VIRTUAL EVENTS ARE ALL THE BUZZ!

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, production world. Welcome to the road ahead. This is Les Goldberg, and I have two amazing guests. I have Lakisha Ann Woods, who's the president and CEO of the National Institute of Building Sciences. And I also have BJ Singh, the president and CEO of EventEQ. EventEQ is our sister company and one of the ETP brands. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the show. Hello. Hello, Les. And thanks. Thanks for joining today. We're super excited. Today we're going to talk about digital virtual events and creating them. And and recently Lakisha you just had an event. So you have lived through the experience. So we're going to ask questions about it. But let's start real quick with BJ, and BJ, can you give us a description of what is a digital virtual event? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's essentially a virtual interpretation of a live event. It can include things like spaces, lobbies, exhibit booths, areas for people to network, and of course the stages and the streams themselves. But it can go beyond that to include pre-event microsites, agendas, registrations and everything needed to create, host and market your event. And probably the most important piece is that because we're in a virtual world, we're able to collect an extensive amount of measurable, actionable data that is sometimes hard to capture at a live event. So. So, Lakisha, tell us about your was this your first digital virtual event? This was our first digital virtual annual meeting. Yes, yes. Okay. And maybe you could just share what was the experience like. And just going down this journey because you're probably used to doing live events where people attend. Very true. Well, one thing that was really great about having our event virtual is it broadens the spectrum of people who can attend, so it expands your audience, expand your reach, and also then in turn allows you to cast a broader net and build the brand awareness that most organizations want and need. So so you were able to expand your audience, and maybe you had X amount of attendees, and this allowed to make it a much broader audience. And did you experience that where you were able to capture a much bigger audience? Because a lot of people were not traveling and they decided to log on? Absolutely. So in past years, of course, I've been in this role about a year and a half. So this was my first produced annual meeting for the organization, but we had about three times the number of attendees at the virtual annual meeting than the previous years. That is awesome. That is awesome. So so BJ, maybe you could describe the product that we use is called Hive that we've developed and maybe you could just give us an overview of what that product is and what makes it unique. Just maybe you could just tell everyone what the description of it and share what our product is for digital virtual events. Yeah. You bet. So you know, our platform, which is called Hive, is essentially everything that I mentioned. It is a complete, comprehensive online solution to host your event, to market your event, and to monetize your event with exhibit floor sponsorship areas. What makes us unique is that we're able to execute an event in about eight weeks, which is pretty unique. Right now, a lot of the other platforms are not able to accommodate an event anytime in 2020. We also have a very robust built in webinar platform that most other platforms lack, and it is very scalable. We are getting ready to do an event with a quarter million attendees in just a few weeks. What's also unique is we also have a very experienced AV team, which most platforms don't offer. So for able to need elevated production value and use our remote cast or studio broadcast and incorporate that, we're able to do that. We have extensive analytics. And last but not the least, lots of opportunities to monetize the event and generate revenue via sponsorships, exhibits and other areas. Got it. It sounds very comprehensive. So, Lakisha, when you were doing your event, did you do a lot of prerecorded where you had maybe some of your breakout speakers where you did pre-record sessions and kind of do those in advance? Yes, we prerecorded all of our sessions because you just never know what you're going to get when it comes to Wi-Fi, the connectivity of your speakers, glitches and just just in general performance. And so it's important to take that when you can take that unknown out of the works. And so we wanted to make sure that we had recorded strong sessions so that when we went live, we were just playing back. And then we did the Q&A. We allowed the speakers the option to answer questions live, reading it from the chat and answering those questions live. And so every speaker chose which option they wanted to do, either typing it in or giving a verbal answer. You know, it's very interesting. We always worry about these. Any type of whether it's a webcast or a digital event. We're so dependent on the internet and people that do things live, there's a certain mitigated amount of risk that you're taking when you do something live. So whether there's a a primary internet connection or a backup one for your live presenter. So whenever these events happen, the weakest link obviously is going to be the internet. And whatever connectivity you have, whether it's cellular or or you're a very or bright a bright house or a spectrum or one of those services, so did your speakers, Lakisha. Did they have any problem adapting to this pre-record and and kind of doing their presentations in this remote way in advance, knowing, you know, sometimes the presentation without audience feedback is a little bit more difficult to do. So it's interesting, I think the one thing that every organization will need to continue to work on is assisting their speakers in this virtual environment. One piece of feedback that we received from many of our speakers was that it was an easy process, so they said that we made it easy for them. So that was wonderful. But then it's still, you know, it's adult learners. And so remembering to be in a location that has strong, powerful internet, no matter what you tell people in advance, when the day of recording comes, for some reason they still don't remember that they needed to test, test and test again. So we had some good and some bad. But again, because we recorded in advance, it gave us an opportunity to rerecord when we needed to. Got it. You know, it's interesting when the camera light goes on and the people realize they're being recorded, sometimes it changes from