9 Lessons Learned After Planning a Virtual Event
Planning a virtual event isn’t something entirely new. If you’re in enablement chances are you’ve planned many virtual trainings, meetings, and your fair share of activities in a virtual setting. Now that it is 2021 and we are nowhere near close to having this virus contained, it is pretty clear everyone is scrambling to plan their Sales Kick-Off (SKO) virtually this year.
You don’t need to follow my input, but take some time to review the 9 lessons I learned while scoping, planning, and creating an incredibly well-received virtual SKO.
- Start early
This may seem like a no brainer but 2 months isn’t enough time for your virtual event. Videos take time to draft, storyboard, create, animate, review, and approve. In fact, the video creation cycle takes about 1.5–2 months in most circumstances. The last thing you want is to have silly mistakes that could have been avoided if you gave everyone enough time to do their various roles.
It is also prudent to leave room for error. If this is your first virtual event, what kind of technology do you intend to use? A mixture of live, semi-live, pre-recorded? How will you make sure all of those are working together? Where will they be hosted? Are there security concerns? What happens if the link gets out to the internet? Where does your audience live? How many streams will you run? How will you do that with a global audience and your existing tech?
These are all challenges and discussions we needed to have before going live with our event. Do you best to get ahead of them and be sure to ask about SSO before you commit to a tool or virtual platform.
2. Create a goal
This may seem like a no-brainer, but what outcomes are you looking to achieve? Is this training? Informative? A product launch? Really slow down and ask yourself what you want to achieve in this 2–3 day event.
We landed on engaging our audience with sales related information, a new sales direction, and introduced a new tool that will help them on the job. Everything else from keynotes to presentations were all meant to be informative and inspirational. The good old reset button before starting the new sales year.
3. Come up with a plan
Now that you have a goal in mind, how are you going to execute on it? What do you want your people to do to prove competency or in our case — how do we measure “inspiration”?
We decided, given our very small window of opportunity, that we would limit the amount of live and Zoom meetings because we didn’t want to burn out our group with another endless, this-could-have-been-an-email, Zoom meeting. Plus, we had the opportunity to mix it up a little so we did. A few sessions were live, some pre-recorded presentations, panel discussions, and a healthy mix of voices from the field telling their story with motion graphics to accompany their talk track. This does require a fair bit of planning but if you get everyone to agree on the plan then things will go smoothly.
4. Align on the plan
Here is where the fun begins. After scoping everyone’s objectives, talking points, and desired outcomes we had to digest it and pitch the solutions from the previous point. One of the challenges working in a virtual environment and creating a virtual event is that people really don’t know what they don’t know. It requires trust, patience, and understanding all around. While easy to type in a post after the fact, it was very difficult when the rubber hit the round and we were a few weeks out without much to review.
In this situation, we met with each Subject Matter Expert (SME), pitched our proposal, and aligned on what kind of solution we will build given the timeframe. In a perfect world, everyone agrees, we move forward, and we launch an amazing event. In the real world… Well, read the next point to learn more.
5. Realign the plan
We had a plan. We have deadlines for deliverables. We are ready to go. Until we are not. Scripts come in late (or not at all), SMEs miss steps and just plunge into building their deck without a script, and all the recordings come faster than expected. What may be two calendar weeks away will feel like two minutes when the rubber meets the road.
If you don’t remember anything from this post remember this — hire a program manager. We are a scrappy bunch and pulled off an event with an amazingly high NPS score, but many of the headaches, sleepless nights, and issues could have been swiftly avoided if we had a program manager responsible for content. Pay the money, designate them as the lead, and assign them with all power between the SME and vendor.
6. Include cross functional teams
Another no-brainer, but our sales team gave the highest reviews to the competitive and value team. The storyline, navigating the customer’s needs, win and losses each taught the field a valuable lesson. Be sure to include more than just your team of choice (e.g, in this case sales) and bring in as many voices as you can muster in the timeframe you have available. It may be more work on you, but it will lead to more user engagement and a better overall experience.
7. Engagement doesn’t mean what you think it means
This one blew me away. Not only did we deliver an amazing virtual experience, but we added in a virtual platform that allowed us to have chat functions. Worked with a vendor to create an entire virtual world that hosted all event-related content, and allowed our users to play games, interact with the environment, and learn, all at the same time.
It was truly an amazing experience.
Another positive consequence of pre-recording content is that your SMEs are free from presenting so they can focus on other tasks. Each of our sessions were “staffed” by the SME and their team. So they were in the room, answering questions, providing feedback, and sharing their thoughts in real time. It was truly a spectacular experience for our presenters and learners alike.
8. Don’t present content, tell a story
Nobody wants to be talked to. Especially for 4–5 hours a day (this is the recommended max, don’t go over this!). The content may be valuable but if it is told in a disengaging manner then it won’t matter how good the story is if nobody is paying attention. This is where point #3 comes into play. Creating a script allows you to get in front of any superfluous information and make cuts before you record. Don’t skip this step. It takes more work but it will save you time in the long run.
9. Try something you’ve never done before
This was the best part of our event. We worked with a creative team to help build the video, add animations, and bring the stories to life. While this was in the expected scope of the project, they came up with a way to keep people coming back for more.
Enter a Pixar-style story. The team came up with a 15-part story (broken into 2–3 minute chunks) that played throughout the 2-day event. Not only did this keep everyone at the edge of their seat waiting to see the fate of the snowflake (the premise of the story) but kept them coming back for more. It was truly phenomenal to monitor the chat/Slack channels throughout the organization and see people eager to consume more content, learn more about the snowflake, and hear more from their leaders and peers.
While there were many concessions along the way, this was truly a magical event that will make going back to in-person events difficult to top.