B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

Ernst and young registrations | Customer Case Study | ON24

B2B marketers are rethinking event strategies & budgets. 🤔 Fuel ROI with webinars in 2025. Read the Forrester report

Shifting mindsets: How EY takes digital learning to the next level

  • 78.6

    Average engagement time in its ON24 virtual events

  • 4666

    Registrants with 2,382 attendees spanning two dedicated virtual learning dates

  • 51.5%

    Participation rate

Capabilities

Industry

Use Cases

  • Event marketing

Number of Employees

  • 10,000+

About

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services it delivers helps build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. EY develops outstanding leaders who team to deliver on its promises to all of its stakeholders. In so doing, EY plays a critical role in building a better working world for its people, for its clients and for its communities. EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity.

Introduction

For a global advisory services company like EY, continuing professional education credits are one of the most pertinent aspects of internal communication. With industry requirements of 20 hours per year and 120 hours over a three year period, it’s important to establish a reliable training program to help employees fulfill these requirements in a timely, efficient and engaging manner. EY knew that webinars were a key tool in creating this program, but it was struggling to scale its program globally and cost effectively. So, it turned to ON24.

Problem

Previously EY’s training strategy relied heavily on costly in-person conferences. When the decision was made to reduce in-person conferences to a cadence of every other year instead of annually, EY needed to find a solution to fill the learning gap, and turned to virtual learning and webinars powered by ON24 to solve the problem and to scale training globally.

  • Rapid Course Development. Developing and delivering CPE curriculum at a rapid pace was mission critical for EY due to the fluid and constantly changing state of its subject matter. It’s turnaround time was an exuberant six months and by the time content and training sessions were developed, content was no longer relevant.
  • Mobility. EY’s global practitioners needed a learning tool that they could access from anywhere in the world, both live and on-demand.
  • A Centralized Delivery Mechanism. A consistent way to deliver information so that everyone around the globe could get the same information at the same time, regardless of timezone.

"We’ve really been able to work closely with ON24 and its partners to evolve our CPE program and deliver engaging content at a rapid pace."

Phil Hoops, Assistant Director Technical Learning, EY

Solution

EY dove deep into the ON24 platform with both live streaming and individual trainings, ultimately focusing its efforts on larger virtual environments. EY quickly found success with a number of ON24 tools.

  • ON24 Partnerships. EY now leverages an ON24 partnership with the Madray Group to more quickly turn around CPE credit programs. With the Madray Group’s support, EY submits its trainings for approval prior to publishing, with a turn around time from Madray of less than three business days.
  • Virtual Learning Environments and Webcast Elite. ON24 allows EY to create interactive online portals to access a mixture of ON24 webinar content and external content all in one place. This takes the place of live events in most cases and allows EY to scale, thus far, to 192 modules across seven different classrooms
  • Interactive Learning. EY drives engagement through multiple interactive learning and survey tools including the ON24 Q&A and polling widgets, so that participants can submit questions and participate as if they are actually in the room. Dedicated networking programs were made available to connect in group chats.
  • Broadcast Video. The company uses ON24 broadcast video functionality to film its events and stream them live via ON24 Webcast Elite as it outgrows time and capacity for on the ground, in-person events.
  • Attendee Journey Insights. EY reports and optimizes events based on data and analytics in real time. The environment provides rich analytics that shows how attendees move through the space, what classes they attend and heat maps of content consumption, enabling the ability to A/B test different floor signage and messaging and see how it affected user behavior. These insights are used to aid in measuring conference success and future strategic decisions. EY can even review a transcription of all attendee conversations, providing rich insights into topic trends that guide future decisions and identifying one-on-one opportunities to follow-up on.
  • On-Demand Recording. In between in-person live events, EY uses ON24’s on-demand recording capability to record stand-alone trainings. EY then builds the necessary wrapper content around its recordings in accordance with accreditation guidelines for CPE credits. Content is then archived so that it is always accessible to the learner, able to be shared and repurposed.

Results

EY now has a highly robust virtual training and content program that helps its practitioners easily complete their required CPE credits. Finding the most success with the two Virtual Learning Environments and events that it has hosted to date, EY grew from holding two one-off training sessions in a year to facilitating large events that host more than 4,000 registrants across the globe. EY’s retention and participation rate also continues to grow with an increasing 51.1 percent participation rate and average attendee engagement of 78.6 minutes.

  • More than 4,000 registrants
  • 51.1 percent participation rate
  • Attendee engagement of 78.6 minutes

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