13 Days to #Empower2021, Daily Journal

We opened the door to #Empower2021 yesterday. Opening the door two weeks prior to the live event is something new we're trying this year. The assumption is that it provides the audience with more opportunities to enjoy the conference and thus, delivers a higher value. It's been two days and about 22% of the registrants have visited our virtual conference so far!

This is post #11 of the 23-day daily journal to document our virtual event planning journey with a sincere hope that those who are planning their own virtual event can benefit from our experience and learnings. Each post has focused on a decision we have made throughout our journey. Today's post is on what we decided to include as part of our conference. When we were making the decisions, our priority was the audience experience.

Post #11. What to include as part of the virtual conference experience

Agenda: #Empower2021 has four different streams - leadership, technology, fundraising, and marketing. When our audience visits the agenda page, they can sort breakout sessions by the stream so that they can easily see most relevant sessions. When they see a session that interests them, they can go to the session’s page and see the session and speaker information. 

Keynotes: we have prepared three keynote sessions. When hovered over, the name of the three keynote speakers pops up and each has a link to their page where the session and speaker information is available.

Breakouts: our audience will see four drop down selections (leadership, technology, fundraising, and marketing) when hover over it.

Take 10: we borrowed this idea from one of Microsoft’s virtual conferences we attended in 2020. Instead of having sessions back to back all day long, we will have a 10-minute break each hour. "Take 10" section has fun content we put together to make the 10-minute breaks engaging and fun. Our audience can enjoy the content, visit our partners’ virtual booth, or take a break from the screen. 

Exhibitors: this is where our audience can find our partners' virtual booths that are filled with on-demand resources.

Game of Good: gamification is a great way to engage audience. We will pick three winners and they will receive two gifts. One for them. One for their organization.

FAQ: we have an instruction video that explains how to navigate through the conference platform. Based on our experience from our past event, having FAQ in the main navigation will make it easier for our audience to notice and access it.

Survey: survey helps us understand what resonated with our audience and what didn't work the way we were expecting.

Other items that are not part of the main navigation but are important to the audience experience:

• Live chat: we have live chat enabled to give our audience an opportunity to reach out to us real time when they have any questions or challenges. The live chat went live as the conference platform went live yesterday. We already got some questions from those who visited our conference yesterday and today.
• "Add to calendar": given that we have four different streams, we have four different sessions happening concurrently. To help our audience build their own agenda for the day, we added "add to calendar" functionality.

What is #Empower2021?

#Empower2021 is our annual virtual conference designed specifically for nonprofits and charities. We started this annual conference last year to offer premium content and event experience at no cost, virtually (to remove financial and geographical barriers). 4,000 people registered for #Empower2020. We're pouring our heart and soul into making our upcoming event even more worthwhile to attend.

Why we do this? Because we truly believe in giving back. We do our part to empower those heroes working for our communities so that they can scale their mission further. Below is the event detail.

• For: leadership, IT, fundraising & marketing at a nonprofit or charity
• Cost: free
• When: 9AM-6PM EST on January 27, 2021