Event Management Archives

The Complete AV Checklist for Event Planners

Posted on February 11, 2022May 31, 2022 by Jennifer Fuller

A complete list of AV equipment, production, and services needed for your next virtual, hybrid, or in-person event

With the continued shift of events over the past two years, many event planners are leaning towards virtual or hybrid events, a mix of in-person and online attendees for many reasons; greater audience reach, reduction of in-person attendees to help accommodate health and safety measures, and cost-efficiencies with a reduced in-person audience. But one thing all event professionals need to ensure not to overlook is the AV (audio visual) approach, equipment, and staff needed to pull off an event that has remote and/or in-person attendees. Whether you host a strictly in-person, virtual, or hybrid event, your event approach will be slightly different. But in any case, AV equipment, production, and services will be needed to create a streamlined and memorable experience for your entire audience.

Long gone are the days that you only need to worry about staging, sound equipment, and projectors with wireless presenter remotes that are placed in every breakout room at your in-person venue. While this equipment will still be needed and utilized for your in-person audience, if you add in a virtual component, you must take into consideration more staff, more equipment, a shift in budget, and an updated approach. Let us help you get started with five things to check off your list when planning the AV equipment and production you will need for your next event:

Decide on your event approach.

First off, you will need to decide what your next event will look like. Are you ready to get back to executing a fully in-person event? Will your attendees prefer a fully virtual event? Is it possible to plan an event that includes both in-person and remote attendees with your current resources and staff? An effective way to start the decision-making process is to survey your attendees – they will surely help with your decision on how you will move forward. If much of your audience is not comfortable returning in-person, you will most likely decide on a virtual event, and vice versa if more of your attendees are ready to be back face-to-face this year. If the results are split, hosting a hybrid event is a wonderful option, as you can meet the needs and preferences of all attendees – and reach a wider audience. Making this decision will help you decide the next steps on what your AV needs will be, and what equipment and resources you will need to pull off a successful event.

Select a venue that meets your AV and capacity needs.

So, you decide to go fully in person or to create a hybrid experience. That is awesome! When you are thinking through your AV needs, there are a few important things you really need to take into consideration when selecting your venue. The first is capacity – does space allow you to properly social distance, while still creating a memorable audio-visual experience? Second, does your venue have an onsite AV vendor or venue partner that will have all the equipment and staff needed to execute your event? Finally, can your venue provide the right amount of bandwidth if you need to live stream any portion of your event? By selecting the right amount of space paired with the right AV vendor, you can then start to figure out what types of AV equipment, production, and services you will need to bring your vision to life and execute a streamlined event that takes all attendees into consideration, no matter where they are located.

For in-person events, Earl Brown suggests a complete list of audio-visual equipment that you will need to speak with your vendor about:

Microphones
In-house lighting
In-house sound system
Portable or in-house sound system
Mixer board(s)
Electrical supply
Video cameras
Desktop or laptop computers
Podium
Two-way radios
Projectors
Technicians and staff needed
Screens

And if you are live streaming any of your sessions to a remote audience or recording any of the sessions to have available later on-demand, there are some additional things to take into consideration like live stream capabilities in your event management platform and additional video cameras and staff support for recording purposes.

Select a virtual or hybrid event platform and mobile app that can support your AV needs, among your other event goals.

Before selecting the right platforms, you will need to identify your event goals and needs. Here are some questions to consider:

Do you need a platform that can deliver content to both an in-person and a virtual audience?
Will you need to live stream your in-person sessions to a remote audience?
Do you plan to have sponsors, and if so, will you have both an in-person and a virtual exhibit experience?
Will you want robust networking features so you can connect your attendees, sponsors, and speakers, no matter where they are located?
Do you need to pre-record some of your content to create on-demand sessions?
Do you need to record any of your in-person sessions to have available on your platform later for those who could not attend live?
Will you need to have the capability for your attendees to create private meetings?
Will you want to have content available year around, or beyond the close of the event?
Do you have an in-house staff that can help with your AV production, or do you need a partner that can help you execute your vision and provide AV services?
Do you have access to any or all the AV equipment you will need to execute your event?

