Behind the Scenes at GAC: Lessons Credit Unions Can Use

Four locations across three time zones and dozens of people behind computer monitors and cameras: That was the key to executing this year’s firstever completely virtual CUNA Governmental Affairs Conference. Behind-the-scenes production of the multi-day event resembled a mix of your local news and an awards show, according to CUNA Chief Products and Services Officer Todd Spiczenski.

“It felt like a combination between those two things to me. We did have a producer. I guess I would have served in that role of executive producer at the general session level. But we had so many folks involved,” he said during a post-GAC interview with CU Times, which also included CUNA Director of Conferences and Meetings Experience Willie Benjamin.

More than 30 people were involved just on the production side, according to Spiczenski. The team was spread out among a small studio inside CUNA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., a production studio at CUNA’s Madison, Wis. offices, two meeting rooms at a hotel in downtown Madison and a production space in the state of Washington at the headquarters of Social27 – the virtual conference platform used by more than 3,000 GAC attendees.

“We did that so we had a bit of redundancy. So if, for example, the Madison Concourse location went down, we had the ability to pivot to either one of those other locations to get the program up and running,” Spiczenski said.

For reference, Antonio Neves, the emcee of the show, was live from the Madison hotel and would toss it to Washington, D.C. for a live discussion during one of the general sessions, or he would throw it over to a recorded breakout session CUNA had pre-taped in the days and weeks prior to GAC.

According to Spiczenski and Benjamin, the general sessions were 50% to 60% live and the rest were pre-recorded. The breakout sessions were “what we call ‘semi-live’ so that although it is pre-recorded, the speaker is in the session while it’s live as it’s being shown, and can answer any questions in real-time. So that’s a different element than what you would typically see in a virtual space,” Benjamin said.

In February 2020, just days after the last in-person GAC in Washington, D.C., Spiczenski and Benjamin watched the world shut down as the deadly pandemic spread. Their teams then began to step into the unknown. “The unknown for us when we made the transition, not just for GAC, but to just go virtual as a whole for 2021 events, was we don’t know what this looks like,” Benjamin said, adding that his team quickly educated themselves on virtual events “and people had to come up to speed with this.” One half of the team became certified in virtual meeting management while the other half received their certifications in digital event strategy.

Spiczenski added, “So while Willie’s team was diving into it from one perspective, we also realigned several of our learning technology folks and partnered them with the team that Willie just described so we had a lot of learning technology platform experience, combined with folks that are used to taking or were getting training on how to take an in-person experience from an attendee perspective and make it come to life in a virtual setting. So it was a really good crossfunctional team that we put in place pretty early into 2020 to prep for this and a complete pivot from all of these in-person events.”

According to Benjamin and Spiczenski, during those first weeks of planning, they asked themselves, “What are the most highly-regarded elements of an in-person GAC?” It was decided that keynote speakers, networking and the vendor/exhibit hall had to be included in the virtual space, but in a trimmed-down fashion. The teams laid out their priorities, and began looking at and testing different technologies and virtual platform environments that were being used by some credit union leagues and other partners.

CUNA completed several test runs with these newly-structured teams and multiple platforms during smaller virtual events that CUNA hosted as 2020 turned into a 100% virtual world.

“That was the beauty of having some other smaller programs to experiment with. Some of those didn’t go as smoothly as the GAC did. Trial and error,” Spiczenski laughed.

According to Spiczenski, the large amount of pre-GAC work including countless hours of rehearsing paid off once the virtual GAC began for the live audience.

“It was a lot of pre-event work. We kind of had that show flow built down and nailed down pretty solidly beforehand, and then when the show actually went live it was really more about managing if something went wrong. We were locked down pretty tight going into it,” Spiczenski said.

The biggest heartburn-inducing moment for Spiczenski came on day two of GAC as Ryan Donovan, CUNA’s chief advocacy officer, was getting ready to do a live interview with the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. Fifteen minutes before the interview was to begin, Gottlieb’s internet went out at his home. They were able to get it restored in time but saw some video-lagging issues for many attendees. Of the countless things that could have gone wrong, Spiczenski and Benjamin were relieved that an internet problem was the worst thing that happened.

“It was just by the grace of a lot of prayers and hopes and dreams, and crossing of everything you have to make sure that technology sustains itself for two full days. And it really worked out for us,” Benjamin said.

He added, “I think we just had some small wins throughout both days, but just like in person, we don’t spike the ball in the end zone until the conference was concluded. I was very determined not to do too much pre-celebration until Kevin Carroll ended and the conference adjourned because you just never know with technology when something can go wrong. What we didn’t want to have happen is the last three minutes become the talk of the two days we invested in making sure the conference went as well as we wanted for the attendees.”

According to Spiczenski, CUNA intends to have an in-person GAC in 2022 as long as vaccination continues on its current path. But he expects that even then, GAC will potentially look different. “So it’s probably too soon to say specifically what that looks like. Our intent is to be there in person and bring the best of that virtual world now into this hybrid component that I think we will be delivering in ’22.”

He added, “I’ll be thinking about, and this is what I’ll be challenging our team with, we were able to pretty successfully take some of the best of in-person GAC and bring it to a virtual environment. I think our next call-out will be maintaining that quality and now kind of bringing the best of the virtual experience into some type of a hybrid future event.”

Benjamin went a step further by adding, “So I think you’ll see some virtual stuff kind of migrate into the face-to-face. Because then you’ll see some of the face-to-face stuff migrating into the virtual platform. It’s a challenge moving forward, but it’s a challenge that we go into with open arms because we’ve experienced what we have with GAC this year.”

Benjamin and Spiczenski advised credit union organizations attempting to put on a virtual event to start small, have an open mind, and experiment and play with the technology platform first before going big. For them, GAC was not their virtual experiment – it was a big show that was the culmination of months of rehearsing and testing in small environments.

“Know what you want to achieve in your conference with the understanding of, ‘Don’t try and reinvent your face-to-face event.’ You’re doing a virtual event so make sure that the platform you select and things you put in that virtual event are conducive to a beneficial virtual event – not what you would have seen in a face-to-face event necessarily,” Benjamin said.