How to virtualize a conference for over 150 people in a week.

Today, I want to share my experience with you on how we virtualized a conference in Berlin for over 150 people, including an award ceremony. The conference is the FTAlive 2020, the 5th annual conference of the Femtec.Alumnae e.V. (FTA) [1], the award is the FTAfelicitas [2] which took place on March 20th and 21st. We started planning this event 6 months ago. The FTAlive organization team was set-up with 4 members in the core-team and 19 more members divided into 4 teams. Within our core team, each of us took over full responsibility for one or two topics. We covered PR, partnering&finance, locations&guest management and program. Each of us relied on one of the 4 teams for their topic. I took responsibility for the (conference) program with a team of 8 including me. Following self-organization rules, each of us had full decision-making authority within their team and our weekly core-team calls were mainly targeting alignment between the four of us and supporting each other for overarching topics. E.g. as the program team we had to closely align with the partnering team, as they were acquiring our partners whose contribution then had to be incorporated into the program. With the Program team we also met weekly shaping the program and aligning on progress.

Thursday night – point of no return (8 days until the conference)

It starts with taking the decision:

Already for a couple of weeks we were discussing Corona in our team. We were organizing extra sanitary precautions with our locations and caterers, following closely the Robert Koch Institute and governmental recommendations. Hoping – as so many in Germany – that the virus would not spread as badly in Germany and meeting with less than 1000 people would still be possible. You all know history, and finally one week before the conference we had to pull the ripcord. In an ad-hoc Thursday night meeting between our non-profit association board and the conference organizational team (orga team) we discussed moving the conference out a couple of months. Given the unknown future course we decided that the best and only option was virtualization. Of course, cancelling was another option, but that would have left the network without a networking option for another year at least and if you don’t network, what kind of network are you?

We directly decided as well to meet again Friday night to make a plan for realization. (all of us are working full-time, so day-time meetings are not possible).

In the meeting Friday night, we brainstormed needed actions, agreed on the most important next steps and division of work packages. For us (the program team) it meant that we had to move the program into the virtual world. The program consisted of 46 sessions (slots) that were prepared and to be presented by an FTA member (“internal”), a partner or a supporting individual connected to the FTA (“external”). Each of the program team members took responsibility for a couple of slots as the so-called “Patin” (“godmother”). This role included aligning with the speaker on content and ensuring that they would prepare a teaser for the program, a short bio and a picture.

Virtualizing the program now included reaching out to all the speakers, making sure that they are capable and feel comfortable with the virtual tool we were going to use. We got support from our Board member for communications as she is a communication tools expert.

 Choosing the virtual platform:

There are numerous tools out there one can use for virtual collaboration. Since many years, the FTA uses the Office 365 non-profit licenses as productivity tool and this year for the first time we also used Teams for virtual collaboration during the conference planning phase. Hence, the orga team was already quite familiar with the tool and would therefore be able to assist the participants of the conference. As time for decisions was short, we decided to use it for the conference collaboration as well. We still had a headache with adding externals (non-FTA members without the respective e-mail address) to the SharePoint. Sunday afternoon we finally found the right box to click (in those tools it is mostly about choosing the right settings).

Saturday morning the virtualization journey began (6 days until the conference):

Step 1: Setting up the virtual venue.

The first step in virtualizing the conference was a three-hour meeting Saturday morning with three people setting up all 50 must-have channels in Teams. One for each slot, an Auditorium for everything that was originally supposed to happen on the main stage (Welcome, Keynote, etc.) and a channel in which the slot masters could align during the conference. Slot masters is the name we gave to those people of the orga team, who should later support the speakers during the virtual sessions in starting the video conference and observing the chat during the presentation or workshop. We came up with this role as we anticipated that not everybody of the speakers would be a digital native and it turned out that especially our external speakers were very happy about having a slot master (agile developers might realize that we lend the name from the “scrum master”, who supports an agile project team). Some channels we created had to be private channels, as some slots were available for a limited number of registered participants only. Those channels had to be filled with the respective registered participants. We also created “sub-channels” for workshops that wanted to break up for group-work. We used the same naming or short versions of the titles with preceding time indicators (Fr 10.45 A, Sa 11.15 C, etc.) to enhance traceability of slots in the long list. It turned out that the whole setup is quite laborious but not difficult and with a little chatting at the side we even had some fun doing it.

 Step 2: Making sure everybody is on-board.

While some of the speakers were already contacted by the “Patin” on Friday and answered super-fast, not everybody of our program team was available on Friday night or Saturday morning – so not even aware of the latest change of plans. We sent an email to all the “Speakers” asking them to please support our initiative and re-assure, if possible, to virtualize their slots.

