Virtually 6 Questions Answered About Hosting Virtual Conferences

Some things just don’t work in a virtual format. Raise your hand if you’ve attended a virtual wine tasting or beer festival. Certain iterations of this idea have promise – those that, for example, offer up a selected style of beer while an expert shares tasting notes, and participants experience the style’s defining characteristics through the expert’s lens. Other attempts are less successful – those involving paying festival entrance fees, picking up an assortment of bottles and cans, and joining a Zoom call with random attendees while drinking alone in front of your screen. It lacks the je ne sais quois of a festival.

On March 11, the WHO declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and we started to come to terms with the many ways this would affect our daily lives. In our roles as Filene’s marketing and events leaders, that meant quickly accepting that our plans for in-person events and member meetings would be disrupted, while pivoting on a dime to make sure we could still deliver on the promise of the value of our events in a new virtual way.

If we’re being completely honest, we were not happy about the prospect of not being able to meet and connect with our event attendees in person, learn about new ideas together in the same space, and deliver our events through carefully selected locations and painstakingly curated experiences.

There were a LOT of questions, but the one answer we knew for sure then was that our spring research event would not be happening in Boston and likely our summer research event in Denver would not be held in person either. The challenge to bring the same excitement, perspective, growth and learning while sitting apart, isolated in front of our screens, was on.

What started as a challenge turned into an opportunity. As of this writing, we successfully planned and delivered our first ever virtual research event with more than 450 registrants, and hosted our second virtual event, building on that success, on June 16. These are the answers we discovered to our biggest virtual event questions:

1.  What’s the right technology?

With a little over a month to go, at a time when days moved deceptively fast from the confines of home, we had to make a quick evaluation and decision on the right technology for both the experience and delivery. Thankfully, the events industry is full of resilient problem-solvers and we found ourselves with almost an abundance of ‘hot-off-the presses’ solutions for virtual delivery. Considering the restraints of time, cost and ability to deliver on our goals, we decided to use a trusted vendor we already had contracted and that could perform to our event objectives. Having a clear outline of attendee experience and engagement is a must before choosing the right platform for delivery.

2.  Should we pre-record or go live?

Once we landed on a technology solution, we put ourselves in the attendee’s point of view to live the experience they would have, considering everything from energy peaks to attention spans to distractions. For our first virtual event, we opted to capture some sessions in a pre-recorded setting to limit tech failure risk during day-of execution. We discovered that live engagement still translates virtually, and pre-recorded sessions created barriers to that engagement. We adjusted our approach for our second event and found an ideal solution: Execute all sessions live with real-time engagement opportunities, mitigating risk by pre-recording a backup, which doubles as an opportunity for presenters to practice delivery in an empty room!

3.  Will the message translate through the medium?

When presenters understand the nuance of engaging a disconnected audience, like university professors with experience delivering online courses or keeping large auditoriums of students actively listening, the content will shine. Using our platform’s tools designed to enable people to raise their hands, give answers and have sidebars with other attendees, one could almost forget that the session wasn’t happening in person. In this sense, the medium isn’t the technology, but rather the human we are hearing and seeing. We knew it worked when we felt the presence of others there with us in the room, and the strange reality of suddenly being alone again only at the conclusion of the event.

4.  What are the pros? What are the cons?

The biggest downfall of a virtual event is the loss of connection. No matter how much the content and presenters pull us in, we’re not going to be able to see our peers over a beverage or meal – the value of in-person human connection can’t be underestimated. Also, paying attention for a full day while immersed in the world of distraction that is our homes made us have to shorten our event days by several hours. “Zoom fatigue” is a very new and real condition we never knew so intimately before.

Yet, there are significant pros to an all-virtual event as well. Most significantly, more people can participate virtually than those who would have been able to in person. We spoke with many attendees in April who said they would not have been there if it went as planned but were able to join once they learned of the shift to virtual. We also saw a trend of entire teams watching together in branches or from their homes. Typically, one or two from a functional area will get to attend in person to report back key takeaways. Our virtual sessions were recorded and available for re-watching and sharing from our event app so anyone could watch.

5.  How can we keep it fresh and fun?

Competing for calendar time is an obstacle that has only increased. With distance no longer a limitation in the virtual realm, we’re excited to talk with friends and family across the country. But with a full day of virtual meetings, what once was novel and fun turns exhausting. There is also a new set of social norms when it comes to virtual fun events like happy hours. We learned we had to put extra care into our roles as facilitators to help set expectations and create a more comfortable learning environment for attendees.

6.  What will the future of events be?

Perhaps a silver lining in all of this, is the opportunity to reinvent the wheel. The way it was for meetings and events will never be again. While we take a moment to mourn that loss, we are excited at the prospect of innovating and inventing a new type of experience that better fits the future of our working worlds. Maybe instead of trying to balance work and life, we’ll create a co-existence of work and life and build activities that can happen in both.

In-person gatherings will come back, but it’s clear the opportunity to engage virtually is a model worth continuing.

Holly Fearing is Marketing & Communications Director for Filene Research Institute in Madison, Wis.

Beth Schnabel is Events Manager for Filene Research Institute in Madison, Wis.