5 Alternatives to Cancelling Your Event due to CoVid-19

As humans, we yearn face-to-face contact.

Globally, events is a $1,100 billion industry. Music sounds better live; stand-up comedians are funnier on stage than on screen, and the advice of self-help gurus feels more perfectly tailored to you when that guru is delivering it right in front of you.

It's not just the entertainment world that knows this—in business, the rapport and trust that exists in-person is vital for making important decisions and having delicate conversations with our team and our customers. Both personally and professionally, there is something about the body language and nuances of expression that come from an in-person conversation that simply can't be matched in a phone call or videoconference chat. We may live in a digital, virtual age, but humans still collaborate best when we're in the same room.

Unfortunately, times have changed, and the CoVid-19 outbreak over the past few weeks means our ability to meet in the same physical space is rapidly eroding, making it harder to initiate, grow, and maintain the relationships that are so important for us to succeed. And when it comes to gatherings of a large number of people, it's anyone's guess how long it will be before we return to any sense of normalcy.

Whether you're responsible for coordinating a large conference, an offsite gathering for the company's executive team, or a panel discussion featuring invited guests, chances are your plans have been thrown into disarray. Your initial reaction might be to cancel your event. However, you may not have to! Here are five options for rethinking your event:

1. Move to a virtual event. Tools like Zoom, Skype, Facebook Live, and Google Hangouts are all free (for small numbers of attendees) and professional platforms like WebEx are inexpensive compared to a large in-person event. Plus, there are a bunch of benefits that come from running a virtual event, such as having an easy way to record the session, and making the content more accessible to attendees who may not have been able to attend. You can still engage a facilitator to manage the discussion, and engage a remote scribe to capture your content in real time for your attendees.
2. Interview your speakers, and release the audio as a series of podcasts. Did your event involve some key presenters delivering a talk? Why not interview them over Zoom or on the phone, record the conversations, and deliver them to your attendees as a series of podcasts? It's a relatively small investment to have these audio recordings professionally edited and uploaded to a secure server for your attendees to access whenever (and from wherever) they want.
3. Turn the content you were going to present into a poster. Worried that the content you were going to cover might be a little dry for your attendees to listen to? Why not present it visually in poster form, in a way that makes absorbing the content more engaging and the concepts compelling? Many of our clients find that information that is represented with the "sketch aesthetic" is more fun to look at, clearer and therefore easier to understand and digest.
4. Turn the content you were going to present into a sketch video. The benefits of creating a sketch video are similar to those of making a poster, but taken to the next level. Viewers are mesmerised when there is a hand drawing on screen, and information that is dry or difficult to understand lends itself well to being presented in this way. There is even science to suggest that when we engage both the verbal and visual channels of our brain, that the connections formed between our neurons are stronger!
5. Turn the content you were going to present into an ebook. If the content lends itself to long-form writing, then perhaps there would be value in turning it into a short ebook? Each speaker could have their own chapter, with a welcome from your company leadership team at the beginning. What an opportunity to build credibility and authority with your audience! Once upon a time, creating a professional ebook was a serious undertaking, but the tools available these days, including producing PDF, ePub, and Kindle versions, make this task relatively straightforward.

Of course, none of these options are mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible to turn around your cancelled in-person event completely—imagine if the outcome of cancelling your event was instead to produce an online webinar for attendees, with a series of videos, posters, an ebook, and a handful of podcasts to deliver to them after the fact? It will require some courage, some creativity, and bit of effort—but that's the way to find your silver lining.

If you'd like to hear more about how we can help with your communications or virtual events, shoot us an email or call us on 1300 SKETCH.