Until recently, it seemed that working remotely, and, especially, holding public events virtually, was something completely new and fresh. Something from the future. Now it is becoming the daily reality, and it is exciting to observe the evolution of the idea of holding events remotely.
We are living in a world where technology allows you to exchange information and communicate with others around the globe, without ever leaving your home. It is time for conferences to adapt to this new way of life. Remote user conferences are the future.
So, we wondered, what if you could generate the immense value of a conference, but without the downside of it being resource-heavy?
What Does it Take to Run A Great Virtual Conference?
Through the process of holding huge online events ourselves, we learned quite a bit about the virtual conference best practices. If you are planning to host a virtual conference, these are some key aspects that you should focus on:
- Study the specifics of working with an audience online. You’ll need to learn how to interact online, what tools will work best for your situation, and, most importantly, how to keep the attention of your audience.
- Make sure that the participants are the same people who registered. The participants should be approved by request, so they can’t just pass the link to a colleague or friend.
- Ensure the live streaming quality of the feeds of both the slides and the presenter.
- Provide an opportunity for group discussion and panel sessions where a series of people present.
- Provide the participants with a way to chat, ask questions, and interact.
- Create an intuitive website or landing page with the schedule and links to all the streams and presentations.
- Take care to avoid losing people during breaks, or even during the event. Disconnecting from a live stream is a million times easier than getting up and leaving the front row in an audience of 1,000 people.
- Develop some activities for the attendees, so that each person on the other side of the screen feels that they are noticed and important. They are used to offline events, where they are actively interacting with other people.
- Think of creative, alternate ways to leave a memory of the event, since there is no way to take a group photo of all the participants, like at an offline conference.
The Online Events Tools
When choosing the tools to hold an online conference and host remote presenters or speakers, it’s vital to keep these requirements in mind:
- The fewer tools the better — it can be difficult for participants to switch between different video conference software tools, and you can lose attendees due to technical problems.
- Simplicity — ideally, your virtual conference tools can be used without prior registration.
- Familiar to the participants — if your audience already uses the virtual conference platform for other purposes, then no additional time is required to understand the interface and functionality.
We recommend using Zoom as the main space for work, and Discord as a platform for collaboration. You can make announcements on your social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, prepare the "handouts" in Google Docs, establish communication with participants in a channel and chat in Telegram, and send the recordings of the keynotes to the participants via email.
Conclusion
We’ve all felt the coronavirus's effect on the tech industry, and, due to the circumstances, it is likely that live streaming virtual conferences will become a major tech trend of 2021. While there are some downsides to holding fully online conferences, there are also numerous benefits to virtual events.
In addition to the events help by Evrone, there are many more scheduled tech conferences in 2021 that will likely be moved online. If you are planning to host a virtual conference, we hope that these tips will help make your event a success.
Previously published at https://evrone.com/running-successful-virtual-event-2020. The author of the story is the chief editor at Evrone