The Award-Winning Conference That Started on the Bus

The best conferences don't start when the first speaker takes the stage. They start when the first attendee opens their phone and realizes the experience has already begun. Event agency PS Occasion used Ventla to run Grant Thornton's 1,200-person Swedish conference — building engagement that started weeks before arrival and won the industry's Golden Wheel award.

The situation

Grant Thornton is one of the world's largest professional services networks, and their Swedish operation holds a major internal conference each year — bringing together around 1,200 employees from offices across the country. The event is a cornerstone of the firm's internal culture: a chance to align on strategy, celebrate achievements, and strengthen the connections that make a national professional services firm feel like one team rather than a collection of offices.

PS Occasion, the event agency responsible for designing and producing the conference, understood that for an event of this scale, the traditional approach — arrive, sit in sessions, attend the dinner, go home — wasn't going to create the kind of engagement Grant Thornton was looking for. They wanted the conference to feel like it started the moment people were invited, not the moment they walked through the door.

The challenge was logistical as much as experiential. With 1,200 attendees travelling from across Sweden, the coordination involved transport, accommodation, dietary requirements, session selection, and real-time schedule management — all of which needed to work seamlessly while the experiential layer ran on top.

What they needed

For a 1,200-person conference that needed to engage before, during, and after the event, PS Occasion needed:

Pre-event engagement tools to build anticipation and start the conference experience weeks before the physical event
A platform that could handle the logistical complexity of 1,200 attendees — transport, accommodation, session registration
Real-time interactivity during sessions: live polling, Q&A, and audience response
Networking features that helped people from different offices connect across a large event
Post-event evaluation and content access to extend the conference's impact beyond the final day

How they used Ventla

PS Occasion's approach was to make the Ventla app the conference's single touchpoint from the moment invitations went out. Weeks before the event, attendees were onboarded into the platform — receiving teasers about the programme, completing pre-event surveys, and beginning to explore who else would be attending.

The engagement started, quite literally, on the bus. As employees travelled to the conference venue, the app delivered content, icebreaker activities, and logistical information. By the time attendees arrived, they had already engaged with the event multiple times. The conference didn't begin with a keynote. It began with a journey.

During the event itself, Ventla handled both the logistical and experiential layers simultaneously. Session schedules, room assignments, and real-time updates kept 1,200 people moving through a complex programme without bottlenecks. Meanwhile, live polls during keynotes, Q&A during breakout sessions, and audience voting during interactive segments kept participation high and energy visible.

The networking features gave employees from different offices a way to find and connect with each other. In a firm where most collaboration happens within local teams, the conference was an opportunity to build cross-office relationships — and the participant directory made those connections intentional rather than accidental.

Post-event, the platform remained live. Session recordings, presentation materials, and photo galleries were accessible on-demand, and the evaluation surveys — sent through the same app — achieved completion rates that reflected how invested attendees were in the experience.

What happened

The conference won the Golden Wheel award — the Swedish event industry's most prestigious recognition — for its overall concept and execution. The jury specifically noted the integration of digital engagement throughout the attendee journey, from pre-event activation to post-event follow-up.

The engagement data told a compelling story. Pre-event activation meant that attendees arrived already oriented, already connected, and already invested. Session interactivity was consistently high across the programme. And the post-event evaluation data gave both PS Occasion and Grant Thornton a detailed understanding of what worked, what resonated, and what to evolve for the next year.

For Grant Thornton, the conference achieved its cultural objective: 1,200 people from offices across Sweden felt like part of one organization, with shared goals and visible connections. For PS Occasion, the event demonstrated what's possible when an agency uses the right tools to extend the event experience beyond the venue walls.

What this means for similar organizations

This case is relevant both for organizations running large internal conferences and for event agencies producing them. The lesson is that engagement is a design choice, not a byproduct of good content. If you start engaging attendees weeks before the event, maintain that engagement throughout, and extend it afterwards, you create a fundamentally different experience than the traditional arrive-attend-leave format.

For event agencies in particular, the ability to deliver this kind of integrated experience — logistics and engagement in one platform — is increasingly what clients expect. The Golden Wheel recognition confirmed that the industry sees this approach as the standard to aspire to, not an exception.

Industry: Professional Services · Event type: Company Conference · Attendees: 1,200 · Region: Sweden

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