About this event
ICEF HE Connect marked an ambitious and successful virtual return for our annual ICEF Higher Education event. With three days of one-on-one meetings, 27 live and on-demand webinars and dedicated networking rooms to encourage chance encounters, ICEF HE Connect brought together more higher education student recruitment professionals than ever before in this new online setting, with a 40% increase in participants versus our previous largest HE event in Helsinki in 2019.
Over the three-day introductory event, our participants conducted over 3,600 meetings, exchanging nearly 40,000 messages and establishing 11,500 connections, rapidly setting solid foundations for this online HE-focused community.
Despite the challenges currently facing the international higher education sector, our participants overwhelmingly felt positive for the future and underlined the importance of looking ahead and preparing for the next student intake in September 2021. In the knowledge that travel restrictions won’t last forever, our attendees were keen to establish solid foundations to help them hit the ground running as of a 2021 return to “normal”.
With a new format designed to facilitate search, and the introduction of integrated video calling within the meeting scheduling system, event attendees again found this virtual event to be a valuable experience, with over 85% rating the number of new contacts made as excellent or good.