Once you can answer those questions, you can begin your selection process by attending demos and determining what platform best fits your needs. If you have answered yes to any or all the above, you will want to select a platform with a multitude of features and capabilities, especially when it comes to AV. Think about what your software should include, and what type of partner you will need:

Online registration
Event website
Live stream capabilities
Live and on-demand webinar and meeting functions
Private or group meeting capabilities with attendees and sponsors
Virtual and hybrid AV production services
Admin training and support
Event mobile app
Sponsor and speaker management
Agenda building capabilities
Robust networking and attendee engagement
Data analytics and measurement for ROI
Access to AV equipment
Event consultation

TIP: Not all virtual and hybrid event platforms are created equal. With Pathable, you have access to all these features, and more. Start your selection process by registering for Pathable’s next live group demo or schedule a one-on-one virtual assessment now.

Figure out how each of your sessions will be delivered.

There are many ways to deliver content and entertainment to your audience, even when they are remote. When using a hybrid or virtual event platform, you will want everyone to feel like part of the action, especially if you have a hybrid event where some of your attendees are in-person, and some are attending remotely. Here are some options to consider when you are determining how your attendees will receive information, and the AV equipment, features, services, staff, and production that you will have to consider when solidifying your approach:

Live streaming: Live streaming is when a streamed video is sent over the internet in real time, without first being recorded, and is different from a live online seminar, where you are delivering your content from a web-based application. So, first off, you will want to determine how many, and which sessions will be live streamed to your remote audience. Setting up every general session and breakout room for a live stream experience can get costly, so it is good to select a few locations that will support live stream and ensure the session(s) you want your remote audience to see live take place in those areas.

You can create even greater engagement by adding video effects to content that is being streamed live. That would entail end-to-end virtual event production and the ability to seamlessly switch HD content, so ensure you select a platform that has support and production staff to help you with those needs. Once you figure this out, you can get a better picture of the amount of AV equipment needed, and the staff needed to support your approach.

Live webinars: In a nutshell, a live webinar is a session that is delivered in real-time using a platform such as Pathable or Zoom. In a live webinar format, the audience will be able to hear and see presenters and/or panelists, but presenters and panelists will not be able to hear or see them. Attendees typically connect with the presenter(s) through a live chat or Q&A panel function, and different webinar platforms all have capabilities such as polls and surveys for even more engagement.

Pre-recorded content: Recording content in advance and creating a thoughtfully produced experience to share with your attendees during your event can be the difference between a good and a momentous event. Pre-recorded content also has longevity, as you can make it accessible after the event and even year-round if you select a platform that gives you that option.

Pre-recording your content can be as minimal as recording a session in Zoom and playing back the recording during your event at a specific time, or after your event. But if you want your virtual crowd engaged and not falling asleep during your pre-recorded session, you may want to consider a more thoughtful approach. Add AV production with graphics, a virtual background, lower thirds, lighting and audio enhancements during recording, and professional editing for a more dynamic program.

Stream operation: When switching back and forth between live webinars, live streaming, and live and pre-recorded content, you will want to ensure a seamless transition. You can create a more dynamic experience and operationalize your live streaming behind the scenes for attendees with stream operators that can control how event attendees experience your content. Work with your internal staff and external AV provider to ensure this service is accounted for when solidifying the AV requirements for your event.

Are you not sure what you need? Choose a vendor with technical experts you can work directly with to carry out your needs. Leveraging their experience and subject matter expertise to offer recommendations and help manage all the content needs for your event will help you immensely overall.

Meet with your AV partner well in advance of your event.

