My 10 Lessons Learned from Planning a Virtual Summit in 3 Weeks

I woke up one morning with a huge desire to give back in a big way this holiday season as it’s been such a crazy and tough year for many people. This was one month before Christmas.

I didn’t want to do it alone and asked the Universe for guidance. This led me to creating, organizing and hosting the first-ever Career Relaunch Summit Live on December 17 - 18, 2020. The purpose was to help people supercharge their career and job search for the new year.

I had 20 fireside chats with career and leadership experts over 2 days - that’s 11 hours of talk time! It was SOO much fun! I felt totally in my element and I'm doing my life purpose work!

With the contribution from these amazing speakers, we helped thousands of people! Our goal was to help people:

• Gain clarity, confidence and a competitive edge
• Unleash their potential and reach new heights
• Boost their motivation, inspiration and imagination
• Mingle, connect and grow their network
• Reset, rethink and relaunch their career for 2021

What a great way for me to end the year in 2020! This is my proudest highlight of the year, where I know I made a difference in helping others. I’m feeling happy, fulfilled and grateful.

It’s also a full-circle moment for me. Over 10 years ago, when I went through coaching training, I had this vision that one day I’d be speaking to thousands of people. My body was shaking when I saw this vivid image. Now, it’s a reality.

Typically, I give myself 6 to 8 weeks to plan a 90-minute webinar. To plan a 2-day virtual summit with 20 speakers where I talked for a long period of time in 3 weeks was a HUGE undertaking.

Anything is possible when you put your heart, mind & effort into it.

Here are my 10 lessons learned from running and planning a virtual summit in just 3 weeks:

1) Make Your Why Greater than Your Fears

There were moments where I wasn’t sure if I could pull this summit off. I also had imposter syndrome where I questioned “Who am I to do this?” However, I always went back to my why - "to give back in a big way this holiday season." I also reminded myself that “I’m meant to do this.” After the first day of my summit, I knew deep down that I was meant to do this. I'm living my life purpose.

Use your WHY as your guiding compass. When you make your WHY about others instead of you, you rise to the occasion.

2) Have a Clear Vision

I imagined what the summit would look like and feel like. This guided me in how I wanted to run the summit. I wanted it to be conversational with the guest speakers and interactive with the audience. I wanted the high vibe energy feeling that gave people encouragement, inspiration and hope. I wanted people to walk away with practical and actionable tips. Hence why I summarized key lessons during the interviews with hashtags to reinforce and retain the learning.

3) Don’t Worry About the How at First

Once I got clear on my why and vision, I set a date, created my list of desired speakers and reached out. This created momentum and excitement. I set the intention and trusted that things would unfold beautifully. Had I mapped out everything I needed to do, I’d have over-analyzed it, worried about a lot of things and backed out.

Be excited about what you want to create. Don't get into analysis paralysis.

Here's my initial outreach message to the speakers, where I had all the essential information:

Hi,

I'm planning a Holiday Pandemic Year-End series to give back on Dec 17 & 18, where I interview career experts to give others hope, inspiration and connection. It's called the Career Relaunch Summit.

Would you be interested in being a guest on my LinkedIn & YouTube Livestream? =) The interview will be about 25 - 28 minutes long.

Here's the high-level agenda:

• Your biggest lessons learned in 2020
• Advice for job seekers on your topic of interest  
• Q&A

Let me know if you're interested. If so, let me know if one of these times on Dec 18 work for you at either 10:30/ 11:30/ 12:00/ 12:30 EST.

I plan on running it from 10am - 5pm EST (with a break between 1 - 2 pm EST).

Please fill out this form to provide more info about you and your talk. If you can have it done by this Thu, that would be great. I will follow-up with the next steps.

I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks!

Diana

4) Build Your Brand and Relationships

This year more than ever, I’ve been a lot more active on LinkedIn in sharing valuable content and commenting on other people’s content to build relationships. I’ve also been a guest speaker on podcasts, live streams, webinars, and summits/ conferences. This established credibility and helped secure speakers quickly within a week. Half of the speakers I never spoke to before over the phone or video. However, we admire and respect each other's work.

It takes time to build your brand, relationships and credibility.

5) Go All In and Take Massive Action

Once I got most speakers lined up, I knew the summit was going to happen! I got organized with a plan and set deadlines. I asked the speakers to fill out a form with their bio, speaking topic, website and social media information. Within a few days, I got the event registration page created using Kartra with my husband helping out. (he’s been my rock!) I started to make a save-the-date announcement about the summit to my list and on my live streams to build the hype.

Then I created various social media marketing images, promotion kit swipe file, marketing video, speakers kit of what to expect, producers kit file of what captions to display on the screen. That was a TON of work but it helped me stay focused and organized. And it helped me communicate effectively with the speakers. I certainly pulled some late nights with planning this since I had a fully booked coaching schedule. I probably put in about 80 hours or more.

I started actively promoting 10 days before the summit and most speakers started to promote the week of the summit.

If you want to make something happen, go all in and take massive action! Stretch out of your comfort zone and be resourceful. Raise your standards.

6) Own Your Brand, Style and Voice

I love personal branding. I believe it’s important to have your brand and style to make it uniquely you. It also makes it easier for you to be consistent with your brand design, theme and taglines. Plus it saves time when designing images. I went with my primary blue theme with an accent colour of fuschia to give the holiday spirit vibe. I also found a summit image that also resembled the acronym of my company name "My Marketability" - MYM. I got creative with designing all the marketing images in Canva.

