The Making of a Virtual Conference: Lessons Learned

In April, 2020, we had to make a huge pivot and move from a live, physical conference to a virtual one. Many associations and companies were in the same situation. The COVID pandemic was being the ultimate disrupter and we were the guinea pigs. 

As President of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Ontario I had to make a quick decision, forget about the down payment we had already made for a conference hall and go virtual, - nothing ventured, nothing gained. We re-built our Conference Committee Team and jumped in. We setup a Speaker Selection Team, a Communications Team, a Marketing Team, and a Sponsorship Team.

We actually did not pick a conference name or date until we had several key speakers lined up and solid layout of the topics we wanted to include in our search for more speakers and panel sessions. 

The Catalyst 2020 Management Consulting Conference was born and was to be delivered over three days, October 27, 28 and 29. Initially, we had picked these dates as there appeared to be an opening in Toronto regarding conference hall availability and no conflicts with other events that we did not want to run up against. Of course, once we had made the announcement other virtual events with potential interest to our members emerged around the same time, but the stick was in the sand and we had to forge on.  These other events actually reinforced our resolve that we had made the right decision.

As a result of the format shift, we successfully attracted over 240 management consultants, CMCs, members, non-members, speakers, panelists, students and sponsors.

Achieving the Goal

You do not pull off a three-day conference with 12 sessions, 9 speaker sessions, 3 panel discussions involving 12 additional speakers, live musical interludes and a networking night without having a dedicated team of planners and organizers. The conference was produced by our CMC-Ontario Institute in partnership with various Provincial Institutes and our National Office. Our core team comprised of 1 staff member and 4 volunteers, one from the GTA Council and 3 from the Ontario Council. Three staff members from the National Office also helped out in the last two months prior to the conference with the marketing, registration and operational logistics. 

Our goal of this conference was to deliver value to members and grow our base of members, renewals and students in spite of the disruptive obstacles resulting from the COVID-19 situation. We succeeded on all fronts!  

Because of the tireless efforts of our creative conference committee, we delivered a solid program across a broad range of topics for consultants including Big Data, How-to - Tips and Techniques, Cybersecurity, Sustainability and Social Responsibility, Social Media Marketing – Personal Branding, Future Trends, Organizational Change, Cloud Transformation, Design Sprints, Innovation, and Artificial Intelligence. The speakers were world-class including top executives from HP, IBM, Microsoft, among others, as well as a few of our Certified Management Consultant members with specific domain expertise with books and reputations I was not even aware of at the time.

Read more about the best practice takeaways from the speaker sessions published on the CMC-Canada website at: https://www.cmc-canada.ca/consult/catalyst-2020-what-you-missed

To enhance the experience and get as close as possible to a live event, we managed to incorporate a Networking Social Event that was a lot of fun and stimulated much member engagement and interactive dialogue; as well we successfully experimented with musical artist interludes – which proved to be a highlight of the show. Success was enhanced by our Sponsors who contributed to both the speaker program, musical interludes, networking event and enabled participant engagement via the online WHOVA platform. 

From the feedback survey it is clear we hit a home run. Results indicated 49.5% were Very Satisfied and 42.5% were Extremely Satisfied. 

Production Tools

For this event, we piloted the integration of several new tools and approaches to making this a successful virtual conference. Tools included; Zoom for the presentation and network dialogue engagement; Our new website infrastructure for promotion and links to registration; Eventbrite for the registration process, and; the Whova App plastform. 

Use of the Whova App was very new and a bit of a risk not to mention an item that was not in our budget. The plan was to use it to support pre-event, during event and post-event marketing and promotion, as well as during event participant engagement, and mobile accessibility. It was also a strong talking point for sponsor engagement and visibility.  As many consultants are aware, the integration points and use of 3rd party Apps added a level of complexity (read cost…) that could impact a seamless user experience in a good or very bad way. 

Integrating the Whova App in conjunction with Zoom had its challenges. Some found it confusing and some found it easy to use, those folks were split at 30% each. It turns out that 36% found the Whova App good for networking, which was the main reason we incorporated it into the plans for the conference. It added an extra aspect to the logistics, but having the Technical Open House for participants the day before helped rectify some of the Whova App difficulties. Although we were skeptical of the value-add vs. additional complexities of using Whova at first, we pushed for a Plan-B to make sure all attendees could get in directly via a Zoom link. In the end we believe it added another element of excitement, mobility as well as another point of access and interaction -- so we will give it a 7 out of 10. 

When Whova gets the Zoom polls properly integrated into the next version it will be an improvement. Our work-around on day two was to re-enter all the polls in the Whova chat for people to see and respond to. This made a huge difference in responses and overall chat activity. (Yes, we huddled after day 1 assessed the first day, made some changes and forged on).