When it comes to events in general, the further in advance you plan, the better. Figuring out your AV requirements is no exception. Especially if there is any pre-event production needed. We met with Orlando Monge from Encore (formerly PSAV), and he had some tips and tricks for when you meet with your AV team. Here’s what he had to say:

Account for onsite space coordination to ensure your attendees are socially distanced properly. This may cause an increase in space needs, which, in turn, requires more AV setup and a potential increase in cost. Think through your layouts and get creative with your AV needs to cut costs.
If you are live streaming, choose a few rooms (as opposed to every meeting room onsite), where you will hold live streamed meetings or sessions. This will help your budget overall, as you will limit the amount of equipment and staff needed to execute your live streaming needs.
Consider pre-recording some content for your virtual attendees – this is a cost-effective way to bring value for those who cannot attend onsite and reduce the number of staff and equipment needed onsite to record every session.
Make sure you are working together with both your AV event production partner as well as your onsite AV partner to create a seamless event. When everyone is communicating, you ensure both your face-to-face and your remote attendees are being taken into consideration and all receiving the same value at your event.
The bottom line is, you don’t have to ditch your old way of approaching AV, especially if you have an in-person element for your next event. But if you decide to add a virtual element and bring in remote attendees in combination with your face-to-face attendees, give yourself some extra time to ensure your transition is seamless, and partner with a vendor and an event management platform that can provide all the bells and whistles to ensure your next event is a success, no matter which format you move forward with.

Learn More:

Take advantage of Pathable’s premium AV planning services alongside our virtual and hybrid event platform to address all your needs in one place. Contact us today to get started!

The Newest Trends in AV Production & How To Incorporate Them

Posted on January 21, 2022February 18, 2022 by Jennifer Fuller

2020 quarantines occurring upon declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic changed the way people come together. You can use new AV production elements currently available to enhance your event management experiences. Usage of this technology works for both virtual and in-person gatherings.

Audience Participation Tools

When we talk about AV production, we are referring to the audio visual production and event technology used to produce a virtual, hybrid, or in-person event. This is not just limited to an in-person event, and can include the services, equipment, tools, and an experienced team that’s needed to pull off a memorable experience. Audiences feel more of a part of both virtual and in-person events when encouraged to participate. You can use interactive tools, such as quizzes, surveys, polls, and infographics to keep people engaged. This works for just about any meeting type including trade shows, concerts, stand-up comedy, and speaking events or corporate meetings.

You can apply additional interactive video elements into a call-to-action link as well. Work all this into AV productions directly or add a call-to-action link when posting your interactive content on social media pages. In addition, you can apply interactive AV elements into your virtual and in-person event invitations.

Combined In-Person and Online Communication

Online video technology for meetings will never cease because more people work out of the office now. This includes combined in-person and online communication known now as “hybrid” virtual events.

A multitude of hybrid meeting tools have found their way into both public and private sectors. For instance, schools, places of worship, businesses, and recovery centers host hybrid video meetings. They still run them even though many places have reopened for service to the community.

Examples of Hybrid Meeting Features

HD Video – HD or 4K has become the minimum standard, especially for online viewers with large screens. This AV production feature works for either live or recorded concerts, theater productions, sporting events and more. HD productions may also include 3D, virtual reality, and augmented reality elements.

Cross-platform access – Ideally, your users should have access via a mobile app and their computers or tablets. It’s possible to create your hybrid streaming event for Android, iOS, Mac, or Windows. This ensures that students, project team members, employees or anyone who requires access can participate no matter what kind of device they own.

Call-in participation – Powered with the right software, your online meeting participants can call in and join conversations along with people attending in person. This works wonders when hosting question-and-answer sessions after a conference speaker finishes a presentation. It also works for talk shows and podcasts where people might also be present in person.

Private or public sessions – Set meeting privacy levels to what makes your organization feel the most secure. Only allow as much information out to the public as you would want to be leaked. Counseling sessions or confidential work meetings usually are set to private. Most sales webinars are set to public.

