Whether you’re planning a small virtual meeting or a major global industry conference, some valuable practices will help you organize your online event in the right way and make it memorable. Here is more about it.
Moving online: how to make a virtual conference successful?
In modern reality, business leaders have changed their minds about working from home, with many now attending and even hosting virtual events. People are often pleasantly surprised by the quality of the audio-visual material, the attendance, and the ease of sharing content during and after the event. Plus, you don’t have to commute to work or walk back and forth to convention centers all day.
The goal of a virtual conference is to deliver the same experience that a participant would have if they were physically present. It should include different ways of interacting and the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers. Today there are other digital technologies. They allow visitors to fully immerse themselves in the virtual world of the conference, as close as possible to the real one.
The top 10 practices for a successful virtual event
But hosting a virtual conference requires different planning, skills, and best practices to enable professional videoconferencing and ensure the privacy of organizers and attendees. Here are ten best practices to achieve this:
- Plan your virtual events as carefully as your real ones. It means doing everything: choosing an interesting, timely topic and agenda, attracting participants and sponsors, communicating with all stakeholders, and preparing speakers in advance. Virtual events are great for building community and sharing content, so prepare presentations and recordings.
- Choose a hot topic. Without a physical location, it can be especially difficult to group virtual conference sessions within a relevant context. To benefit from a virtual conference, bring all your sessions, courses, and workshops together with one clear, central theme.
- Include live video broadcasts in the program. One of the most effective ways to attract visitors is through live broadcasts. They bring a much-needed element of human interaction, without which they can seem completely impersonal. It is possible with the help of a virtual data room. It is a digital platform designed for arranging a secure virtual workspace for business communication. In addition, the software ensures many useful tools for data management.
- Appoint multiple moderators. Moderators will be responsible for keeping track of who joins the event, muting/unmuting speakers, posting the optimal video layout at the right time, and answering questions from attendees from speakers.
- Form a dialogue. Before the broadcast, invite the participants to send you their questions and suggestions, and at the end of the broadcast, give them your answers. People who ask questions are much more likely to stay until the end of the broadcast to hear your answers.
- Create interesting content. Data room technologies allow you to add visual content or other relevant data to the discussed topic. They are designed so that you can deliver an unforgettable experience and keep visitors coming back for more information.
- Don’t forget the details. Create a checklist of everything you need to do before the conference. Most data room services allow automatic recording by default through the event settings.
- Encourage communication. Data room platforms such as Intralinks, Firmex, or Digify have chat features that allow you to have discussions during a session and send private messages to participants after it has ended.
- Keep it simple. Think about what aspects can be simplified as much as possible, leaving only the basics.
- Don’t forget to collect feedback. When organizations develop something new and implement it, they always ask the participants if it works.