the natural flow of people talking and communicating on, you know, the Zooms or the go to meetings or the WebEx. So when you started going down this journey, Lakisha, how long did it take you to organize this event from like when the day you said, we're going virtual? How long was the process? Well, we were assuming, you know, we'd like to plan for the hope for the best, but plan for the worst. And so our conference was originally supposed to be in April, and then we moved it to August. And in April, when we moved it to August, we started looking at companies that were taking their meetings virtual. So back in April, we started looking because we wanted to be prepared for, well, what if we can't be face to face in August? What are other people doing? Where are we hearing feedback about what systems work and which ones don't? And let's avoid the ones where people had a catastrophe. It was somebody, a CEO got on a list serve and said, it's the thing you don't want. We went online or conference. All of a sudden in the middle of the session, everything went dark and the company not good. The platform just died. So we were taking list of those. But then when it was time for our executive committee to make the call, okay, we're going virtual. It was about two months out. And so we gave ourselves, you know, 8 to 10 weeks to put this all together. Would you say the goals of the organization and the attendees and the sponsors, would you say in your opinion they were met you globally as far as the when you decided to do this virtual event, everybody agreed that it was, you know, we were going to have to go virtual. No one was ready to to gather together in a confined space with hundreds of people, let alone thousands. But we so everybody knew we needed to go virtual. I think it is because our conference just ended two days ago. It's difficult to say how our sponsors feel about it. The early feedback we've received is this was this was new for them just as much as it was for us, and they weren't quite sure what to expect. So that I think, is something that all systems and companies, people are going to have to refine that sponsor experience. I've attended several virtual meetings and I know when I'm in person, if I physically go into an expo hall because that's where I'm going to go meet somebody or that's where I'm going to eat, or oh, yeah, I should probably walk by this booth. But when you're digital, it really gives you an option to not click if you don't want to. And so companies are really going to have to refine how they support their sponsor needs. But from an attendee perspective, it's so much easier because you can listen to every session, even though they're competing, because you can go back and replay. So more flexibility for the attendee. We still have to find the best way to service the needs of our sponsors. So. So BJ, you made a comment about data analytics and the sponsors and what kind of data are you going to provide to the sponsors about the audience? Give us an example of maybe some of the feedback that they get. Yeah. So essentially we track everything that an attendee does from the time that they log on until they log off. So for the clients, there's a lot of data there in terms of what sessions were popular, what sessions that attendees go to, what exhibitor boots did they go to? Did they network with that exhibit or did they take advantage of any of the offers? We even have built in continuing education tracking, which is very important for a lot of associations. And we can track the fact that the attendee was there from beginning to end. And then if you're actually using our platform for your email communication, we track all the click through. So you have data and they come to the site but not register. Did they register? So pretty much everything that the attendee does and every exhibitor booth they go to and what they can, what they did in that exhibitor booth is all data that we capture and can make that available to the corresponding sponsor. That sounds super. If I was a sponsor, knowing everyone, if I had a real exhibit, it would be almost impossible to know all the attendees that actually hit my exhibit and actually saw it. But virtually I get the data. So, Lakisha, have you heard any feedback from any of your attendees yet? Or do you do like feedback surveys? And it's still so fresh that you might not have had any feedback or have you had any initial feedback? We have had initial feedback. We sent out a survey, but I don't have the results of that survey yet. I think we're going to give them a couple more days to complete it, but we did receive some great verbal feedback from our attendees. At the end of the day, we did networking sessions that people could see each other face to face and talk. And so that's where we gathered that, that feedback from attendees each night that, oh, this was really great. I found this session really helpful and then also gave them that opportunity to talk to other people about what they learned that day, which is something that people are craving in this virtual environment. And so we did set that up as a separate activity in an effort for people to continue to connect face to face and put them into separate small breakout groups to do just that. That is awesome. So, so, BJ, as we've been doing this for the last few months and the digital virtual event has evolved, so to speak. Well, maybe. Can you give some feedback about things we've learned about things that work and maybe things that don't work? Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that we have learned is that there's a lot of fatigue around everything virtual, because all everyone does is set on Zoom and WebEx calls all day. So I think how you structure your agenda, and I think NIBS did a great job. You know, you cannot have eight hours general sessions in a virtual environment. You cannot have 20 breakouts. And I think the amount of time that people are willing to be engaged in an online event is probably the biggest lesson. What is a day and a half show? We're now seeing that spread out sometimes over 3 or 4 days, just because that's just the attention span that most attendees are willing to give in a virtual environment. And the second, I think, is just setting the right expectations. I think Lakisha hit it on the head that their expectations are very different in a virtual environment than they are in live, even though we're trying to recreate the experience. But it is a different expectation. And making sure that we set those big sponsors with attendees is is always a good thing. And last but not the least, I think what nibs