Recorded or live – This feature enhances your audience reach power. You can record your webinars and promote them on social media. In addition, you can invite them to sign up via email and send them reminders of your hybrid, in-person or virtual event. On the other hand, you can also stream live and include instant captions for the hearing impaired.

Pre-registration – To ensure you’re not wasting your time presenting live video, you can promote it in advance. This could involve inviting them to connect and sending them email reminders when they register for your webinar. Pre-registration gives you an estimate of how many people to expect for your live or recorded event. For hybrid events, it also allows you to collect fees online and charge for your presentations.

Screen sharing – Virtual or hybrid meetings don’t just have to involve sitting around talking. You can integrate a variety of graphic elements into your slides to use for illustration sake. Then, you can share them with your audience both in person and online. You also can apply this feature to virtual trade shows, college courses, local product demonstrations, and employee training sessions.

Story Sharing

Gone are the days of just text social posts. It seems that still images don’t even do justice anymore. You can still have these, but it’s wise to mix it up a little with some exciting stories that include video footage.

There’s also the option to record stories live and add captions. Various types of streaming software work for this that you can integrate into your hybrid meetings. Smartphones also provide ways to produce automated captions in videos fast for story sharing. You can use past, present or future event footage to entice new social media audiences to join your next event.

AI Voiceovers

Endless numbers of new artificial intelligence voices have now hit the market. It’s a new way to add quality voices to your videos. Some websites even rent out their voices for multimedia editing. You can also host audio presentations using these voices.

Licensing issues may apply but it provides an alternative to hiring human voiceover talent. The new AI voices coming out you would use for this purpose sound more natural than the “old-school” text-to-speech voices that sound like a computer. You also can now activate human-AI robots to talk for you in videos and integrate them into live interactive content at in-person events. They also will enhance all your virtual reality AV productions used for both educational and promotional purposes.

Immersive Technology (360 Videos, Metaverse, etc.)

By now, you may have heard of 360 videos and “metaverse.” In e-commerce news, Amazon reports that these immersive technologies have also begun to change the retail landscape. They also have applications in other industries such as gaming, advertising, film and TV, or education and health.

360 and “metaverse” features relate to HD, 4K and 3D television and online video creation. Each of these immersive features allows your virtual event participants unique experiences. You can help them feel as if they’re on location even if they’re just stuck at home like they were in 2020.

360 and metaverse content comes in a variety of forms and also might include some augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) elements. Some of this does require special equipment, such as virtual reality glasses, but it can enhance both in-person and online events.

Don’t worry if you don’t know all the differences between available immersive technologies to enhance your organization’s events. However, you can read more information about them if you’re curious how they can keep your event audience engaged.

AI Virtual Representatives

Virtual representatives combine the use of AI voices and humanlike presenters into interactive live chats. They integrate well on social media, websites or blogs and landing pages. Oftentimes, virtual representatives will ask you if you need any help, and it’s as if a real person is talking to you.

They also can guide your virtual or in-person event registrants through sign-up forms. You can assign various administrative roles to your virtual representatives during live conferences too. For instance, you can use animation to enhance a discussion or demonstration if you don’t have enough speakers.

More AI features will continue to improve this technology as developments of virtual representatives unfold. However, usage of these characters has already proven to enhance event management for all virtual and hybrid gatherings.

LEARN MORE

With the right technology and a few proven approaches, you can use AV production to create highly effective virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. Find out how the Pathable event platform can help support the ideas in this article and more: Explore Pathable.

How to Make Your Event Engaging and Combat Virtual Fatigue

Posted on January 13, 2022February 18, 2022 by Jennifer Fuller

Virtual events have pretty much been the norm for two years, and people have mixed feelings about them. However, the simple fact that they are practical means that you can expect to continue getting invites to them for the foreseeable future. Whether it’s an industry-related conference, a smaller regional meeting that your religious organization puts on, or even just a way to take a class that was once held in-person, virtual events are here to stay in one form or another.

