Thinking about Virtualizing an Event? Here’s What We’ve Learned

Like all organizations that host annual in-person conferences, we had to make the tough decision to cancel, postpone, or pivot to a virtualized convening. In early March—when we were all racing to adjust to the new reality brought on by COVID-19, and for the safety and well-being of everyone involved— we decided to take a wild leap into the unknown and transform our annual OPEN conference into our first-ever live virtual conference in a matter of 10 days.

The experience was intense, educational, and (surprisingly!) fun. Many thanks to the hundreds of participants and dozens of presenters for joining us on our journey. Since that time we have been contacted by numerous people and organizations to share lessons learned from our trial by fire process. In light of the requests, we decided to put together a free webinar to help others that were making their way down the same novel path of creating online events.

Key Takeaways from our Experience

Focus on your goals: If you can refine your goals for your event at the outset, you will do yourself and your team a favor for the remaining hundreds of decisions that you are about to make! For example, is high touch engagement and interaction between presenters and attendees your goal? If so, you will want to select the appropriate tool and process to support that goal. If your goal is to showcase people’s work, then you will likely want to select a different tool and process to support that goal.

Keep it simple: If this is your first foray into hosting an online event, try to avoid using all the bells, whistles, and new tools available (there are so many now!). Instead, focus on one or two key tools to achieve your goals and get to know them well.

Acknowledge–and embrace–the benefits and drawbacks: There will be bumps and blessings along the way. Practice compassion with yourself, your team, and your speakers when things go the right way and sideways. We discovered many silver linings in hosting our virtualized event; more people were able to attend our conference sessions than would have been possible due to time, cost, and room size capacity. Shifting online also reduced our collective environmental footprint.

Learn more tips for success and things we would do differently by downloading the recording of the Presenting a Virtualized Event webinar here. (When prompted, please use this password to access the recording: 4D+Uxme*). For more detailed takeaways, check out this blog post.

Teaching Design and Innovation Online Webinar

Don’t miss VentureWell’s next free webinar in our series, Teaching Design and Innovation Online on May 28 at 2pm ET. You’ll have the opportunity to engage with design faculty in an interactive conversation to explore the topic of bringing creativity tools and approaches into an online classroom. Register here.