As we’ve seen in Part 1 of this series, virtual conference is more challenging than having just face-to-face encounters separately. To pull off a successful virtual conference, event planners need to have the working knowledge of both physical and virtual conference, as well as cater to the challenges that each event style presents. 

Today, we’re continuing with looking at a few more tips and tricks to own your next virtual conference. This article should help make your journey into the world of virtual conference a much easier one. Check out Part 1 of this article to get more tips and tricks. 

1. Focus on content and engagement

Content is king, and this is true especially for virtual conference. You will need to keep your audiences online engaged and constantly at attention throughout the event, and the best way to do so is to have engaging activities for them to take part in. 

Polls, voting, submitting questions are things that everyone can get involved in using the right tools on the platform. This will help create topics for content for your virtual audiences to engage with. The moderator or emcee can be a facilitator for this, as they are able to engage the audience with questions and information. 

If you want to increase the quality of your content, you can also do it through a questionnaire. This questionnaire can help prepare your prospective attendees for your future event. It can serve as a subtle form of event marketing as it shows respondents that you value their opinion and primes them to look forward to what you are planning.

You should ensure optimal interaction that is planned and managed well to include all participants and for an appropriate amount of time. Take into consideration that many online viewers will be watching alone and so cannot discuss directly with anyone. Still, virtual attendees can still be asked to think and respond via the comments or social media hashtags. 

Do note that the online response may not be as immediate so it’s good to allow some time to accommodate their responses as well. 

2. Choose the right timing

Virtual conference present an excellent opportunity to capture new and engaged audiences as it gives you the chance to reach people from all over the world. 

However, this also means that you will have to be more careful in choosing a date and time for your event. If a virtual conference is broadcasted live to a global audience, you know you have to contend with different time zones. You will have to find a balance between the time of the event locally, as well as to make sure international audiences are able to attend if they should choose to. Planning your virtual conference to accommodate each person’s time of day can be a struggle, but with careful planning and coordination, it can be done.

Another thing to take note about time is that when you are providing a live stream, you should always try to keep to the scheduled timing. This is because some of your audiences may log on specifically to catch certain presentations, speakers or snippets of information at a particular time, and it wouldn’t be good to let your previous speaker’s presentation overrun as this might cause confusion. 

3. Select the right venue

Just like any event, the venue plays one of the most important roles in a virtual event. As the organizer, you will need to make sure that there are sufficient options to accommodate your online audiences. 

Image from: Faber Audiovisuals

For the virtual conference space, you will have to counter issues that frequently plague online events, like attendees struggling to connect to the video or audio, slow feedback on forums or live chats and a lack of networking facilities. If you’re doing live streaming sessions, you should also consider having a good studio that is able to accommodate all your shooting needs, as you don’t want any issues to crop up halfway through your live feed. 

4. Have a great connection

One of the biggest peeves of a virtual conference is bad internet connection, which results in bad video, audio or both. As an organizer, you should always make sure that whoever is hosting your technology, whether hardware or software, should try their utmost best to make sure that they provide the highest quality video or audio for those attending at home. 

Bad feed quality can drastically decrease satisfaction and lead to a poor attendee experience. Also, having choppy video feeds and feeds cutting in and out on a presenter distract the user from the content, which is not something you’d want your attendees to experience at your event. 

To counter this, you need to make sure that the virtual component is fail-safe and that you have a professional IT team on standby to support any tech issues that may crop up during the event. 

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that events are changing towards a world in which virtual conference is key. With virtual conference is becoming increasingly popular and more accessible as the technology advances, we hope that the above tips are useful and able to help you plan your own virtual conference successfully. 

If you’re doing it right, a successful virtual conference can help to broaden your audience and provide more exposure to your event, as well as offer an international perspective and provide a richer experience for everyone involved.

Having an event management company that understands the know-hows of turning your next virtual conference or event into a success is important. At Milestone Production, we’re well-versed with plenty of experience in virtual event planning, from the platform we use down to the different ways to improve interaction between virtual attendees. Our solid team will ensure that all your virtual event needs are met, with customisable solutions for events of any size. 

Embrace the new norm of collaborative virtual events. Go virtual. Go global.

Speak to us at +603 7932 1001 

Email us at hannah@milestone-production.com

With the COVID-19 pandemic situation continuing to pose challenges to event organizers around the country, there have been plenty of new solutions cropping up. Digital solutions and implementations have been favored, with Facebook Live events and Zoom conferences among some of the more popular options. These solutions have slowly gained traction as an increasingly important and successful method of hosting events during this time. 