The feedback unfortunately included also doubts and requests to re-consider our decision and instead of virtualizing the conference moving it to summer. But the decision was made and there was no turning back now, so we wrote quite a long email, bringing transparency on the reasons for our decision. This helped and, in the end, – also after having some calls with some of the speakers on HOW to best virtualize and also maybe adapt the content - everybody except one was finding a way to virtualize their slot and to support. We lost another speaker due to the turmoil of corona. But last-minute cancelling can happen to you also in non-virtual conferences and we had some flexibility built into the program, so those two were easy to handle.

Step 3: Ensuring the networking aspect

One of the main reasons the FTAlive was initiated 5 years ago in the first place, was the desire to meet in person (hence the name FTAlive). We all know each other from our common time during the “Femtec Career-Building Program” (a program supporting young women in STEM [3]) or collaboration in one of our FTA working groups. Over years many of us have become friends sharing the STEM background, same values and similar career aspirations. We are spread over Germany and beyond and therefore seldomly see each other. Thus, keeping networking high was essential to make the virtual version a success.

Most networking on conferences happens in the breaks between slots.

We created some additional channels for dedicated topics, to foster networking for specific interest groups. For example, for the “Newbies”, our new FTA members, for whom we originally had planned a “newbie stand” at the conference. Also, for the different cohorts of the Femtec Career-Building Program.

In our association we have younger females that are just at the beginning of their careers and we have more experienced females with 5 – 15 years of work and leadership history. It is especially worthwhile to match those and as each of us tends to meet up during the break with those familiar to them, this commingling can benefit from some push. Therefore, we turned the planned one-hour networking slot (originally with lots of face-to-face interaction) into a big virtual networking roulette. With the help of an Excel table we performed some random magic and matched pairs 5 times for 8 minutes to discuss 5 questions, which guided the pairs to get to know each other and to give each other career advice. This slot later turned out to be one of the most appreciated once of the whole conference.

Weekend is over – the journey continues (4 days until the conference)

Step 4: Utilizing all ideas

On Monday was the next Program team meeting. In this meeting I shared the latest changes with the whole team. One of the team members had already started to write a “how-to” for the participants. We wanted to inform the participants ahead of the conference start about the new virtual environment, how to orient oneself and the slot master role. Fastly, the other team members came up with some additional points and behavioral recommendations during and outside the sessions. Those were easily incorporated into our digital program [4].

Normally, we collect feedback to our sessions at the end. One team member proposed to generate a “Forms” (basically a frontend user interface for an Excel file), to ensure we keep this good practice. As we are self-organized, she not only proposed but also generated it during the next day.

One important element of all workshops is the flip chart and a whiteboard. There are many whiteboard tools out there. We looked at those we know from our different work environments. Unfortunately, we could not find any during our meeting (we gave us 5 minutes for that search), that is available without generating an account. However, we did not want to overload the participants with even more tools and account-generation effort. Hence, we decided that generating a PowerPoint presentation in the Teams channel and then using that as whiteboard (it is possible to edit the ppt simultaneously) would be the right solution for our conference.

Every conference’s highlight is the group picture. How to make a group picture if you are not at the same place? Unfortunately, Teams does not have the possibility to share the videos of the participants all on one screen (at least not to our knowledge). Hence, we agreed to set up a channel “Foto in Rot” (Picture in Red) were every participant would be asked to upload a picture dressed in red or with a red accessory during the dedicated slot. This is an FTA tradition as we want to bring attention to the equal-pay day, which unfortunately is still around the time frame of our yearly conference in March and not on the 31st of December in the old year. All pictures loaded into one channel are conveniently gathered in the linked SharePoint folder with the same name of that channel. From there, we planned to create a collage out of these pictures.

Finally, we decided that we needed to write another email to all participants with the latest info. As the PR team was sure that we would not be able to capture everything at once, they just send a few words with a link to our homepage, to be able to update the information as needed within the next days. From experience, most people start to prepare for such an event on the way to the event, so we figured, that even late changes would still reach the participants in time – without the need to send email after email.

Testing the prototype (Two conference days)

 Step 5: Implementation

During the conference the slot master role turned out to be extremely helpful. In our dedicated slot master Teams channel, it was possible to ask for short-term support, share quick feedback of what works and what does not. If you are participating in a slot, even if you are a slot master, due to the interesting content it is very easy to lose track of time. Therefore, we used the channel to send a message to all slot masters 5 Minutes before the end of each slot, so they would not forget to end the session and share the feedback Forms, in order to be able to attend the next slot in time. It felt a little bit like we were all connected with walkie-talkies behind the scenes. At Friday night, directly after the conference we met for 15 minutes to do a short re-cap of what went well and what we can improve. Interestingly, everything went more smoothly than we had hoped, so the next day could come.

