The Dos and Don’ts of Planning Your Virtual Event
Kerianne Gibney, former Consultant
Boulder, CO
As many of our clients continue to make the transition from in-person events to various forms of virtual engagement, Corner Alliance has identified what works well and what could be improved for future virtual engagement opportunities as they become the norm.
While virtual engagement is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach for clients, there are inevitable hurdles to overcome and challenges to navigate. Our lessons learned will help you avoid tricky situations, traverse new territory, and lead to successful execution.
The Dos
Corner Alliance adheres to similar Dos when planning and executing in-person events, however, we’re here to tell you which Dos are even more critical for your virtual engagement. Coordinating the execution of an event on a digital platform with a team in remote environments is no simple feat. The following actions will keep your plan synchronized and on track.
Planning
Set a realistic timeline with an attainable end goal. Outline key performance indicators (KPIs) upfront and determine how your team will meet them. Confirm the timeline, milestones, and end goal with all team members before getting started.
Divide and conquer. Identify and assign roles to your team members in advance. For larger engagements, designate task leads for various components of the project, empowering each of them to prioritize and delegate assignments, conduct iterative reviews, and make some of their own choices.
Make it attractive. Create branding and style guidance to consistently use throughout your engagement campaign. Remember, all content will be produced in a digital format. Stakeholders are already consuming so much digital content and yours needs to stand out. Think sleek, bold, and intriguing.
Over-communicate everything. Check-in often with both your team and stakeholders – clear communication is key. Without the ability to meet regularly in-person, you will be relying solely on electronic communication and conference calls. Emails may get lost in inboxes and verbal communication may be forgotten. Don’t hesitate to repeat yourself, follow-up, and frequently emphasize the most important details and deadlines. While over-communicating the engagement details, tasks, and logistics, be sure to also build enthusiasm throughout the entire planning process.
Just because the planning stage is through and your communications campaign and virtual engagement are prepared for launch, doesn’t mean your job is complete. As you get ready to launch your virtual engagement be prepared, be ready, and be available for your attendees. Even while your engagement takes off, it’s important to remain focused and keep your end goal in mind.
Execution
Engage partners and influencers early on. These parties are key players in the promotion of your “event.” Share any branded materials such as outreach flyers, social media tiles, and complementary messaging to make their promotions as easy as possible.
Practice. Practice. Practice. Test the audiovisual controls, platform capabilities, and user experience. Recruit others who are unfamiliar with the platform to test them too. Conduct dry runs with any speakers, providing constructive feedback to keep audience members engaged without the in-person interaction. Allow any opportunity to detect A/V issues before they happen and create a risk mitigation plan in case they arise.
Be a reliable resource. Consider developing a recorded webinar, video tutorial, or user-guide if your engagement platform is new to your client or their stakeholders and requires some education. Publicize the available channels in which attendees can contact you for technical support throughout the virtual engagement.
Collect and respond to feedback. Participants may not be able to get their questions answered on the spot while they’re digesting content from behind a screen. Create an effective feedback loop to solicit reactions and questions from attendees during and after your virtual engagement. Deploy satisfaction surveys and follow-up with responses to any questions submitted.
The Don’ts
Some challenges of virtual engagements may differ from those experienced while planning and executing a typical in-person event. For example, meeting space, lodging, and travel logistics are non-issues for virtual engagements. However, that doesn’t mean there are no roadblocks when it comes to virtual engagement. In fact, there are some challenges entirely unique to virtual engagements. We’re here to tell you what not to do in order to avoid potential traps as you plan and execute and provide alternate solutions to reach success.
Planning
Don’t overlook the Assess and Plan phases. Instead, analyze all available data about your client’s stakeholders or past engagements. What worked? What didn’t work? What is most important to your stakeholders? Spend adequate time in the assess and plan phases before implementing. Once you have an approved strategy, then you can create tactics.
Don’t set obscure goals. Instead, set clear, specific, measurable goals for your engagement. Do you want to gain new stakeholders? Do you want to drive interest in a new research area? Additionally, consider the metrics you can track online: number of session views, number of new followers on Twitter, number of virtual networking sign-ups, number of new newsletter subscribers, etc. Check out another blog post in this series about measuring success to learn more!
Don’t overcommit your resources. Instead, refer to your strategy and goals when determining when to say “yes.” It’s okay to not say “yes” to everything. If your goal is to gain new stakeholders, say “yes” to a detailed outreach plan, but not individualized emails for invitees already in your network. If your goal is to drive interest in a new research area, say “yes” to promotional videos highlighting the importance and impact of the research area, but not the production of additional videos for regularly scheduled content. Consider what will be manageable for your team to do and to do well.
Execution
Don’t use chain of command approvals. Instead, identify a single decision maker; this is especially crucial during tight turnarounds. While there may be empowered task leads, they are ultimately serving as team contributors with designated thresholds for their independent decisions.
Don’t use too many platforms for a single engagement. Instead, keep the user experience as seamless as possible. Have a single point of entry to access your virtual engagement (e.g., website landing page, mobile application, virtual conference lobby, etc.). If you are going to use various platforms, make sure they are integrated in a way that is easy to follow.
Corner Alliance Can Help
At Corner Alliance, we view change as opportunity. Change allows us to learn, grow, and evolve. As more and more events go virtual, we must adapt to meet our stakeholders in the middle. These Dos and Don'ts have helped us exceed expectations when leading and supporting several recent innovative efforts. With credible experience transforming events into an entirely digital format, we hope the insight we’ve gained can help you too. So you don’t have to learn lessons the hard way, check out our downloadable content, Getting Started with Virtual Engagements for Government: Five Key Variables to Consider, demonstrating how Corner Alliance can help you achieve success with your next virtual engagement.
Author
Kerianne Gibney, former Consultant to NIST’s PSCR Division, has a mission to make a powerful impact. She has experience with meeting design, meeting facilitation, and virtual engagement, most recently with PSCR 2020: The Digital Experience. With a background in Public Health Science, she is passionate about improving public safety by helping to advance communications technology for first responders.