To have consistent messaging, I came up with a tagline to use "Learn from 15+ career & leadership experts to supercharge your career and job search"

Since I'm all about spreading high vibe energy and joy, I learned how to create intro and outro music for the summit using iMovie. It made a HUGE difference in energy level and gave me a mini stretch break in between. It was totally worth getting a music subscription on Artlist.io. I searched for music that had an uplifting and inspirational vibe.

Here's the marketing teaser video and some of the social media images I created:

7) Make It Easy for the Speakers and Promoters

In order to get people to promote your event effectively, I learned that it's important to get everyone on the same page with consistent messaging. I created a promotion kit swipe file where I shared a variety of marketing messages for email and social media use to make it really easy for the speakers and partners to promote the event. That way, they can just copy and paste the content, then tweak it accordingly. I also reached out to some professional associations, non-profit organizations and people in my network to help spread the word. Having the swipe file created made it more efficient to get the word out quickly. I'm really grateful that many people were willing to help promote as they supported the mission of giving back this holiday season.

Make it easy and simple for others to help you.

8) Always Test Things Out

It's so critical to test out the technology before the big day as you'll learn some good lessons and minimize any technical issues during the day of your event. Plus you become familiar with all the features. I purchased Restream and I did 3 live streams before the summit. I also tested out the music twice a few days before. This helped me realize that I needed to optimize my video files using Handbrake to ensure there wasn't any lag time. Plus, I went through the schedule run down and tested Restream with my husband, who took care of displaying the captions and chats on screen. If you're interested in running a summit, I highly recommend testing things out to build your confidence by doing more lives. I've been doing an average of weekly virtual speaking webinars this year since the pandemic.

Test and experiment to minimize hiccups and maximize your performance.

9) Engage with Your Audience

Engaging and interacting with the audience was really important to me. I wanted the participants to feel encouraged, empowered and inspired. I'm really grateful that my awesome friend, Simrat Pahwa who moderated the chat room for both days. She's so positive, responsive and enthusiastic. She went above and beyond. I trusted her in representing my brand and voice. She kept the audience engaged by welcoming them, encouraging them, asking questions, sharing the speakers' bios & links, and reinforcing key lessons from the speakers. To welcome the speakers, I asked the audience to show their support with their favourite emojis (e.g. clapping hands) and used #GOSpeakerName. This really raised the vibrational energy level to generate excitement. Throughout the interview with the speakers, I'd summarized the key-value bombs dropped by the speakers using hashtags to reinforce the learning and engage with the audience. For example, #clarity, #brandbuilding, #valueadd, #strategicnetworking, #askforhelp, #followup, #patience, #adaptability. 

10) Show Up Fully and Have Fun

Lastly, as the host, I set the tone of the summit. I learned that it's so important for me to show up fully. For me, this meant being present, excited and engaged. More importantly, having fun throughout the day. I came up with personal stories to share to kick off each segment to build a stronger connection with my audience. I pumped myself up before I started each interview. I'd jump up and down, clap my hands, make a move. I'd say a positive affirmation. I also learned the importance of thinking on my feet and using humour. There were a few times when the speakers had audio issues and had to rejoin, so I had to come up with something quickly to stay engaged with the audience. And there were 2 times where I muted myself after the coffee break and started talking without knowing. I just had to use humour to laugh it out and continue the show.

How you show up has a great impact on how your audience will respond and engage with you.

If you read this far, thank you very much!

I want to send you my best wishes. Merry Christmas! May you have a warm, safe and relaxing holiday! Wishing you a fruitful and prosperous new year! Remember:

You matter. Own your greatness with confidence to shine.

REPLAYS

If you're interested in tuning in to the Career Relaunch summit, here's the playlist to watch the replay. If you watch it on YouTube, you can click on the timestamp to watch your preferred sessions.

Here's also the videos of each segment with the speakers listed. I'm so proud and grateful for all the amazing speakers' contributions. Without them, there wouldn't be a summit. If you want the coles note version, I summarized the key lessons of each day's summit at the end of segment 2 and segment 4.

SEGMENT 1:

SEGMENT 2:

SEGMENT 3:

SEGMENT 4:

#careerdevelopment #professionaldevelopment #personaldevelopment #careers #jobsearch #bestadvice #inspiration #motivation #leadership #personalbranding #communication #networking #resume #interviews #DCspeaks

___________________________

Want some free interview prep training? Go to: https://mymarketability.com/interviewprep

Is this your first time reading one of my articles? Awesome! I hope you enjoyed it! If we're not connected on LinkedIn yet, follow me or send me an invite to connect.

I'm Diana YK Chan. I'm a former Recruiter turned Speaker, Trainer and Career Coach at My Marketability. I help ambitious leaders and executives, like you, design the next chapter of your life and navigate transformational changes in your career by redefining what success means to you, unleashing your talents, and differentiating your unique brand value.

I've delivered speaking and training engagements to thousands of people and I've coached hundreds of clients 1-on-1 globally, from new grads to C-level, representing diverse industries and professions to change careers, land incredible opportunities, and increase their income significantly. My mission is to empower you to own your greatness with confidence so that you do amazing things and make a remarkable impact in this world.

Want to elevate your brand and advance your career? I invite you to visit https://mymarketability.com/ and subscribe to my list to receive exclusive career and job-search advice that I only share in email. You can opt-in to receive my 10-day job search mastery challenge.