What I've continued to learn running large-scale virtual conferences

Welcome to my weekly LinkedIn newsletter! Connected Fundraising Weekly will be?my way?of providing easy-to-engage insights around donor behavior, fundraiser enablement, and technology. I hope you enjoy the content, and please share if you think someone would benefit from what I'm writing!

Three years into the pandemic, I'm still learning to create interesting educational content in a digital environment. Yet, each year my team is getting more comfortable and I am learning how to work with them to make sure things are not solely living in my head.

I've written about the first two years of planning Generosity Xchange and then bringing back the Nonprofit Social Media Summit. Here are those below:

• What I learned running our company's first conference virtually during a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and a hurricane
• What I learned producing two virtual conferences back to back

This year there was no hurricane, my power didn't go out, and the platform didn't crash or get sold in the middle of our conference registration process. And even if something happened, we were prepared.

So what I wanted to share was the boring grind work that we put into making this year's set of virtual conferences our most successful yet.

Platform and Conference Vision Fit

When planning your virtual conferences or educational experiences, a critical piece is to start with the core WHY of the event itself. I attended a bunch of in-person conferences this year (with varying degrees of quality) and realized that choosing the layout of how people interact with content matters no matter where it is being held.

One in-person conference was structured to be very focused on lecture-style presentations, almost as if we were attending a TED Talk. Others had informal gathering spaces but it was still hard to feel like any of the learning was going to continue past the conference.

Especially for Generosity Xchange, we wanted a place where attendees could feel part of the experience and actively guide the energy and flow. So choosing something that had several interactive elements was key. Here are a few things we were able to offer attendees to keep them engaged:

• Attendees could record welcome videos
• Speed networking matched interests
• Discussion rooms based on experience in a topic (e.g. New vs Experienced)
• Chat and polls and interactive games
• Attendees dictated parts of the schedule through an optional open text field during registration asking "What are you hoping to learn"

There are things I know we can do better - the trivia I did for Julia Campbell's was fun and now that I understand the platform better, I can add more questions and anticipate better how to capture the winners' information. I'll share some other content-specific perspectives.

Steal This Resource

Linking to Chad Barger, ACFRE, ACNP 's simple but useful conference key takeaway worksheet provides folks the ability to personalize their path.

Content Planning

I was less involved in planning out the entirety of each conference's content lineup but still feel that a combination of pre-recorded content and live presentations is the way to go. Playing around with formats is key though and understanding how to do transitions is important.

For example, on Day 1 of the Generosity Xchange I had set things up to play on one stream through the StreamYard platform and have that pipe into Hopin for attendees to watch. The issue is that if I ended the stream then it killed the URL that speakers login to. So I had to keep the stream going the entire first day since I didn't want to disrupt things for the speakers. But I rectified for Day 2 to make clean breaks in the program, which helped manage transitions more easily.

The other thing is making it clear when pre-recorded content or different presentation styles are happening. We are getting conditioned to sit and stare at a screen so if we as attendees are jolted out of that format it can be confusing. We have certain expectations because webinars and a good virtual experience will play with these conventions and push some comfort zones - if they are properly outlined.

Steal This Resource

Having a run-of-show document that centralized everything in one place was one of our best investments. I highly suggest making sure your Run of Show time zones match your conference schedule time zones. In one of the dumbest self-inflicted decisions I have made, I put the entire Run of Show in Central but the conference platform defaulted to Eastern. Don't do that.

Speaker and Sponsor Support

The appetite for in-person conferences means that many speakers and sponsors are going to expect good support and engagement from a virtual conference. Why focus on digital when I can see people in person, right?

Here's the thing - conferences "in real life" can suck pretty hard, especially from what I've experienced as a vendor doing sponsorship. It is critical to lead with the value specific to each audience.

• Speakers - want the exposure of their ideas to a broader audience, want things to be clear and easy, want to be compensated for their work, and get/give useful feedback
• Sponsors - want to generate both leads and demand for their products and services. Demand generation falls into thought leadership, lead generation falls into the collection of data

I believe there's a hybrid approach to both of these, where you can fold in engagement for speakers to help them augment their presentations (e.g. making it easy to see questions and comments, which Hopin + Streamyard did better than expected) while sponsors need a combination of lead and demand generation opportunities.

The sponsor side of things deserves its post but I want to share some numbers we will be putting out more formally. When we look at both events, the impact is pretty impressive:

• Generosity Xchange generated over 1500 registrations and Nonprofit Social Media Summit was over 1000
• Live attendance was 44% and 54% respectively
• Attendees rated event and content satisfaction in the 90% range for both events
• Generosity Xchange had over 50% of attendees holding decision-maker titles
• Sponsor recall, especially of the top tier sponsorships, was at 60% for attendees. This means that when asked "can you name a sponsor" in a follow-up survey, folks remembered and even cited specific sessions sponsors did

Steal This Resource

We put together some great Speaker, Sponsor, and Internal Staff Kits. I'll share the Speaker one since I got some positive feedback from speakers in particular on that:

In Conclusion

I have a lot more I could write on planning these experiences but it is critical to view them as a gift back to our audience as the primary reason we put these on. Neon One doesn't NEED to do a big virtual conference but it is important to us to do so and in a way that lives up to our values. Having a diverse lineup of voices, compensating speakers and donating to nonprofits, having kick-ass swag as a gift, doing fun things like having Indigenous band Swamp Water perform at Generosity Xchange or doing trivia for the Nonprofit Social Media Summit - all of these add up.

I don't care if you work for a competitor, a different sector, or whatever. I love talking about this type of planning and am an open book. So what else do you want to know?

And how can we translate this into meaningful experiences in-person? Because I can guarantee that the Neon One Experience doesn't just live virtually.