Connecting Dreams Foundation powers the world’s longest sustainability summit with Zoho Backstage
- INDUSTRY Non-profit organization
- EVENT TYPE Virtual
The organization
Founded in 2013, Connecting Dreams Foundation trains students, youth, and social entrepreneurs in systemic entrepreneurship, equipping them with the skills to solve real problems within their communities. What began as an initiative in two villages has since grown into a global movement spanning more than 35 countries, engaging over 20,000 changemakers.
Events now play a central role in advancing the Foundation's mission. They serve as platforms where change makers connect, ideas travel across borders, and momentum builds. When India assumed the G20 presidency in 2022, the Foundation was appointed as one of the national coordinators for the Civil 20, an official G20 engagement group focused on civil society participation. As a part of this responsibility, the Foundation was tasked with organizing multiple events centred around Sustainable Development Goals.
To bring the spirit of global collaboration to life, the team envisioned a dynamic concept: a continuous, round-the-clock online summit that would “follow the sun,” with participation moving across countries and time zones as the day progressed.
It was the most ambitious event they had ever attempted, and executing it at a global scale would demand the right technology and coordination behind the scenes.
The challenge
The Changemaker 20 Summit was virtual in every sense, but its scale was anything but ordinary. Designed as a 122-hour continuous online event, the summit would bring together participants from across time zones in a truly round-the-clock format.
To manage an event of this scale, the organizing team needed a single, unified platform that could handle registrations, ticketing, the event website, speaker management, session scheduling, and live programming, without forcing the team to juggle multiple disconnected tools.
Before choosing Zoho Backstage, the Foundation evaluated platforms like Airmeet, Open Sessions, and Zoom. While each platform offered certain capabilities, none could fully balance functionality, scalability, and cost. As registrations increased, pricing rose sharply, making budget a major concern for a non-profit.
There were also usability concerns. Some platforms required additional setups or dedicated applications that attendees and speakers were unfamiliar with. With more than 760 global speakers involved, the team knew that introducing a complex system could create confusion, disrupt sessions, and impact the overall event experience.
"We started exploring multiple tools…It was quite expensive. Because the kind of scale we were looking at was huge, and we thought it would not fit our budget, that’s why we decided to go with Zoho Backstage."
The solution
Connecting Dreams Foundation chose Zoho Backstage because it brought the entire event lifecycle onto a single platform.
Registrations, ticketing, speaker profiles, session scheduling, the event website, attendee communication, and live programming could all be managed from one place. For a team running a 122-hour global summit with hundreds of speakers and attendees across time zones, eliminating the need to constantly move data between tools significantly reduced operational complexity.
Setting up the event website itself required no coding expertise. Using Backstage’s no-code builder, the Foundation’s team independently created and managed the website without relying on external developers or technical support.
"The website creation was quite easy and quite handy... for a person like me who has never worked on creation of a website or who has worked on complicated platforms…"
Speaker management became far more streamlined as well. Each speaker had an individual profile where multiple sessions could be mapped under a single account, removing the need to repeatedly enter the same information. Speakers could also manage and update their own profiles, easing the coordination workload for the organizing team.
For attendees, accessibility was a key advantage. Participants could join directly without downloading additional applications, browse sessions based on their interests, create personalized agendas, and sync schedules with Google Calendar. During live sessions, attendees could actively participate through reactions, chat, Q&A, and mic or camera access requests—creating a more interactive virtual experience.
Midway through the event, the team encountered an unexpected challenge after reaching the speaker limit on their plan. With the summit already live, the situation demanded an immediate resolution. The Foundation reached out to the Zoho Backstage team for support.
"We reached out to the Zoho Backstage team, and they were there to help us out. They immediately provided a solution — and that has been their approach from day one."
From the initial planning stages through the final session of the summit, the Zoho Backstage team remained closely involved. Customization requests were handled quickly, support remained consistently accessible, and the Foundation always had a team they could rely on when unexpected challenges arose.
Zoho Backstage features that Connecting Dreams Foundation relied on:
- Custom event website (no-code builder)
- Online ticketing and registration
- Speaker profile management
- Agenda creation and session scheduling
- One-click attendee email communications
- Attendee-built personal agendas (with Google Calendar sync)
- Live session tools (reactions, mic/camera access, chat)
- Zoho OnAir, a feature within Backstage, for live online event programming
Benefits and ROI
According to the Foundation, this event became the longest online summit ever conducted on sustainable development goals.
Executing an event at that scale was possible because the team was not spending time navigating disconnected systems or managing multiple platforms simultaneously. With everything centralized inside Zoho Backstage, administrative effort reduced significantly, allowing the team to focus more on the summit experience itself.
"Zoho Backstage really helped us in terms of time efficiency and resource management — so we didn't have to go out there and outsource any of the requirements of the events."
The Foundation also avoided the additional costs typically associated with external technical support, third-party integrations, and multiple event tools, an important advantage for a non-profit.
The platform’s ease of use enabled even non-technical participants to engage actively with speakers, discussions, and live sessions, significantly improving overall interaction and engagement throughout the summit.
Perhaps the clearest measure of what made it possible came from the Foundation's own reflection at the end of the summit.
"There were almost 760 speakers coming in from so many different parts of the globe. The Changemaker 20 Summit, which ran for 122 hours, was the longest ever Summit done on sustainable development purely online. 137 countries participated… I don't even think we would have been able to achieve this without Zoho Backstage."
Future plans
For Connecting Dreams Foundation, the Changemaker 20 Summit was a proof of concept that a small, mission-driven team could run a globally scaled, round-the-clock event and do it well.
"Zoho Backstage is one platform that gave me a lot of confidence that I can handle things, I can manage an event, and it is my go-to space for any online event."
With more than 35 countries already part of its network and an ongoing mandate around sustainable development, the Foundation plans to continue hosting large-scale online gatherings. Zoho Backstage will be at the center of how those events come together.