How many people ultimately show up to a virtual event after accepting an invite?

The Ortus Club has been organising roundtable discussions and knowledge-sharing events for the c-level, predominantly in the form of dinners and lunches, for about five years. In the past few months, we were able to add virtual events into our portfolio which provided us with the opportunity to learn and notice differences and similarities between physical and virtual events.

One aspect we were curious about was whether the attendance rate of virtual events differed between countries and regions as the two questions we get asked the most by our clients (and that we always ask ourselves before starting to send out invites) are: 

• How many invites do we need to send out in order to get the desired number of participants to attend an event? and 
• How many people will actually show up after they’ve accepted the invites? 

The answer is never straightforward as a variety of factors can affect whether an event is well attended or not. Is the topic interesting enough? Has it been discussed too many times? How many other events are being hosted on that day? Is the program interesting? Is the event targeted at a specific enough audience?

Since the beginning of March 2020, we were able to host more than 60 virtual events across APAC (Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand), North America (New York City, Seattle, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta) and EMEA (UK, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Dubai). Overall, we observed an average attendance rate of 85%. But where were the most no-shows?

Countries listed by highest to lowest attendance rates (after acceptance):

1. Hong Kong (90%)

2. Singapore (76%)

3. United Kingdom (75%)

...

14. Thailand (71%)

15. Malaysia (70%)

16. North America (55%)

We also observed that large-scale events had a slightly lower attendance rate which may be due to the inferior level of personalisation in the messaging. Since the beginning of the year, our virtual masterclasses and panel discussion, often targeted at between 30 to 100 people, had an average attendance rate of 68% while our more intimate virtual roundtables dedicated to 10-15 participants had a 76% attendance rate.

The transition of our physical events into virtual has given us the opportunity to continue hosting knowledge-sharing events despite global lockdowns but we are looking forward to hosting virtual events in the new normal too. We will continue improving our attendance rates and look forward to sharing findings in the future.

If you’re interested in hosting a knowledge-sharing discussions with The Ortus Club, feel free to contact us at [email protected]