Virtual conference, as the name suggests, is essentially event which involve online participants enjoying both content and interactivity in real time, even from different locations.

Image from: MeetingHand

Virtual conference may seem easier to organize, but in actuality, they are more challenging than physical events. To pull off a successful virtual conference, event planners need to have the working knowledge of both physical and virtual events, and with it, a myriad of challenges that will not be as easily resolved. 

Today, we’ll be looking at some tips and tricks to organize and conduct a virtual conference. If this is your first time planning a virtual event, don’t worry. This article should help make your journey into the world of virtual conference a much easier one. 

Before you continue, check out our comprehensive look at hybrid events here.

1. Choose the right platform

First and foremost, choosing the right virtual platform in which to host your virtual conference should be one of the key factors you should look at. 

A good virtual conference platform should be able to combine the physical event planning software that is crucial for you to stay organized, as well as the virtual event options to accommodate your online audiences. This includes options like uploading videos, live chat and lead generation features for sponsors and vendors. 

A high-quality virtual conference platform is able to cover all of these options, while giving you great audience engagement as well. Some of the features you should be looking out for include live chat, lead generation, social media connection, the ability to upload pre-recorded videos, live video and feed recording, among others.

Virtual conference platforms are also able to capture important data and the insights that you can glean to make your next event so much more successful. Some of the data you’ll be glad to have include the participation numbers, engagement and drop out rates. By evaluating your attendees’ data during the event, you can gain more insights and information on your attendees, and improve your future content. 

2. Identify your audiences

Virtual conference allows you to increase your reach and capture more attendees. Virtual conference present an excellent opportunity to capture new and engaged audiences as it gives you the chance to reach the kinds of people that ordinarily wouldn’t have been interested in the event, simply because they had no intention of attending in person. 

This is usually for two reasons, firstly because they’re unsure what benefits there are to attending the event in person, and secondly, geographical restrictions don’t allow them to travel. An added advantage is that virtual attendees can even join in from anywhere in the world!

Image from: The Future of Customer Engagement

3. Planning your virtual event

A fully virtual conference is not just a straightforward rehash of physical events with digital elements. This is why preparation and planning are so important. 

Firstly, the most important things like slides, video and other background information need to be prepared, loaded onto your platform of choice and tested in advance. You should be aware of any deadlines and any complexities which will be required so that you will have more time to prepare the materials rather than have a last minute rush. You should also find out if there are any flexibility for changes or additions to your prepared content. 

Another thing that you should prepare for a virtual conference is the technical preparations for your participants. Things like access links for your participants, live chat systems, rooms for discussion (if there are any), and Q&A sessions are things that should be tested in advance before the actual event. The last thing you would want to have happening during the event is participants not being able to join because of a wrong link, or discussion rooms not being prepared for networking sessions. 

Testing is also an important part of the planning process. No matter how many times you have planned your online event or virtual conferences, you should always test and retest your systems to make sure that the virtual experience you are providing is a good one.

Image from: Parker Design

Testing will usually help you sort out any issues with the software or platform you are using and identify any problems you may have with providing content or ensuring that the live chat works, for example. This is also true for camera placement and positioning. You don’t want to have a camera facing a blind spot for the whole duration of your event!

Like any event, you should have an event flow, so that everyone is on the same page on what is happening and when. This will be a good guiding point for your planning team, as well as your speakers and participants. It’s always good to be prepared as much as possible before the event. 

4. Have a great moderator / emcee 

Any good event should have an equally good mix of speakers, as well as a fantastic host or emcee to keep everyone’s spirits up. We cannot say much about having good speakers at your event, as this is wholly dependent on whether you or your client is able to engage relevant speakers befitting the event. However, we can say that research and knowledge into your event subject matter is key to engaging the right speakers for your event. 

As an event organizer, you should know that having someone to motivate your audience to stay alert, engaged, and excited about the content is very important. As a facilitator of the event, the virtual emcee or moderator is a key link between the content and the online audiences. They will be able to keep each session participant focused and keep each attendee more engaged with the content overall. 

Furthermore, they are able to manage the flow of the event as well, by contributing feedback, questions and comments from the online participants to the speakers. Not only will this further build a rapport between both speakers and audiences, it will also provide more engagement for the event. 

More details to be continued in Part 2

If you are starting to wonder how your next virtual conference can benefit from these tips and trick, pop us a a line at :-

hannah@milestone-production.com  

+603 7932 1001