How to Create and Run Virtual Conferences | A Retrospective on Catalyzing the Future

Social distancing during the pandemic has placed a great deal of stress on conference organizers, forcing them either to cancel their event or to move it into a virtual venue.

This disruption forces individuals and organizations to rethink the way that conferences work. Going with a virtual conference may seem like a great effort but it's considerably better than skipping a 2020 conference and hoping that 2021 will be better.

What if it isn't?

Will you skip 2021 as well and risk not engaging with the groups who usually attend your conference? Will you risk not reaching customers and partners to engage them with your messages?

Challenges of Switching to Virtual Conferences

Virtual conferences can work. There are certainly some challenges to switching to virtual. Now that we are eight months into the pandemic crisis, I'm hearing from many colleagues and friends that they are experiencing Zoom fatigue.

Any virtual conference you experience has got to offer something that takes this transition to digital first experiences into account. And despite the existence of some interesting new virtual conference platforms, there's a palpable digital divide between many professionals who are struggling to increase their digital literacy and the lexicon of user experience that many designers assume exists. Your virtual conference needs to be accessible, lowering the friction to participate as much as possible.

One of the implied benefits of an in-person conference is that they represent a break from the daily grind. Conferences provide a liminal space outside of our day-to-day experiences where we can encounter new ideas, meet new people who challenge our thinking, and find inspiration. But when you're running a virtual conference, all of your attendees are working from home or even from their office.

How do you create a sense of place? A feel for the experience?

This is a question I haven't seen much conversation about and is probably an article all it's own.

I don't have a good answer for it either. However, I suspect that it has something to do with purposefully cultivating a sense of mindfulness among participants at the outset. If you cannot affect participants as powerfully as you can with travel, a physical venue, and in-person meetings, then you must find some other way to impress upon your virtual participants that they are entering into something special.

That may mean an invitation to meditate upon a topic for a few moments, encouraging them to write down their thoughts or personal goals for the event, or just setting the tone by showing a video or talking about an infographic. Helping participants enter into the spirit of an event can make a great deal of difference in how they engage for the entire conference.

There are more practical considerations as well. For example, how you you encourage and enable the same kinds of serendipitous interactions and networking opportunities that organically happen at live events? Meeting random interesting people needs to be something that virtual conferences get better at.

Finally, how do you charge for virtual events? I've noticed that so many of the conferences this year opted to charge nothing for participation. The upside of this move is that it makes your conference much more accessible and can win you new participants you haven't seen before. The downside is that you're implying that a virtual conference isn't quite as valuable as an in-person conference. Is it?

The Benefits of Switching to a Virtual Conference

Beyond the challenges, think for a moment about the benefits of switching to a virtual conference.

Let's start with less overhead. Your biggest expenses from putting on a big, in-person event are going to be your venue, staff, refreshments, and food costs. All of them are gone. In their place, you'll be taking on far fewer expenses, the cost of subscribing to a few platforms and engaging in some social media marketing that, let's face it, you were going to do anyway.

The fact that your participants won't have to travel any farther than their home office is awesome. You're more likely to get participants to join in than ever before.

Capturing data will be much easier, too. Your platform or Google Analytics or Facebook will tell you exactly how many people are watching and how long they watched. You'll be able to track every comment and you'll likely have every session recorded.

On the topic of recorded sessions, the playback value is immense. You can either open it up for free review or you could selectively (or entirely) place the sessions behind a paywall immediately or somewhat later (say 48 hours after the event).

Lessons Learned from Catalyzing the Future

On September 30, 2020, I was part of a volunteer team that decided to run a free, global virtual conference titled Catalyzing the Future. You can watch the live stream playbacks right on the website. You can also find them by visiting our social outposts on Facebook or YouTube.

We got started in earnest with planning this conference about six weeks in advance. At the outset, I came onboard to provide the digital marketing and communications for the event, but ended up taking on more of a producer role. We had a core team of fewer than six people and an extended team that built us out to ten or twelve at most. We definitely could have used more to accomplish all we had set out to do.

What went well? The event was a success overall. We made the decision a couple of weeks in to switch from delivering the entire conference via Zoom with breakout sessions to making it a live streamed event that is open to all. We still asked individuals to register for the mailing list so that we could remind attendees of the upcoming event.

As a lead-up to the event, we conducted a series of interviews with panelists, keynotes, and other thought leaders who could not attend the main event. We called them Catalyzing Conversations and they were an incredibly successful part of the marketing leading up to the event itself because they excited and created organic conversations on LinkedIn in particular as they were posted.

I also started a series of event diary vblogs with the very best of intentions. That didn't really work out as I got busier. ˉ\_(ツ)_/ˉ

We did not use paid ads at all for the event, which was fine, although I think we might have seen even more participants if we had.

As it stood, we had over 1,000 viewers during the live streamed event and made comments from both YouTube and Facebook.

