This has been a tough year for anyone who’s in the business of running conferences and events. How can you connect with people during a lockdown, when you can’t gather in the same room, share ideas and get to know each other over a beer? It’s not easy--but we also need to be able to get together now more than ever.
Though nothing can replace meeting in person, you can stay connected if you engage with real people online and get them involved. Over the course of this year, I’ve learned a lot about how to do that. I discussed my experiences in an interview with Kurt Schmidt on the Schmidt List, and there are some things I’ve learned that I want to share with you.
The Bureau of Digital provides programming, resources and support to a community of 10,000+ professionals in the digital industry. As of December 2019, we were doing great and the future looked bright. Then in March, the pandemic hit. Our revenue dropped 95% overnight and to make things tougher we posted a $53,000 loss caused by refunds.
Members of our community saw what was happening and came to our rescue, putting out videos about how much the Bureau meant to them. They lifted us up, and paid membership started to grow. I knew we had to take care of our community and partners, who’d invested a lot with us so we adapted quickly.
We shifted to running all of our events on Zoom. In April, our financial and legal experts, Summit CPA Group and Matchstick Legal presented a Q&A on a topic most businesses were thinking about—PPP and EIDL loans—and 280 people signed up. I watched them all helping one another, sharing ideas and experiences, and I thought, “We’re gonna be OK.” I realized we could still fulfill our core purpose, supporting people who don’t have support. We’d have to learn a new approach, but online events could work as long as we made them engaging enough to get people excited about joining. And we did.
You don’t need the most popular guest speaker
Colleagues suggested that we sign up big names since they’d probably be affordable for an online event during a pandemic. But it didn’t feel right. Huge companies can use their whole marketing budget to put on virtual events with celebrities, but that’s not us. So we stuck with our philosophy of bringing in people from the community to speak at our events. I reached out to every previous Bureau speaker who’d rated four or higher on a scale of one to five on post-event surveys and in two days, we scheduled out four months of programming, with two and sometimes even three events per week.
Emphasize the people, not the technology
One of our first big events was a full day of presentations on diversity, equity and inclusion that we ran in partnership with Project Inkblot. To keep the audience engaged, I asked the speakers to send three songs that touched them and photos of themselves having fun. Between speakers, we played their music and slides, and it sparked a real conversation. The attendees commented on the photos and the songs and started connecting in a real way in a tiny text box. They had conversations and got to know each other. They enjoyed themselves and found new friends and colleagues.
That set the tone for how we wanted to do things and reinforced a basic lesson: You have to make your event about people, not technology. The focus shouldn’t be on which product to use but on facilitating the best conversations or, if it’s a social event, having the most fun. We went with Zoom because it’s simple and familiar to most people, and familiarity breeds trust.
Rather than having the speakers send in canned recordings of their talks, we did everything live so the audience could engage with the speakers. Things will go wrong, and we told the attendees and speakers to expect it and laugh with us when it does. It’s how you recover that matters. If you have positive energy, so will the audience. Especially when they know you would rather have a real experience with them than have them just hit a play button and sit back while a video plays.
Keep attendees involved
At the start of every event, we give a pep talk. We tell the attendees that the speakers spent a lot of time on their presentations, and they need to feel the audience’s presence. Otherwise, it’s like they’re talking to themselves in a mirror. Attendees can send them positive energy by using the chatbox. We tell the attendees, if something makes you laugh, type “ha-ha.” If it makes you think, type “hmm.” Or use emojis. That feedback is how they’ll know they’re doing OK. If everyone is silent, they’ll lose energy and you’ll lose interest. So you have a job to do: Keep the chat flowing. And guess what--they do, every single time!
When you have a few hundred people at a virtual event, you can’t turn on everyone’s camera and mics. But there are other ways to involve them. We had one speaker who did live polling, another who asked attendees to download a PDF to improve how they interact with clients and another who had them fill out a survey during the presentation where you could see the results real time. Or have attendees send in photos ahead of time, then turn on their mics and ask them to share the story behind the picture. They love that! And so do we.
For instance, we ran a photo caption contest at one of our recent events. One attendee sent us a photo of himself standing on a camel in front of a pyramid. We found out he was “camel surfing”! We invited him to tell his story, and everybody started asking questions and commenting in the chat. I love that our events enable the community to share their stories. You want your audience to lean in, to listen and respond. If they know they might get called on, they’ll be paying attention.
Incorporate physical takeaways
You can also do things you’d do at an in-person conference. We’ve sent snack boxes that attendees opened during a break, and they compared what they’d gotten. Or you can have sketching sessions or “white elephant” contests. There’s no reason not to play games. We sometimes play one called “within reach.” We ask members of the audience to explain their thoughts by holding up something they can reach—say, a watch if they worry they are running out of time to accomplish a task.
Next year we’ll be going even bigger with online events until our community tells us they are ready to meet in person again. If we do go live at some point in 2021, we’ll probably start with hybrid events, hosting a small number of people on-site and the rest online. I’d want to do that at a news station or a public broadcasting studio—someplace built for broadcasting.
Our experience shows that you can succeed with digital events: As of October, we’ve recovered about 40% of our monthly revenues, nearly half of that from online events. My advice is to be yourself. People will appreciate that you’re different, that you’re giving them something they can’t get anywhere else. Make your sessions about people, not technology, and let them interact with each other! It’s lonely for a lot of us right now, and if we have the ability to connect and build community it’s our responsibility to do so with passion and enthusiasm.
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