5 Keys to Planning A Successful Virtual Event
- By Daniel Hennes
- Sep 04, 2022
5 Tips for Executing a Successful Virtual Event
As we emerge from Covid, in person events are coming back. While virtual events may not be as necessary anymore, they are still incredibly popular due to their ease of execution, lower costs, and the fact that people can watch from the comfort of their own home. In fact, around 60% of workers who moved to work remotely during the pandemic reported that if given the choice, they would continue to work from home. It is clear that even as we enter a post-Covid era, these virtual events are here to stay and we have the 5 keys to make them outstanding.
1. Limit the Length
These days, it can be difficult to capture an audience’s attention and even more so to keep it. Especially without in person stimulation or obligation to pay attention, virtual events can be difficult to keep an audience engaged. People have busy schedules and logging on to an online event for too long on top of that can quickly lead to viewers getting distracted or bored. The mental exhaustion of “Zoom fatigue” is a real issue, so keeping the length of a virtual event to an hour or less is vital to holding viewers’ attention.
2. Encourage Audience Engagement
It is crucial for a virtual event to allow time for question and answer interaction to keep audience members engaged. Even having viewers feed questions into a chat throughout a webinar can make them feel more involved. Pure lecturing can be easy for an audience to lose attention, particularly on a virtual platform. At home distractions and not being in the same space as a speaker can create a big disconnect between speaker and viewer, so encouraging your audience to be a part of the event will maintain their attention and further their interest. Creating a more interactive environment where audience members are directly engaging with a speaker will lead to a better event overall.
3. Make Sure the Subject is Relevant to Everyone
Virtual events already feel less personal than live ones, so catering to the interest of an audience is extremely important. Send out polls to get a grasp of preference on topics and speakers, understand what content is relevant to your audience, and then use that to find the right speaker with the right subject matter expertise. Getting opinions from viewers beforehand is not only important to ensure that they will be interested during the event, but also to make employees feel that they have a say and are being heard within the company.
4. Do a Pre-event Call with the Speaker
This is an essential part of planning any event, but even more so for virtual events because of their brevity. It is important that audience members are engaged for the entire time. As an event host, it is crucial that you organize with an event speaker to ensure that they are able to capture your vision for the event. Make sure you know what you want to accomplish and then work with your speaker to be able to nail those goals. Whether that be going over visual aides, key speaking points and stories, or overall message, it is critical that everyone be on the same page.
5. Create a Tangible Post-event Action
It is important to make sure that your event resonates with viewers and that it will have a lasting impact even after it ends. What good is hosting an event if people don’t remember it? Getting viewers to continue to think about your speaker can be accomplished by scheduling discussion sessions in smaller groups, sending out surveys, sending out a recording for future viewing, or anything else to keep audience members engaged even after the event and to get them excited for the next one.
Should I book a speaker for my event?
In today’s age, our attention span is dwindling. A technological era in which we can get rushes of dopamine to our brain in a couple seconds by scrolling on a variety of social media platforms has created an atmosphere where we quickly become uninterested by something if we are not immediately curious to hear more. In an event, this means being able to grab your audience’s attention immediately and pull them in, wanting to hear more. This is where hiring a speaker for an event comes into play. The speakers that are on Engage’s website are some of the most high-class, interesting stories you will ever hear. Engage has the stories and speakers that will hold your audience captive with interest.
To learn more about Engage, its talent, and how to book your next speaker contact us at info@letsengage.com or visit https://www.letsengage.com/.
