Scratch Foundation
With RingCentral Events, the Scratch Foundation Reaches Virtual Attendees in 100 Countries
50+
unique sessions at the 2024 virtual Scratch Conference
102
unique countries represented at the 2024 global event
65%
cost savings achieved between 2023 and 2024, with RingCentral Events
We’re committed to a continuous-improvement model at the Scratch Foundation. And as a RingCentral Events customer, I appreciate seeing the company continuously improve its own solution. Each quarter, I get an email listing the platform’s many new capabilities. That’s what you want from a tech partner, and I’m looking forward to RingCentral Events adding ever-more functionality to help us scale and grow.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations
The world’s largest coding community for kids
Developed at one of the world’s most respected technical colleges, MIT, the Scratch Foundation began in 2007 as an organization committed to providing young people with the digital tools and opportunities to learn coding and other valuable technical skills for the coming century. By every available metric, the nonprofit has succeeded in achieving that founding mission.
Today, Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for young people, where over 130 million users worldwide create stories, games, and animations with Scratch’s free coding tools and resources. Thanks in part to foundational support from organizations like Siegel Family Endowment, the LEGO Foundation, and Google, the Scratch Foundation has built an incredible global community of young people, educators, and families who are creating more than 500,000 projects every day.
INDUSTRY
Nonprofit
YEAR FOUNDED
2007
Only one events platform spoke their language
As the Scratch Foundation’s free coding resources gained more interest year after year from millions of young people all over the world–as well as from educators and other nonprofits–the organization determined that one of the best ways to serve its growing global community was through virtual events.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey, the Scratch Foundation’s Senior Manager of Program Operations, explains that the first virtual-events platforms he researched came up short on several must-have items.
“We’re a global organization, and our mission is to create learning opportunities for young people wherever they are, whatever languages they speak,” says Dr. Bailey. “So, a key issue that knocked most vendors off our list was their inability to seamlessly work with our AI-based translation and interpretation solution.”
Beyond the language and localization barrier–a growing challenge for an organization serving users in dozens of countries–Dr. Bailey cites other challenges he found with several solutions. “We found these platforms complex and unintuitive, which represented another barrier to giving our users the best possible experience. And honestly, I was unimpressed with the customer service levels of these vendors.”
After a recommendation from a trusted colleague, Dr. Bailey found the one virtual-events software platform that addressed all of his organization’s needs.
Looking at the landscape of vendors, RingCentral Events was the clear standout on every score: feature-set, flexibility, integrations with our other technologies, pricing, and even the unmatched quality of the company’s customer support.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations
Cracking the code for an outstanding virtual conference
With the ability to integrate their AI-powered language solution into their RingCentral Events environment, the Scratch Foundation’s team were now able to deliver a consistent, high-quality version of their flagship global event–Scratch Conference–to participants in countries all over the world.
With content both from the Scratch Foundation’s own subject-matter experts and its many partners, the event included a wide range of sessions–including Ignite Talks, Collaborative Creative Sessions, and more than a dozen Panels and Workshops. The 2024 event, in fact, featured more than 80 presenters delivering content to 1,300 attendees from more than 100 countries.
Another valuable component to the conference, Dr. Bailey explains, were the Nano Networking Sessions. “These brief sessions served as meet-and-greet networking opportunities, giving both our partners and attendees a chance to connect, establish relationships, and learn from each other. We’ve been hearing from many participants that these networking opportunities are among the most valuable aspects of the entire event.”
As one Scratch Foundation Conference presenter put it, “Hearing from people all around the world, in real time, was so inspiring!”
One beautiful thing about RingCentral Events is that it so easily connects with our other tools. After seeing how quickly and easily the RingCentral team helped us integrate our translation and localization solution, we could see the platform is so flexible that we’ll be able to enhance our virtual events with whatever new technology solutions we want to weave in.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations
In addition to RingCentral’s API for connecting their localization app, the Scratch Foundation leverages many features in RingCentral Events to turn its annual Scratch Conferences into the high-value experiences their global user community deserves.
“These Scratch Conferences are massive community gatherings, and we want to give attendees the chance to customize their experiences to fit their needs and interests,” says Dr. Bailey. “So, we use tools in RingCentral Events such as Expo Booths, where our partners can showcase their work, as well as the Panels, Breakout Rooms for quick talks, and Session Rooms for topic-specific workshops.”
Because the RingCentral Events platform is so straightforward and intuitive, Dr. Bailey adds, the organization can let its regional team members localize the Conference experience for different parts of the world.
“For the 2024 Scratch Conference, we had ecosystem leaders creating their own versions of the Conference in North America, Kenya, Vietnam, Brazil, India, and the UK. That was possible only because RingCentral Events is such a user-friendly platform, and our regional leaders don’t need much support or manpower to localize the virtual Conference for each region’s communities.”
A support team they can depend on
Since deploying RingCentral Events to power the Scratch Foundation’s Programs Team’s online gatherings–from the annual Scratch Conferences to more frequent Scratch in Practice (SIP) sessions worldwide–Dr. Bailey points out that one his favorite aspects of working with RingCentral is the quality and responsiveness of the customer support team.
Whenever we have a technical question or need guidance building a new capability into our events, we know with 100% certainty that RingCentral’s support team will be there quickly–and not just to respond, but also with a well-thought-out plan of action to help us. This team makes us feel like an important and unique partner, and RingCentral Events offers the highest level of customer support I’ve ever experienced from a technology partner.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations
Growing without spending
As much value as the Scratch Foundation derives from RingCentral Events, Dr. Bailey notes that the platform simply wouldn’t have been an option if it were too expensive for the budget-minded nonprofit. Thankfully, he says, both the RingCentral Events subscription itself and the person-hours needed to operate the platform have proven extremely affordable.
“One of the most valuable aspects of RingCentral Events for the Scratch Foundation is the increasing value it creates for our partners returning year after year to participate in our events. Each year everyone becomes more familiar with the platform–and I know this because we’re hearing it from many of them–and they’re having better and better experiences using it.”
With our previous platforms, we would’ve had to bring on a lot of contractors to handle specific aspects of our virtual events. But RingCentral Events is so easy to use–and we can always build on the foundation of our previous events–that we don’t need to hire all those extra people to create fantastic virtual conferences. As a nonprofit with an eye always on our spending, that’s really important to us.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations
Additionally, Dr. Bailey notes, even as the organization leverages RingCentral Events for more events and adds more sessions and attendees to its virtual experiences year-over-year, the Scratch Foundation is seeing its overall costs for these events going down.
“From year one to year two using RingCentral Events to power our big annual conference, we actually experienced roughly a 65% drop in costs–and that’s while we were also increasing our usage of the platform.”
A technology partner for tomorrow
RingCentral Events has become so fundamental to the Scratch Foundation’s outreach to its user community, Dr. Bailey explains, that he and his colleagues across the organization plan to continue finding more ways to leverage the platform to serve its users, educators, and partner organizations globally.
“One concept we’re working on now is to complement our virtual conferences around the world with in-person events. And we’ve learned that we can use RingCentral Events to help improve the registration process and other parts of the attendee experience for those onsite gatherings.”
Another area of the RingCentral platform Dr. Bailey’s team plans to use is the reporting and analytics engine to discover opportunities both to improve the experience for existing users and to capture new ones. “We’d like to use the reporting to figure out who we’re missing, why, and how to create dedicated events to address their specific needs and goals.”
As an organization that has been relying on this platform for more than a year to host our most important virtual events all over the world, my team and I can now say with experience that RingCentral Events is the model of excellence in this field.
Dr. Jarvis Bailey
Senior Manager of Program Operations