At Friday night 8 o’clock our FTAfelicitas award also found its way into the virtual world. Normally, this would have been a great evening event, with special guests, a gala dinner and of course the nominees and winners of the FTAfelicitas award. To keep the glamour, we followed the FTAfelicitas orga team advice and still dressed up nicely in front of our computers with a glass of sparkling wine and some snacks. We met again in the Auditorium and were able to follow great laudations and moving acceptance speeches which were really more inspirational speeches philosophizing on our FTA 2020 motto: STANDup! SPEAKup! STEPup!.

Saturday, our networking roulette went live. It turned out to be a little stressful (answering 5 questions in 8 minutes, two persons each), but very entertaining and inspiring, and finally praised by many as one of the best slots. Also, the rest of the conference went smoothly, even those virtual workshops, in which we had to split up in sub-teams and re-convene did turn out to be effective. 

Evaluating the experience (One day after the conference)

 Success Factors:

The main success factor for this agile transformation from analog to digital was of course the orga team itself. Once the decision was taken everybody was supportive. Instead of only asking “what shall I do?” the answer was “I additionally will implement this”! This really helped in improving the virtualization beyond what seemed possible on Friday when we only discussed some ideas and the main mechanics in the core-team together with the board. While on Saturday, we laid the foundation for virtualization, on Monday night (the time when the rest of the program team heard about the virtualization) keeping the networking aspects alive and making it an easy experience for everybody involved was the focus. It also helped, that the FTA board not only supported the decision to virtualize the conference (which presented a high financial risk to the association), but more importantly joint the team with hands-on attitude.

What I have not covered in my report, is all the work that was done in the other teams. The PR team kept the communication alive on all channels and made sure that info e-mails were prepared properly. The Partnering team clarified with the partners that they would support us even if they would not get the “original package” but a virtual version of it. Luckily, they did not let us down, but rather were working together with us to transfer their input into the best virtual experience possible. The Location&Guest mangement team had to ensure that everybody with a valid ticket would be able to enter the virtual platform. The key to success again was here that every team was able to concentrate on their mission. As everybody was fully empowered for their part, there was no need for the Program team to worry about any of those things so we could concentrate 100% on the program. The same thing of course is true the other way around.

 During the preparation for the conference we also made some good decisions, whose real strengths only became obvious in the last week. The all-digital conference program on our webpage. Very early in the planning phase we had to decide how to put the conference program together. Last year we compiled - quite classically - a word-document that was then converted into PDF and sent via e-mail to the conference attendees and also uploaded to our homepage. This document had almost 80 pages as it contained not only information on all plus 40 slots including pictures and short bios of the speakers, but also general information about the venue, welcoming etc. We also printed it out a couple of times to make it available at the conference. We still remembered the hassle we had last year ensuring all inputs to the document were available on time and also how difficult it became to ensure uniform editing of the document while it was increasing in size when adding all the pictures. Last year we were about 5 women working simultaneously on the file via our SharePoint system. In the end, our team lead had to download it to her computer and brush it up in an extra shift as it was just not manageable anymore. This, the fact that we live in a digital world where (almost) everybody owns a smartphone and the fact that printing out paper should be avoided whenever possible to safe resources, led to the decision to go all-digital this time.

We included a calendar plug-in to our WordPress based homepage that turned out to be very handy. Firstly, everybody from the team was now able to enter data without worrying about the format (that was handled by the tool). Secondly, we were able to release a “minimal viable program” version 4 weeks prior to the conference start. We just left some of the slot-descriptions open – which pleased our members as they were quite curious of course.

And now the benefit: Due to the virtualization and corona crisis two of the 46 slots as mentioned were cancelled. This had to be incorporated by moving around also some of the others. But this now was super easy, as we only had to change two clicks in the WordPress backend. No timely re-shuffling of pages in word and sending out and re-printing of the program.

Final thoughts:

Thinking back 10 days from now it is still hard to believe that we were able to manage a successful all-virtual conference with over 150 participants. Of course, we all hope that FTAlive 2021 will be an analog experience again. But until then we all learned that networking is also possible in a virtual environment, we don’t need to be afraid of crushing internet connection (we were stable the whole time) and that we are all much more capable with virtual tools than we might think.

Agile behavior and openness to new ways of collaboration can bring a team and a whole community a long way.

Thanks to the whole Orga Team of the FTAlive 2020 and the Board of the FTA that shares this experience with me.

[1] https://www.femtec-alumnae.org/aktiv/ftalive-konferenz-2020/

[2] https://www.femtec-alumnae.org/aktiv/felicitas-preis-2020/

[3] https://www.femtec.org/programme/career-building-programm/

[4] https://www.femtec-alumnae.org/sessions/welcome-fta-up/

Remark:

(Neither I nor the FTA get payed by Microsoft and I don’t want to intentionally advertise the Office suite here. We made good experience with the suite as described in the article, still, I am sure there are many tools out there, which have comparable functionality.)