which adds to our event planning difficulty.

We required a solution that could do the following:

To boost event planning efficiency, combine the features of our favorite event planning systems.
Increase engagement with event attendees who have their cameras off.

What it does

Wiz-Event is an all-in-one event planning platform that integrates features from our favorite event planning platforms into a single, easy-to-use webpage that can be shared throughout an online event. Wiz-Event is a website for event moderators that:

Integrates with your Google Slides presentation
Integrates with Spotify for welcome & break music
Integrates with Slido for easy audience Q&A
Send out and pin important announcements, which normally get lost in chats
Has the ability to email all participants after an event (thank you notes and feedback forms)
Integrates a virtual assistant chatbot

For event attendees, Wiz-Event is a simple webpage that:

Allows them to pick a customized zoom background for the event to encourage cameras on
Integrates with Slido for easy Q&A without visiting another platform
Allows them to see event details, speakers & announcements

Attendees do not need to register or create an account, and they may enjoy Wiz-Event in all of its beauty via an easy-to-share event-specific URL.

How we built it

MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) technology stack, Twilio Sendgrid for automatic emails Figma was used to create the design.

The Admin Portal (client-side) is used to send event settings, which are then posted to our database using Express to contact the Node backend endpoints (server)
For admins and participants, the database is queried for a specific event ID, and the necessary content is provided.
Attendees register for an event by using the unique event ID, and their information is stored in our database.
The Twilio Sendgrid integration sends a customized email to all participants with the push of a button.
With Google's Diagflow, AI powered chatbot service, we created functions by constantly adding the speaker database for connecting attendees to the speakers.
Hosted the website on firebase (Google Cloud Platform).

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulties making requests to our backend using Axios. Connectivity to Sendgrid mail was another challenge we had to overcome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As event organizers, we're ecstatic to have created a tool that will assist us in resolving many of our pain points in the future. We're hoping to keep working on Wiz-Event so that we may release it and utilize it at some of our own events!

What we learned

We learned a lot about Node.js, MongoDB, and Twilio, among other new languages and technologies. During our preliminary study, it was also interesting to learn more about the virtual event environment and gain a deeper understanding of some of the most prevalent pain points reported by both attendees and organizers. We were also able to investigate various tools and APIs, giving us a decent idea of what we want to do next with this project!