Lessons Learned from conference event planning
2020 became the year of virtual events. Canceling their travel plans, conference stakeholders such as attendees, speakers, and organizers all shifted to digital this year. These changes produced a wide spectrum of preferences, opinions, and lessons learned.
While we are all figuring out the best ways to move forward as an industry, we should always remember the human aspect of any gathering. Luckily, many conference organizers today are already asking the right questions, like “how do we encourage conversation and interactions?”, “What speaker sessions should we select, and how do we select speakers?” and “How do we set our conference up for success?” We all know that the best events are the ones that inspire, include, and enable us to succeed.
Virtual events have their own challenges. This blog post shares some learnings we found while organizing the Unscripted Conference this year.
Differentiating from other virtual events:
Digital fatigue produced by too many other events was reported as the biggest challenge to virtual event organizing (Source: Wild Apricot). The month of October was no exception to this finding. To stand out from other virtual events, we had to consider the spectrum of speakers and attendees. There is little value in running a virtual event in the same month with the same messages and speakers.
This meant reaching out to groups of people with practical experience and expertise in a specific topic that haven’t previously been a part of the circuit DevOps events. It’s safe to rely on your trusted network of speakers for an upcoming event, but what does it mean to expand beyond your network and leverage others? We had to think about reaching out to new or growing communities via Slack or Twitter hashtags and other social or communication channels.
Supporting conference stakeholders:
Virtual events rely on digital platforms as physical events rely on venues. Ask questions around accessibility to your digital platforms as you would with physical spaces. How easy is it for attendees to log in to the event platform to join a speaker session? Do your speakers have the proper equipment to present? What is the process like moving from one session to the next? And how accessible and inclusive are sessions during and after the event? These are only some of the questions event organizers should be considering when planning their events.
We decided to use Social27 as our event platform, but there are others like Hopin and some organizations dedicate engineering time to build their own.
Building Safe Environments:
Psychological safety plays a big role in gatherings. People are more willing to speak up, share, and network with others when they feel like they can be themselves. Conference events are often recurring, so building credibility and authenticity amongst stakeholders is a great way to boost future endeavors and opportunities.
There’s a quote from Maya Angelou where she says, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Find ways to implement inclusive language and practices before, during, and after the event. Some practices can involve introducing a code of conduct, providing contact information or visibility to event organizers the day of the event, and immediately following up with any issues.
Cultivating Authentic Interactions
Interacting with other attendees is one of the greatest benefits of conference gatherings. Creating a community of belonging by design can be challenging because it is easy to be limited to the virtual platform and conference agenda. One way to engage attendees and drive interactions is to diversify your communication channels. While event platforms may have chat and messaging capabilities, consider long term communications and post-event conversations.
Setting up a Slack channel and driving attendees to join a community is a great way to catalyze conversations. Some event platforms also have social media integrations and social profiles, which allow attendees to connect with speakers and other participants during the event easily. We utilized a slack channel and organizers modified their names during the event with “Organizer” to help moderate the event. We also had various slack addons and custom emojis for extra fun.
Planning a Diverse and Inclusive Virtual Event Is About Intention.
Virtual event planning is not easy, it took hours over a span of months, attention and deliberation from a whole team, and there are still many lessons to be learned. The best any conference organizer can do is adopt a human-centric approach to event planning and continually improve the experience for many people attending events. With virtual events, there is an opportunity to include more voices and reach out to more people that would otherwise not have the opportunity to attend a conference event. This blog post shares some tips for building virtual events to align industries, bring people together, and stand out.
