How do you make a hybrid event actually good for people live online?

We know that often live online events are the stand-in for a physical event, and hybrid conferences, learning and meetings are the next step as a lot of us came out of the Covid lockdown and embraced technology more.

That’s great, but how many of us have had a poor experience because we were the ones remote? We missed out on the networking, the chatter, couldn’t quite see the flipchart or hear the people speaking in the room. Perhaps the speaker or host forgot about us a bit, an after-thought like in so many telephone conference calls in the past.

I don’t want virtual or hybrid delivery to get a poor reputation – yet when we don’t know what expertise, equipment and experience is needed to design and deliver them effectively, it’s logical that there will be some negative feedback.

I teamed up with Laura Overton to rise to the challenge of last year’s hybrid Speexx China Exchange conference, and we are doing the same this year on the 23rd November, free attendance live online. We wanted to create an event that really brought people together for a learning exchange, whilst also celebrating the location people were actually in.

The keys to our success include:

1. Having a vision and guiding principles to respect everyone’s contributions equally, whether they are a speaker or attendee, physically present or live online
2. Ensuring that we have the platform, equipment, staff and plan for everyone to see and hear everyone else
3. Bring people together with their reflections, questions and other outputs through third party cloud software that everyone used (Mentimeter)
4. Respecting the locations people were in and making the most of that – eg table discussions in-person, breakout rooms live online

Whether you have a big or small budget for your event you can ensure:

• You have the equipment you can afford or have available to get people to see and hear each other – that could be camera equipment and roving mics, or it could be strategically placed laptops
• You have the software you need to make the most of both audiences – you need to be able to control video and audio as much as possible, and have co-hosts to support, including someone in-person and someone live online if possible
• You have the skills and experience to do this well – if you’ve never run a virtual session, don’t dive straight into hybrid, as you’ll need excellent live online skills in order to make the most of bringing two audiences together

You can read more about the design journey Laura and I took, as well as our lessons learned and further recommendations in our free case study.