Five Things to Know to Run a Successful Live Virtual Event

Recently I was interviewed by Authority Magazine for an article on running successful live virtual events.  Here are the five pieces of advice I shared with readers, based on our experience facilitating 389 live virtual conferences and thousands of smaller virtual meetings and events in 2020 for some of the world’s largest global financial institutions:

1. Hold your event live, but pre-record as much content as you can. Running an event in real-time is the best way to create a dynamic, shared experience for your audience that has the energy and feel of an in-person event. However, pre-recording material like keynote and plenary sessions in advance allows for higher production values and reduces the risk of a live performance. Don’t be afraid to shoot keynote talks in unusual places. At CMWorld, for example, keynote speaker Andrew Davis shot his keynote in a half-dozen different locations, each of which helped emphasize a point in his talk by changing context.
2. Use a host or “ringmaster” to set the stage and provide continuity. It’s helpful to have a credible host to articulate the themes of the event and to tie each of the plenary sessions together. CMWorld used content marketing guru Robert Rose to give the opening keynote and to provide introductions to each of the other main speakers over the course of a three-day event. He also summed up each day’s content and teased that of the next day.
3. Engage your audience with interactivity. Even if your content is pre-recorded, you can encourage your viewers to stay involved by offering live Q&A sessions or taking polls and reporting the results live. At CMWorld, while the keynotes were all pre-recorded, questions were encouraged and answered live after the plenary sessions.
4. Shorten your sessions. We’ve found that keynote talks and breakout sessions can be much more efficiently delivered online. At CMWorld, the typical 45- to 60-minute keynote and 50-minute breakouts were shortened to 30 minutes, and the entire conference was shortened by a day. Nobody missed a thing.
5. Your conference will generate a lot of data — use it! One of the unique characteristics of a virtual conference is that it generates a wealth of information about your content and your attendees — information that is simply not available in a physical conference. This data is remarkably useful for planning content for future conferences and for sorting attendees based on interests. CMWorld offered sponsorships for many of its sessions and tracks. In return, these sponsors received valuable lists of attendees who engaged with the content, ultimately increasing the value of the sponsorship.

Read the Entire Interview