That said, businesses and organizations that host events have to step up their game when it comes to attracting participants and maintaining their interest. There is no shortage of events being held online, and since travel costs are eliminated and time constraints relaxed (you can now attend back-to-back conferences on opposite sides of the world if you wish), you have a wider audience, but you also are competing with far more distractions than would be present at a live event.

So, how do you get participants excited about your event? How do you ensure they stay for the whole thing rather than clicking over to watch TikTocs or scroll through Facebook? Here are four areas that you must give special attention to when planning your event in order to accomplish your goals for the event.

Build Up Event Anticipation

After people sign up for your event, you need to continue to nurture the relationship. The amount of time between signing up and the event will determine how often you contact them. When there’s only a day or two between these two dates, plan at least one touchpoint, but for a week or more lead time, aim to be in touch at least twice a week.

You can email them and invite them to join a private Facebook group for pre-event activities. You could send them short text messages with helpful tips or motivational quotations. The nature of your event will play a large part in the content you send. You can send out a questionnaire about what people want to learn or get insight into their views on the topic. Sending out a guide or workbook that they can print off and use to take notes is a great way to both engage with them now and better ensure they have a good experience at the event.

Create an Energetic Atmosphere

Having speakers and hosts who are energetic and can engage with the participants is important. When possible, choose speakers who are experienced with online speaking, but if you can’t, do a couple of practice runs leading up to the event. Nothing will get participants to hop over to Instagram faster than a speaker that comes across as boring and monotone.

A great “ice breaker” is to open the event by asking everyone what’s in their cup, and engaging in a bit of good-natured banter around the topic. “Oh, the cola people are showing up!” and “Where are all my coffee drinkers?” Asking about preferred pets, such as ” are you a cat person or a dog person,” is a fun way to get people talking in the chat and grab their attention.

Finally, during the presentation, the speaker should address guests by name as much as possible. This conveys the message that you’re paying attention and care about guests enough to go through the effort of knowing their name even though you may not even see their faces.

Make Sessions as Short as Possible

It seems that attention spans are getting increasingly shorter with every passing smartphone upgrade! In all seriousness, this is true. Some research shows the TED Talk formula of 18 minutes is ideal. Any longer than that and you start to lose people to boredom or busyness. With so many websites competing for their attention, it’s best to let guests know of the time commitment upfront. You can let them know it will be “under 30 minutes” or “the presentation will last 20 minutes with a 15 minute Q&A session at the end.”

Another way to ensure people stay with you (or at least come back) is by promising something at the end. This may be giving away some free swag or a discount on the product you’re promoting. At the start of your presentation, let guests know that you’ll be doing the giveaway at the end and only those still in attendance are eligible.

Keep Attendees on Their Toes by Mixing it Up

No matter how short or long your hybrid events are, mixing up the content of the program is essential. For longer, day-long events, try to aim to keep presentations short, but then mix in some lighter fare like an ice-breaker in the chat room. For hybrid events, you can do a few segments of Q&A live from the in-person group. For an all-virtual event, ask a question and take a few minutes to let people respond, then share the answers verbally. For events that lend themselves to interaction, invite a few people to come on camera with you. This could be for them to ask a question or do a mini-coaching session.

Since virtual events have become a normal part of life, people are more aware of the health risks of sitting in front of screens for too long. Build-in water breaks and give participants five minutes to go refill their cups. Encourage people to get up and move by leading a short stretching session.

Final Thoughts

Virtual events will outlive the pandemic, so it’s essential to develop and implement strategies that help your organization create awesome events that will educate, engage, and even entertain guests. For marketing presentations that you do on a regular basis, you can implement these tips and use the feedback to make your next one better. If your event is held less often, jot down these tips and put them in your planning file so that you have them handy as you start planning your next event.

Learn More

With the right technology and a few proven approaches, you can create highly effective hybrid events. Find out how the Pathable event platform can help support the ideas in this article and more: Explore Pathable.

Tag: Event Management