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In the episode, I want to talk about why it’s important to focus on online conference delivery. You made all these sales. You have everyone in the door, but you also really want to deliver a great experience, deliver a great event so everyone’s excited, they’ve learned a lot and they’re ready to come back for the next one that you run as well.
Focus on delivering a really great conference experience for your attendees.
You want to make sure that they’re enjoying themselves, that they’re learning a lot, that they think things are well-organized, that they’re not getting frustrated because they can’t log in or can’t find their password or can’t find the right pages to go to. You want to alleviate all that. The bigger the event, the harder this is to accomplish.
The Digital Dust Safety Conference (DDSC) had 52 presentations, attended by almost 250 people from 25 countries across 12 different time zones. There were over 50 speakers that needed to be corralled and cajoled into showing up on time and working with our technology.
I thought at least there’d be a 1% failure rate or 2% failure rate. Over 52 presentations, one, two, three, four of them would go off wrong or stop or videos would freeze or something, but it didn’t. It actually ran without a hitch. My power actually flickered on the 52nd presentation on the fourth day, which could have kicked everyone out of that meeting and we would have lost on the last presentation. But fortunately my power stayed on and we were able to finish with this perfect score for our event.
Great conferences are run by a great team.
I pulled together a core team of three to run the DDSC: a moderator, an event organizer, and a research and support person.
The moderator introduced speakers, collected questions during the presentation and shared them during the Q&A period.
The event organizer made sure the speakers were on time and ready, that the presentations were correct and queued, and answered help desk questions.
The research and support person had a relaxed role. They were just responsible for attending for seeing the conference through the eyes of an attendee, for taking notes about the sessions, which we’d use then to summarize the sessions after the event and just helping where needed. If the help desk emails got too many, then the event organizer could hand that off to the research and support person. If I needed something set up, then I could request that through our Slack channel.
Great teams and great conferences need to be supported with great tools.
Delivering such a lengthy and complicated conference would have been much harder without the right tools for the task. We saved ourselves time and energy with these tools at hand.
- A single spreadsheet with all the conference links
Between our platform, 10XPro, and our webinar software, Zoom, we had up to six different links for each presentation. To keep track of attendee links, speaker links, moderator links, and organizer links, we used Google Sheets to corral all the links in one place. - A public facing program page
Instead of having automated emails that went out every 30 minutes, we created a responsive program page in 10xPro with daily tabs and times with links to the presentations. That same program page also housed the presentation recordings once they became available. Attendees could see where we were in the schedule and catch up on any missed presentations from one place. - A single spreadsheet with speaker information
This was just one sheet with a tab for each presentation and a few bullet points that I used as the moderator for the introduction of the speaker, their affiliation, their role, and the correct enunciation of their name. I also copied questions from the presentation into this document.
In addition to a great team and the right tools, we also created standard operating practices, or SOPs, to ensure that we were providing our attendees with a consistently excellent experience.
We invited all of the presenters to practice sessions to run through their slides, we ran through our own processes multiple times, and we developed step-by-step documents to ensure that all 52 of the presentations came off without a hitch.
In all this, we still managed to surprise ourselves with the outcomes of the testing and practice.
Five tips to ensure conference delivery success for your online event.
First, put yourself in the schedule. By taking advantage of the event as an opportunity to speak, you can direct the messaging. In my case, this conference was about industrial safety with attendees who provided equipment and services, many of whom are competing for the same space. So I did want to control the messaging to ensure a neutral conference with multiple opinions.
Speaking also positions you as the authority. It allows you to give basic and general information about the overall event, but it kind of rubs off that you are the authority if you’re speaking at the event. So I put myself as the morning keynotes for each session and I was always present. I was there moderating each session. This really allowed me to be put at the forefront as being involved with all the speakers, really helped increase my authority and also interaction with the audience.
Second, have a team of at least three people. As mentioned previously, you’ll be very busy and won’t have time to worry about where the speakers are. Having someone to rely on for various aspects of the event can positively impact the smoothness and efficiency, going a long way to providing a flawless attendee experience.
Third, host the presentations on your own computer. This allows you to collect the presentations beforehand. If you’ve got the slides organized and share them from your computer, you can make sure the formatting makes sense, make sure there’s nothing that’s inappropriate. Additionally, if one of your panellists is disconnected during the presentation, the whole panel still have the files in front of them. It was helpful, too, because if the speakers got lost or closed something by mistake, I had that computer right there. I could take over control and set it back up pretty quickly.
Fourth, do test runs with all of your speakers and your team. This can be extremely time consuming but went a long way toward making the speakers feel more comfortable. They knew what to expect the day of the conference, could log in easily, knew how to run their slides, and how the moderation would work with multiple people on the line. Their comfort translated to better presentations, too.
Fifth, create a standard operating procedure and checklists for everything as you develop your online conference. These events guarantee long hours and longer days. If you miss steps, you’re no longer providing consistency and risk not meeting your attendee’s expectations. You also might be missing out on your own opportunities, such as forgetting to hit ‘record’ on a presentation that could be a potential replay for audience members who missed it’s first showing.
You want to have a great event. You’ve sold all these tickets. Now you want people to enjoy themselves to learn and to want to come back to the event the next time you run it as well. These tips, tools and tactics will help you do just that.
Want to see more on how we delivered our conference?
We’ve packaged together our SOPs and checklists into a free download for you. And if you have any questions or comments on this episode, post them in the comments!
Alternatively, you can reach out to GradBlogger on Twitter or Instagram or email me at Chris@GradBlogger.com. I reply to all the emails that we get.
To recap our Marketing Your Online Conference series thus far:
- In episode 44 of the GradBlogger podcast, we cover getting your sales sequence right.
- In episode 45, we talked about how to market your newsletter.
- In episode 58, we covered a review of the newsletter marketing analytics
- In episode 59, we discussed Marketing Channel Analytics.