did is, is a is a big trend where a lot of presenters that are often very comfortable speaking on a live stage sometimes are not as comfortable speaking to a virtual audience when they don't have that response coming back from the room real time. And so pre-recording is is becoming the norm rather than the exception for a lot of the sessions. Got it. So one day when we go back to live events and this is someday in the future, I'm going like, I don't know how far in the future. I don't know if it's six months a year, whatever the future will bring, but we will be back in a ballroom at some point. What I really want to know is, do you believe that there'll be besides the live event in the future? Do you believe there'll be some digital? Because I think we started this conversation. You said you really had an exponential amount of attendees, you know, versus live versus this virtual. So do you see if you take me into the future? Do you see having a live and having a virtual coexist? What are your thoughts? Absolutely. I think that companies are now recognizing that they will have to accommodate the audience that can't make the travel journey. It allows you to reach a larger audience, and it also accommodates people who don't have the budgets that others do to be able to fly and stay in a hotel and attend your meeting, but they still need the knowledge. They still need that thought leadership so that they can develop in their careers. So I think it is wise for companies to prepare for that, that hybrid model we were already planning when, you know, before any of this happened for our April event, we were going to at least stream our keynotes on Facebook Live. That was already in the plan, so that we could just let people know who we are and share some of that information that people who hadn't registered to, to build awareness of our conference. And of course, when all this happened and it didn't matter, we needed a real professional service to put everything together. But when we go back to being in person, we will still always want to accommodate our virtual attendee, because, I mean, we had people from not just across the United States, but 45 countries. And even in our virtual happy hour, at the end of the day, we had somebody who came in from from Africa and we were, oh, you, you win the award of the furthest distance for happy hour, when normally it's the furthest traveled, the furthest travel distance. Exactly. Yes. And I think this is the happy hour where you have to bring your own libation. Yes, BYOB. So that will be the trick with virtual events. I think companies are going to have to be creative, especially when you're going to charge. You're going to have to be a little more creative in how people can feel connected. You know, what kind of care package can you send out to to paid attendees to make them feel more connected to what they would normally receive if they were in person? Because I know companies who originally made the transition from in-person to digital, and then they thought, oh, we'll just cut the fees by 20%. And they received a lot of criticism. People weren't going to like, you're not feeding me. You're not. I'm just sitting in my house and you're going to try to charge that exorbitant rate. There's got to be more in it for people than just the thought leadership. And so if you want to continue to again, as BJ mentioned, the fatigue, if you want to avoid that fatigue, you've got to make it a little more interesting than just staring at a screen. What else can you incorporate into the event to make people feel connected? You know, I always want to be connected whenever I'm in anything. The connection is such an important component. So BJ, let me ask this question. So we're usually doing the AV and setting up for whether it's a trade show or general session breakouts. And people are producing that that event, that where all the attendees show up. And now we're talking about having this hybrid model, which Lakisha mentioned. So so now there's going to be people producing this live in person meeting, and it might not be as big, but then also they're going to be producing this virtual. So tell me about what the difference in the experiences that have to be put together. So you know, I do agree with Lakisha first that I think that events, whether it's 100% virtual or an extension of a live event when things come back to normal is is never going away. I think on one hand there's fatigue, on the other hand, there's a lot of comfort in being able to participate in an event virtually. I think there's going to be a fear of people's health for foreseeable future. As Lakisha mentioned, budgets are not going to be travel, budgets are going to shrink, venue capacities are going to shrink. And so it's always going to be here. I think, you know, whether it's our platform hive or or an alternative solution. I think the the goal is to give that virtual attendee as close to that live event experience as possible, with them being 100% remote. You know what? I think you all have given everyone a taste of what to expect if they're planning a virtual event. And a couple of key points that I heard were the connection, the fatigue, the trying to provide people value for what they're paying for, and all the things that, Lakisha, that you mentioned. And, BJ, it's truly about creating some experience, and it's a slightly different experience than the one we're used to. So it's all kind of a little new for everybody. We just kind of have to figure it out and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And as we go down this journey, and I think ultimately that there's going to be lots of virtual out there and people are going to be very critical about the experience that they have, and some virtual experiences are going to be great, and those are going to be the winners and other virtual experiences. And I think, Lakisha, you mentioned when the screen goes black and something doesn't work, it's definitely not going to motivate the audience. And so people want their value. So anyway, well, I really appreciate both of you joining today. You know, I think, Lakisha, you've given us an insight from the owner, the stakeholder for a show and someone who just recently completed a show. So I thank you for joining us. And BJ, obviously, for the side of it or someone who had to put the mechanics to deliver the show, I think you both are amazing people, and I thank you so much for joining, and I look forward to many excellent, amazing virtual events in the future. And thanks for joining both of you. And this is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead.