What I learned running our company's first conference virtually during a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and a hurricane

I should be taking a rest, if I were listening to the advice of multiple panels from our conference. Yet I've wanted to write up my thoughts and feelings about our virtual conference experience from the moment we started planning it in earnest.

My company services the social good sector. That means we help nonprofits, foundations, and educational institutions with technology and services to help them grow. I started with the part of our company that provides a CRM to nonprofits but in 2018 we combined with a platform that does peer to peer fundraising for some of the largest organizations in the world. A few months later we added a company that does giving days for communities as well as client and case management. Then a few months after that we added an arts and ticketing platform.

Early in 2020 we were beginning to plan out our company's first conference. We do a lot of webinars but for years I've dreamed of having a user conference. I've watched jealously as other companies rolled out their marketing for their own conferences and I kept saying to myself - we can do better.

We were going to have things in Denver in mid-July in order to help organizations get ready for their campaigns and the fall giving season. I was scoping out bars for after parties and worrying about capacity since I had big dreams. I was thinking about logistics for vendors to ensure they weren't treated the same way that I've been treated at industry conferences. I wanted to create an experience that was the best of everything - educational, community building, business friendly for partners, diverse, equitable in access. I was even trying to figure out how to provide childcare during the conference, budget willing.

Then came COVID-19. And that all went out the window.

We decided pretty early on that we would shift to a digital environment. We had a test run at running a virtual conference in April by focusing on a subset of our client base. Yet it was a glorified GoToWebinar that just ran for a while. If we were going to do a proper user conference, we needed to do it RIGHT. I huddled with my boss and quickly settled on an honest to goodness virtual conference platform. That came with a hefty price tag for something that we've never done before and in a world where our auxiliary marketing budget was slashed to zero.

I want to share how we put all this together, what I think we did right, and what I want to do better.

How We Did It

Budgeting

Our executive team made it pretty clear early on that we needed our company to focus on immediate services when it came to what we spend our money on - you know, like paying people to work. So a new event wasn't really in the cards here.

For the past few years, I've been working hard to develop a partner channel program that I feel is very good and represents what I want to see throughout our industry. I put a lot of stress on how important this part of our company is, with varying success internally. But I work hard for our partners and want to prove that aligning and investing into my company means money for their company. So I decided to turn to them in order to cover the costs of the conference.

I wanted to ensure we covered the following, in order of priority:

• Conference platform and support
• Keynote and session speaker payments
• Accessibility items like streamlining transcriptions and captions
• Client thank you gifts, especially for panelists
• Social event offerings

So I put together a deck cobbled together from the draft I was preparing for the physical conference and adjusted any of the physical space items to represent a virtual environment. And then I slashed the original amounts. I put together an email to our network and hit send.

Within minutes, several partners stepped up and started making commitments. And then I realized I needed to put together a legal agreement to actually show we were going to deliver. I did some research and put together one that we plan on re-using in the future. Here's the Word document if you want to see what I used, feel free to adapt for your own events.

We also decided that a paid conference would be preferable to a totally free event. I've obsessed over this detail for a while now and there are pros and cons to either choice. But to ensure that we could cover our budget as well as provide the best value to our attendees, we settled on a set of low cost options based off when people bought their tickets. Early adopters got the lowest priced ticket and people who bought it closer to the event were charged a higher fee. We also developed a series of discounts for VIPs and onboarded all speakers for free.

Ticket breakdown was as follows, with tickets being launched in late June for our August 3 - 4 conference.

• 57% bought early bird tickets
• 35% bought general admission tickets
• 8% bought late admission tickets

Platform Logistics

We settled on a platform called Pathable for our conference itself. We had only a short window of time to choose a platform and I reached out to a few vendors to get some demos. Pathable was very impressive upfront, while other platforms either didn't respond to inquiries or one even reached out to me last week to set up a demo.

When choosing a virtual conference platform, here are things that in retrospect you should be asking about:

• Ticket purchase options - is this native or do you rely on an integration?
• If there's an integration, can it support multiple attendees getting imported? Unfortunately Pathable's integration with Eventbrite did not so I had to come up with a less than ideal import process that I'm pretty sure led to day of confusion and frustration
• What is the viewer experience like for sessions? Is there chat? Other types of interactive items, like polls or file downloads?
• What are the license limits for the types of sessions you want to have?
• What is the training on the platform? What is the setup like?
• Can attendees interact with each other? Can sponsors get spotlighted and interact with attendees in a meaningful way?
• How do you get speakers into the platform?
• How do you communicate with attendees?
• What happens with refunds? We found that with the initial Eventbrite setting that it kicked out guests who we refunded. While on the surface this sounds good, we had refunded a VIP who mistakenly bought a ticket and she kept getting taken out of the system. I imagine she was confused why she got multiple welcome emails.

And this is just the start of what I'm thinking about right now. There's a lot that goes into running a virtual conference if you're thinking it through!

Content

We had envisioned that our conference would be an intersection of different stakeholders in the nonprofit sector who typically don't interact with each other. Foundations with grantees, donors with nonprofits, small and large organizations, and so on.

And there was a few conferences that I was paying attention to in the lead up to our event to see what was working and what was not working. There were also really powerful conversations happening on Twitter around the role that professional staff play versus service consultants. And most importantly was the line up of speakers themselves - are they all white faces? Men? Or are we going to celebrate a diversity of faces, voices? My friend and Neon One partner Julia Campbell really outlined the importance of this and I tried to take it to heart, though I'll dive into that later in more detail.

Our team settled on four primary tracks to help align with our products but then also layered in a few extra tracks to address things that didn't neatly fit, such as our social events or sessions we wanted to experiment with around meditation virtually. We reached out to folks in our company to help out with some of the sessions while I turned to our partner network to drum up some of the sessions. But we also made an important decision to explicitly ask clients to be on panels together and not feel pressured to do a formal presentation but just talk. This was honestly some of the best content we did and I highly encourage putting trust into your client base when putting together content. And let them know that they can speak from the heart, even if that means they may not speak glowingly about your products. When you enter into the public space then you'll need to let go of some of the control that marketing sometimes wants to enforce.

When planning a virtual conference, the things that I got obsessed about were:

• We wanted to create a rolling series of "ah ha" moments for folks, would our content do that?
• Was the content immediately applicable for attendees to act on?
• Did we have enough diversity in topics to keep things interesting?
• What was the energy and flow that we were creating for our overall conference?
• Did we present topics that were actually applicable to our attendees?
• What about social events? Did we offer things that anyone could enjoy?
• What about virtual swag? People like to get stuff, what could we offer?
• What about "gathering moments"? Every event needs at least one moment that everyone collectively shares. For example, I always would force people to do trivia together at parties I would throw. How does this translate into a shared experience or experiences during your virtual event?

I think we honestly did a pretty good job here overall and our session surveys generally support this. And the swag we did was pretty cool - for instance, we put together a Spotify playlist that synced up with the theme of our event and asked folks to add to it.

Speakers and Sessions

Making things clear on how the platform works is important when gearing up for a virtual conference and I think we did okay here, though I wish I was much more clear to panelists that they didn't need to prepare decks in advance. When getting things ready for speakers, things to keep in mind:

• Have you let them know how to login?
• Have you provided any training on how the platform works? Like, if you're using Zoom to do presentations do they know how to use it to share their screen?
• Do they know what they're talking about?
• If you have a sponsor introducing them, does that sponsor know about the session?
• Did you know that people who are paying for an event might want to know what is actually happening at the conference? In all seriousness, getting content locked in as early as possible greatly streamlines the trust people will put into the event.
• What about decks when needed? Is there a template you're providing for design consistency and is it easily accessible / editable? I hear lots of complaints about event decks and I generally hate working with stuff that isn't our template, so be comfortable letting go of this if speakers get annoyed.

We put together a few supporting resources for our speakers but there's a few things that we could have done better here. And day of support was hit or miss depending on the session, though I appreciated that our platform offered the option.

Communication

Settling on a vision and theme early for your virtual conference is pretty important. In the planning we eventually settled on a theme around exchange and growing together. This helped drive content as well as visuals and messaging.

A mix of emails, social media, and personal outreach is important here. Don't assume your VIPs are going to necessarily care about your event unless you make it clear they should and would be celebrated by coming to the event. And don't assume that everyone implicitly understands who you are, even your own clients. Especially for a company that has so many different services and products like ours, there's a good chance that your clients just simply don't care enough about you to really care about the details behind the scenes.

And if you feel like you are communicating a lot, I can pretty much guarantee you that you aren't. Get your client team involved early so they can engage high profile clients or folks that you want to serve on panels.

We also created a landing page on our website for some of the initial messaging but shifted our energy to the virtual conference platform once it was in a position to be shown to people. Really explore how things look and I highly suggest doing usability testing on every type of page in both desktop and mobile views.

At the end of the day, I think this quote sums up what you should be going for (ironic given the length of this post):

I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter.

Showtime

So I'm honestly still in a post event haze so some of the details of the last two days are going to come in pieces over the next few weeks, but making sure that you have your team at the ready to be available will be key. Plan for worst case scenarios, have sample messaging ready, and create an FAQ page on your event website and drive people toward that.

One of the messages I got was around making sure that when things go south (which they did and they will), communicate communicate and communicate more. Things will go wrong but we had a Slack channel to coordinate behind the scenes. This was especially needed when the hurricane yesterday took out my power and internet for about 5 minutes before my generator kicked in - all less than an hour before our big keynote.

We had a bit of a rocky start to the day as people were getting acclimated logging into the platform. But day two had a worst case scenario where the platform itself crashed for many users. We quickly pivoted to doing a YouTube Live Stream and getting that out to attendees as quickly as possible.

It is also pretty important to make sure that session surveys are presented to attendees and make it clear you would love that feedback. And in turn, we learned how vitally important interaction with the chat features of the platform were. People want actual interaction.

We also were pleasantly surprised by the social events and people's reactions. Don't be afraid or worried that folks won't participate. Just try something out and be true to your brand and your event's vision and it'll all come together.

What I'd Do Differently

I'm going to to run a list of things that I want to do better next time, in no particular order:

• Better prep for certain facilitators of sessions, there's some that felt thrown together and it showed during the presentation of the content
• More advanced outreach to speakers and clarity on their roles in the process, especially if they're just a panelist with nothing to prepare
• Better diversity overall. I think we did an okay job but I also had to stop myself from going too far and tokenizing. Enter into authentic discussions around diversity. I would have loved to have had at least some sessions in Spanish, for instance. Or I wish I could have gotten the money to cover live captions for all sessions.
• More focus and facilitation on private interactions between attendees. It was a feature that I don't think folks understood and we didn't highlight that enough.
• Better clarity on the role that pre-taped sessions and their speakers could have. There was some fun chat during those sessions but making it clear that if a pre-taped interviewee could make the session live to join the chat is something I wish I worked on more.

Anyway, I think that's enough. I know this is long but I need to get this out. I'll leave with one of my favorite quotes from our conference and I'd love if you shared your own tips and thoughts about virtual conferences.