Frameable, a productivity software company creating remote-first digital experiences for groups and teams, today introduced self-serve access to all service tiers of Social hour, a platform for hosting engaging professional and personal virtual events in spaces built for social connection and quality face-to-face time.

Frameable built Social hour to provide conference and event planners an alternative to typical meeting software, which isn’t designed to facilitate truly engaging and enjoyable virtual events. As various virtual event software solutions began to proliferate, fueled by COVID-19 lockdowns, Frameable’s primary goal was to give professional event planners what they most want: a frictionless experience for themselves in the design phase, and an invigorating experience for attendees moving around the virtual environment. Frameable employed a design-first approach to optimize every part of the event planning process, including event planning and management, branding and customization, guest experience and social interactions, and event analysis and reporting.

With the introduction of self-serve access to Social hour, users of all paid service tiers (Basic, Pro, Enterprise) may easily build and host fully customized events on their own, including complex multi-room or multi-track events experiences. Social hour also enables attendees to break into more intimate and accessible groups at “tables” or “lounges” before or after content presentations, awards, announcements, or other shared viewing experiences. These thoughtfully designed features maximize the commercial value of the event for the host, while strengthening social connections and networking opportunities for attendees.

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Even as businesses move into pandemic recovery, meetings and conferences — a trillion-plus dollar industry — will largely remain virtual or hybrid for some time. Professional event planners still struggle to find virtual event solutions that provide a great attendee experience and are highly customizable. With Social hour, hosts can customize and brand their event, and attendees can have the freedom to visit whichever tables or topics they please and create new topic tables as conversations evolve, before or after any main stage program content is shared. Event planners can also choose to provide a fully directed attendee experience, if that is appropriate for their event.

“A virtual event needs to be more than 10 hours of video, which attendees passively consume. It has to be elegant and at least partially interactive for everyone involved,” said Adam Riggs, CEO of Frameable. “Aside from breakout sessions, the big benefit of in-person conferences is the ability to casually meet and network with industry colleagues in the lobby or grab coffee while also meeting new meaningful contacts before, during, or after any programming. Social hour provides all of this, enabling guests to move informally and by choice among smaller groups, to collaborate or just socialize with other guests, according to the event designer’s vision.”

“The goal of Social hour is to provide professional event planners with what they actually want and need to execute a successful virtual event with ease, eliminating distractions that don’t add real value to the event. Social hour empowers anyone to design and build a fully-customized virtual event that meets the needs of their organization and provides a memorable experience for everyone involved,” added Riggs.

Social hour Testimonials

Equinix: the world’s digital infrastructure company. Digital leaders harness its trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success.

“As a fast-growing company with 10,000 employees around the world, internal events are a regular part of staying connected. Working our way through the pandemic, we went looking for a tool that could help us welcome new team members and build connections between our teams. Social Hour fit the bill, providing a fun and flexible platform that we hope to leverage further in the future.

  • Jacob Smith, VP Bare Metal Strategy Marketing @ Equinix

AIChE: the world’s leading membership association for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries.

While we had been successfully delivering conference content digitally, enabling virtual networking was more challenging. We selected Social Hour for their ability to seamlessly integrate with our conference content delivery platform and provide many options for facilitating interaction among attendees. The platform helped everyone stay engaged and connected in a four-day event with more than 1000 attendees. We hosted everything from technical networking events to fun roundtable events on the Social Hour platform, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Their team was very flexible and easy to work with; they listened to every request and implemented many new features on short notice.”

  • Amit Gupta, Chief Information Officer @ AIChE

TechChange: an all-in-one digital events firm that helps build and deliver a beautiful and engaging virtual experience for your audience, wherever they are in the world.

“At TechChange, we produce virtual conferences and networking events for some of the world’s largest and well-known foundations and non-profit organizations including USAid, Unicef, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Social hour’s fast, intuitive, customizable layout and breakout tables provide the closest to an in-person experience we’ve had at any virtual event yet! We’ve tried every provider – Social hour is hands down the best in class.”

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