Making the Most of Your Virtual Conference: 8 Best Practices

This is a guest blog post provided by our friends at Nexus Marketing.

Virtual conferences provide a less expensive alternative for connecting with target audiences. However, not many nonprofits can make the most of the opportunities virtual events present. This is largely due to poor planning strategies and a lack of insight into such events’ real potential.

To organize virtual conference sessions and get the most from them, consider the following best practices:

Let’s dive in to learn more!

1. Set Your Conference Goals and KPIs in Advance

The first step towards realizing the true potential of your conference is to set clear goals. To develop realistic goals for your event, consider your primary motivations, then brainstorm around your team’s event goals. You can also talk to other conference organizers to learn about their experience and use that as a guide to set goals for your event.

Once you have set your event goals, use them to generate key performance indicators (KPIs) for your conference. KPIs are primarily used to determine whether or not an event is successful. However, when you determine KPIs in advance, they can guide the strategies you will use to move the event forward.

Some examples of conference KPIs include:

Event registration and attendance: measured by total registrations and actual attendance on the platform.
Attendee interaction: measured by messages exchanged within the conference community.
Event networking: measured by the number of 1:1 meetings, private chats, video calls, etc.
Event and speaker engagement: measured by session attendance, participation rate in live polls and Q&A, as well as comments during an event session.
Gross revenue: measured by the number of tickets sold, dollars fundraised, merchandise sales, and sponsorship revenue among other metrics.
Sponsor satisfaction: measured by positive feedback from sponsors and indication towards sustaining partnership for future events.

Setting your conference goals early can also help you to determine which audience to target, which speakers to invite, and which sponsors to partner with for the event.

2. Choose an Effective Virtual Event Platform

The success of a virtual conference is, in large part, determined by the virtual event platform your organization chooses. It is critical to find a platform with the capabilities and requirements to run your event successfully. Apart from budget considerations, look for a platform that offers the following:

Capacity to accommodate events of any size
Full platform customization
Webinar capabilities with embedded interactive tools
Customized agenda for attendees
Interactive tools
Multi-screen solutions
Mobile event app
Intuitive navigation
Real-time event analytics and reporting
Sponsorship and exhibition

If you have additional event requirements, don’t hesitate to ask the platform provider. You can also request a demo to better understand the event experience the platform provides.

3. Expand Your Reach To Increase Attendance

Increase conference attendance through strategic outreach. It’s recommended that you implement a multi-channel approach for event promotion. Here are some platforms to consider:

Event landing page or microsite
Email promotion
Social media
Paid social media
Press release
Partner promotion, such as speakers and sponsors

Since it is possible to reach a global audience with the virtual conference, you can also target audiences in new locations using past audiences’ profiles as a guide.

4. Plan Your Virtual Event Content and Sessions

One of the ways to immerse attendees into the event experience is to create intriguing educational sessions. If you can get attendees engaged, they will be more likely to participate effectively in the other aspects of the event like networking, gamification, polling, fundraising, exhibition, and more.

Send Pre-event Surveys to Past Attendees

To plan content that will resonate with attendees, consider current challenges and other emerging issues that affect your industry. To gauge this, send out pre-event surveys to past attendees to ask them questions about what topics they hope to see in your planned conference. You can also list several topics and ask participants to rate them based on how important they think they are.

Ask them what they think about your planned speakers or suggestions on speakers. This practice will help you to decide ahead on the topics and speakers that will intrigue attendees most.

Decide on Content Delivery Format

How you deliver your webinar sessions matters when it comes to attendee engagement. There are two primary options to consider for this: live and pre-recorded webinars.

Your virtual event platform should support both formats and should include embedded interactive tools like Q&A, live chat, and polling for speaker-audience interaction. For live webinars, you can also decide whether they will be a one-way interaction or if everyone will have their cameras on. Your choice will depend on whether the event is presentation-focused or interaction-focused.

5. Prepare Speakers and Attendees for the Event

To get the most from your event, prepare both speakers and attendees for the event experience. On the part of speakers, ensure that they are familiar with the tools they need to connect, present and engage the audience. For attendees, guide them on platform navigation and the tools they need to connect, interact, and network.

Create informative FAQ pages where you provide guides for both speakers and attendees on the use of the platform. You can also provide a support channel on the platform where participants can log issues and resolve them quickly.

6. Give Sponsors and Exhibitors Ample Opportunities

Sponsor satisfaction is essential to generating more sponsorship revenue and retaining exhibitors’ loyalty for upcoming events. Consider different ways to facilitate interaction and networking between attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors so that sponsors can have value for their partnership. Therefore helps sponsors achieve the following from your conference:

Maximum brand awareness
Lead generation opportunities
Sales

You can create brand awareness by featuring sponsors’ logos and banners on the event home screen, mobile event app, session pages, agenda pages, poll results pages, donation pages, event public forum, email communications, social media, and more.

Offer virtual exhibition halls and virtual booths for each sponsor so that attendees can meet with them privately. You can help facilitate these meetings by creating user and sponsor profiles on your platform where attendees can find sponsors that match their interests and vice-versa.

7. Gather Data Insight throughout The Conference Lifecycle

One of the benefits of virtual events is the ease of tracking and retrieving essential data. These data points help to unlock valuable insights regarding attendees’ journey, behaviors, interests, and preferences. Such information is retrievable throughout your event lifecycle.

Below are some suggestions on the data to track and retrieve:

Results of marketing strategies
Event session registrations
Live polls and post-event surveys
Messages exchanged within the event platform
Content engagement
Speaker engagement
Sponsor engagement
Social media engagement

Discuss with your platform provider ahead to specify the kind of data you will like to track before, during, and after your conference.

8. Execute a Solid Post-event Strategy

Post-conference activities can generate additional results for your conference. Keep up with your event attendees and sponsors through communication, feedback collection, engagements, and special offerings. Specifically, consider the following:

Send post-event surveys to attendees and sponsors
Make content available on-demand and re-purpose event content for capturing more supporters and engagement
Maintain your event community year-round

You can keep your conference platform open year-round so you can continue to engage attendees with additional content and offers. By doing so, you can grow a support community for your nonprofit

Your event goals and KPIs are the most critical factors towards getting the most from your virtual conference session. Think carefully about them, and once they are in order, you’ll require a suitable virtual event platform to drive your strategy. These two are foundational to getting the most from your conference.

About the Author

Jordan Schwartz is president and co-founder of Pathable, an event app and website platform for conferences and tradeshows. He left academic psychology for the lure of software building, and spent 10 years at Microsoft leading the development of consumer-facing software. Frustrated with the conferences he attended there, he left Microsoft in 2007 with the goal of delivering more value and better networking opportunities through a next-generation conference app. Jordan moonlights as a digital nomad, returning often to his hometown of Seattle to tend his bee hives.

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Kristin Steele