A key feature of the Whova solution was the ability for attendees to go back and re-play the various recorded sessions and view the presentation materials. We made these available to all registrants for a six month period after the conference and have put one of them out on YouTube for public consumption. Here is the link to the Cloud Transformation panel session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrDQs7HV4Q

Another production hurdle was the need to have one session end, while preparing for the next one right after as well as hosting a musical interlude. To make this happen without stop-and-go interruptions, we used alternating Zoom accounts so we could stagger the musical interludes. One account was the Zoom Webinar account (which also allows for “panel” formats) and the other was the Zoom Meeting account (which is better for chats & breakout networking). To handle our growing registration volumes (a good thing), we upped our respective capacity to 500 and 300 attendees early on. Even with these features, Zoom alone might have been boring, or the same old same old, so the Whova App despite the challenges definitely added a flair of anticipation and intrigue.

Conference Topics

The choice of topics and speakers was an effort based on member surveys, as well as on topics raised by the initial Conference Committee. These were then integrated into topics selected by the team of five to stage topics that were across various disciplines and would be of interest to independent consultants, as well as to those in larger consulting firms and/or working with larger enterprise type clients. So, if we did not please everyone with every session, well that was bound to happen. We were pretty sure no matter a consultant’s background or area of expertise, every session would have some nuggets of useful knowledge, and they did. Check out some key points at the following link.

In general, we had great support from our sponsors and our partner community. Lead-time and the ability for prospective sponsors to rally their internal support to fund sponsorship was a challenge. In the future I would recommend engaging with a broader range of sponsors earlier on in the process and also expanding the various sectors affiliated with our target market of conference attendees. An annual event would make it easier to line-up sponsors and present a larger value-add opportunity as well as provide a larger lead time. But, sometimes an excuse is just an excuse. When that happens, take it in stride and move on, as we did.

Promotion

There comes a point with the planning and executing of a large event of this nature when the KISS, Keep It Simple, rule had to be applied. Weekly meetings with the Conference Committee and weekly meetings with the Joint National Office team were key to keep the wheels moving forward. Bringing in a social media marketing person to work Facebook and utilizing our own staff and internal resources to work LinkedIn were also major new areas of outreach. It takes time to build a following and leverage these channels – this is something we and many others need to get much better at. 

We were successful in incorporating speaker video’s and other marketing messaging, but our marketing and use of social media was still not as impactful as it could be. We knew that the dollars one can spend on social media can be incredible – and needs to be very tightly focused to ensure the desired result. Hence, we kept a tight control of this. We had a small budget and for the most part stuck to it. 

Reaching out to non-members is an ongoing issue for all associations looking to grow and for all companies looking for new business. The current COIVID pandemic environment and the changing demographics on how humans interact have made it significantly more difficult and complex for marketing initiatives.

Effective, targeted and integrated marketing both at the personal, local, provincial and national level remains a problem, challenge and opportunity for many of us going forward. From the positive feedback and the two sessions in the conference that dealt with the Internet and social media we were able to gain appreciation and additional lessons learned to help us get better at this.

For example, from our survey of attendees, for the session on Bridging the Digital Divide feedback results indicated that 77% found it Relevant or Extremely Relevant; and for the session on Creating a Personal Brand we received the highest praise where 65% of attendees found it Extremely Relevant and 25% found it Relevant - a combined positive feedback of 90%.

It may be of no surprise to some, but planning, organizing and running a virtual conference is not less effort than a physical on-site conference, in fact it may be a lot more of an effort, with a different set of risks and concerns. Having a Plan B in many areas was critical - a last minute power failure from the home of a speaker could cause them to not make the event, so we had back up speakers and sessions we could flip to in an instant. In addition, the technology is much newer to people and rehearsals for most speakers were required. This proactively fixed a lot of potential glitches and handoff alignment issues before they could happen.

Several positive highlights are worth noting; the virtual conference was attended by members from all across Canada as well as a few international members from the USA, Europe and South Korea, with no hotel costs, and no flights. We intentionally set the times so that all members across North Americas time zones could attend. The engagement and interaction from all the attendees was wonderful to watch on the various Chats and Subject Matter Meetups, it showed us that we have an amazing diverse, talented and professional group of members. People you can refer colleagues to and / or interact with to enhance your business or career.

A lot of people have expressed an interest in seeing this done on an annual basis. 98% of survey responders said they would attend a virtual conference like this again, and 80% stated it was good value for the money. So, in conjunction with our prospective partners, we will look at this possibility. 

A huge thank you to all who made this terrific event a great success, and thanks to my Conference Committee Team; Beata Domanska-Lead Project Manager, Sandra Addison-Brock, CMC-Ontario Events Coordinator, Desi Nikolova, Speaker Selection Lead, Sean McFarland, Sponsorship Lead, and Bernie Uhlich, Co-Host and Professional Development Lead.

PS. We eventually did get the deposit back for the rental of the conference hall under the force majeure rule.

Craig Mackay, FCMC is President, Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Ontario, (CMC-Ontario) and Vice President of Nortak Software, responsible for Information Solutions. Craig is also a Management Advisory Service (MAS) consultant recognized by the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) and the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC-Canada).