Our technology approach of using Streamyard to live stream to both YouTube and Facebook simultaneously was very successful in my estimation. There were not technology hitches here even though we streamed three simultaneous broadcasts, which was an incredibly complex undertaking. We didn't have any delays. That was amazing.

What could have gone better? Despite the great number of social media conversations that resulted from the Catalyzing Conversations and the event itself (before, during and after), I would have liked to see more volunteers making an organized social media push in advance of the event and in more places than just LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn platform was key, but I felt like we didn't get to engage well on Twitter and didn't grow enough of a Facebook following. We didn't engage at all on Instagram or Reddit, both of which I tend to view as lost opportunities due to a lack of time and capacity.

In advance of the event, several of the volunteers reached out to event participants to introduce ourselves and the idea behind the event. This was super important and I would not have changed that. It was an opportunity to align with them about the purpose of the event, to tell them how much we appreciated their participation, how we would work to promote their posts and thought leadership, and that we'd appreciate their efforts to share posts from others.

What we didn't get to do, however, was something I had promised those I talked to, which was an intention to send out a list of links to thought leadership pieces and posts by other participants so that we could all cross-promote each other.

However, by taking on more of a producer role myself, this just didn't happen and the promotion of the event ended up as previous events in the series turned out to be, which was more of an organic, ad hoc method of sharing, liking and commenting on posts from other participants. This was fine, but it didn't represent a great stride forward which I had envisioned.

Finally, it was a great disappointment that LinkedIn Live was not available to us as a streaming platform. The 40+ experts we convened for the Catalyzing Conversations and the event itself were perfectly aligned for a LinkedIn Live broadcast.

Sadly, LinkedIn seems to be stuck in a looooong beta test and is only accepting proven LinkedIn superstars, I guess. There wasn't anything to be done about it, although I will remark that LinkedIn is totally missing the boat by dragging their feet with this highly useful functionality when they could be launching to great success during the pandemic.

What would you do differently? I can think of a few things that I would do differently as we move forward into more virtual conferences.

Get started earlier. Although we had a ramp of about six weeks to plan and launch the event, it was needlessly stressful, especially when we decided to make the switch to live streaming and our roles shifted somewhat as a team.

Among the early content marketing efforts I'd like to land on better next time is having a good "pillar" post about the event. My friend and the founder of the event Si Alhir pretty much did this in From Transcending the Crisis to Catalyzing the Future but I feel like it might have been shared more widely. I also wonder if we would have had more success putting the pillar post on our website with a teaser blog on LinkedIn.

Have producer roles identified ahead of time. We spent a few cycles more than we should have just trying to identify people who could be producers (think stage managers) who could run the live streams and make sure that the speaker transitions were smooth. We didn't have a lot of control over this and it definitely worked out, but it was a distraction from building excitement about the event. Energy could have been spent elsewhere.

We were totally missing sponsors. Although we had supporting companies, mine included, we didn't really have paid sponsors or exhibitors who could have lended their marketing muscle to the event and provided some modest monetary resources to things like a social advertising campaign and some lightweight software subscriptions.

One of the things it would have been good to do well in advance of the event would be to identify a group of potential sponsor companies that would benefit from sharing messages with our audience and put together an ask for some lightweight support. It's a good buy with a strong potential return on investment.

Architect the experience for serendipitous networking. I'd like to see more ways for participants to interact with panels and each other. This time, the only way to do that was through comments coming through to us via YouTube or Facebook. Next time, I'd really like to try using a virtual networking platform such as TEOOH or even a dedicated virtual conference platform. You can easily locate a blog roundup about the choices with a cursory Google search.

Next time... virtual swag! With the fast planning and execution that happened for this event, one of the things we missed out on completely was to offer virtual "swag" for event participants. I have seen this offered with other events but have been mostly unimpressed with what was offered. However, with the astoundingly insightful group of contributors we had at the event, I feel certain we could have offered free book chapters, original articles, helpful how-to guides and much more that would have been extremely valuable to event goers and provided great visibility and value to our contributors.

Conclusion

My jury is still out about the micro-workshops we are planning as a follow-up to the event. I believe that they are a good idea and a way to make more events like this sustainable.

The type of event we ran with Catalyzing the Future was never really intended as a money maker but instead was a way to convene important conversations about planning for a better future beyond the current crises we face and to give visibility to some of the more innovative thinkers in our time.

But I do believe that virtual conferences can indeed be a successful money-maker if that's your goal.

So don't cancel your live events. Plan a move to virtual. They can and will work.

If you are contemplating whether to run a virtual event, I invite you to reach out and talk to me about it. Also, I'd love to hear more about what your experiences have been. Please tell me about them in the comments section below.

#CatalyzingTheFuture #VirtualEvents #VirtualConference #EventPlanning #EventManagement