Four ways to maximize your events & learning budget in 2022

It’s no secret that the past two years has presented the events industry with new opportunities and undeniable challenges. As many events continue to lean towards an in-person return, or at least have an in-person component, there are still many factors that continue to drive our approach to events; including health concerns, onsite safety, and knowledge of technology to pull off a multi-faceted event, just to name a few.

To execute a successful event, whether virtual, in-person, or both, we must also ensure event professionals and organizational leaders are aligned with how the attendees want their education delivered. So, we must ask ourselves:

  • Are we sure all our attendees are fully ready to get back to in-person events?
  • Do some attendees still prefer learning in a virtual format?
  • How can we ensure we bring the most value to our attendees and sponsors, no matter what the event format is?
  • Do we have the right technology and support to pull off our event vision?

These are all questions we’re hearing, so we took a deeper dive and conducted some research – a study of 1,000+ members and 850+ association professionals – to get a feel for what 2022 has in store for all of us.

In this Community Brands’ research study, 2021 Association Trends: Building the Next Normal, all these questions, and many more, were addressed to help us better understand what we should be thinking about to meet our organizational goals, and the needs of our attendees and sponsors. Not only did we find out the answers, but we also brought in two of the experts from the events industry to take a deeper dive into the results, discuss some of the event trends they are seeing, and provide onsite and virtual event recommendations as we roll into 2022:

Heather Cooke-Barnett, Assistant Director of Group Sales
Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort

Orlando Monge, Regional VP of Venues
Encore

Here are some of the things we learned, and some tips and tricks on how to maximize your events and learning spend to meet your goals and pull off a successful event:

1. In 2022, it will be important to broaden your event mix and frequency.

According to the research study, 58% of event professionals said they were ready to return to in-person events by the Fall of 2021, while only 32% of the attendees were ready, and still, there’s another 11% of attendees not feeling comfortable to return until the second half of 2022. What is this telling us? It’s time to mix it up, but also not forget about staying connected with your virtual audience. The shift to virtual events in the past year and a half have allowed us to reach new attendees who hadn’t attended previous in-person events. And as in-person events continue to return, we must still engage with those at-home attendees by providing virtual and hybrid event and online community experiences that align with their needs and expectations. Here is how:

  • Provide year-round online course via live webinar or short videos
  • Webcast your live events
  • Create a hybrid experience through live-streaming and pre-recorded content
  • Enhance the technology you use for professional education and certification
  • Add smaller, virtual events throughout the year to supplement your larger meetings or conferences
  • Level-up your AV (Audio Visual) to help overcome virtual fatigue
  • Select a virtual event platform and AV services partner that can help facilitate the needs of both your in-person and virtual attendees

2. Investing in event technology will help meet event goals for your organization, your attendees, and your sponsors.

50% of the professionals feel technologically unprepared going into 2022. As we investigate the near future, event professionals indicate that sponsorships and in-person ticket sales will be the top drivers of revenue from their events. To assist with event planning and execution, they are turning to online registration tools, a virtual event platform, and AV services for virtual attendees and are considered the most important tools to have in your stack. These will be important investments going into the new year, preparing you for any event format you plan to tackle. Technology to consider:

Online registration
Virtual and hybrid platform
AV production and services
Analytics tools
Mobile event app
Onsite event check-in and badge printing
Attendee tracking tools
Expo management
Lead retrieval
Sponsor management
Speaker management

3. Leveling-up your AV will help to combat virtual fatigue and bring more value to your virtual attendees.

Let’s face it – virtual fatigue is real. Attendee expectations have never been higher, so it might be time to step up your game and reboot your approach to virtual and hybrid events. According to the research study, the professionals feel like the two biggest challenges for holding a hybrid event is providing comparable value to both their in-person and virtual attendees, as well as the audio-visual planning and execution. Aside from choosing the right technology and services partner to help you pull off your AV production, Orlando Monge from Encore (formerly PSAV) offered some tips to ensure AV success and maximize costs at your next hybrid or in-person event:

  • Plan, plan, plan. As event professionals, advanced planning is an easy decision, but when it comes to AV production, the further in advance, the better. If you know you will add a virtual element or livestream to your event, make sure you are communicating your needs well in advance so you won’t be scrambling and increasing unforeseen costs at the last minute.

  • Account for onsite space coordination to ensure your attendees are socially distanced properly. This may cause in 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 cut the amount 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 in-person and your virtual attendees are being taken into consideration and all receiving the same value at your event.

4. Enhancing safety measures and precautions onsite will not only help to bring your attendees back in-person but help you to meet your onsite minimums.

As we continue to watch the fluctuating trends with the pandemic, it has been difficult to make that final decision and move forward with how to approach the next event – are we going to host this in-person next year? Should we stick with virtual? Should we do a hybrid event so we can bring attendees in-person, but also reach those who are uncomfortable to be in a group of people? What if we choose hybrid, and we can’t meet our venue minimums because more people choose to participate from home? What if Covid cases unexpectedly rise, and our in-person attendees drop? Heather Cooke-Barnett, Assistant Director of Group Sales, Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort, had some ideas to help you determine your approach, and create an onsite experience that your attendees won’t want to miss, despite the uncertainties and challenges that we are all facing:

  • Survey your audience. The best way to determine the comfort level of your attendees is to ask them. Once you analyze the results, you can make a better-informed decision on how to move forward, how many attendees you would have onsite, and to create a safe environment that makes them want to attend in person.

  • Create a safe environment and communicate the precautions you are taking in advance. Most everyone is concerned these day with, “How will you keep me safe in a large group setting?” Heather Cooke-Barnett recommends not only going above and beyond to create that safe space, but also stresses the need for communicating all the tactics leading up to the event to help increase onsite attendees. Here are a few things to consider:


    • Select a venue that is experienced with in-person or hybrid events, and follows their own safety protocols for staff and guests

    • Determine if you will require vaccine proof, a negative Covid-19 test, or both before the event, and ensure your guests know the requirements before arrival

    • Determine your mask policy in accordance with the venue guidelines and the CDC (Center for Disease Control) recommendations and ensure your guests know the requirements before arrival

    • Work with a third-party vendor like CLEAR to help you set up onsite health needs and pre-event screening

    • Set aside space in your event planning that allows for daily symptom checks, pre-event vaccine card screening, testing, and an isolation room in the event someone tests positive

    • Meet often with your onsite hospitality staff and meeting organizer prior to the event to determine the safest space and food and beverage setups for your attendees. Here are some check-in and setup tips to help ensure your onsite guests are always comfortable:
      • Use contactless event check-in tools like Expo Logic to save line time in line, reduce gathering in large groups, and not require your attendees to touch screens that multiple people have touched

      • Work with your venue partner to create an online check-in process and keyless entry for their hotel room

      • Require daily symptom checks

      • Offer colored bands for attendees in green, yellow, and red that indicate their comfort level with other attendees – red for those who are not comfortable being close to other, while green indicates those who are fine with closer contact

      • Allow guests to use the virtual platform you selected to watch the livestream sessions from their hotel room

      • Ensure food and beverage is distributed safely:

        • Keep airwalls open in larger food and beverage settings
        • Switch your normal self-serve, double buffets, to one-sided buffets with plexiglass and servers
        •  Consider serving your meals plated, and offer to-go boxes for those who may feel better eating alone
        • Reduce the amount of chairs at your rounds from 10 to 8, or even less, if space allows
        • Set up some smaller tables for one for those who feel less comfortable in a group setting

The bottom line is, the safer you are onsite, and the more you communicate with your attendees about the protocols you are taking, the more probable your attendees will want to be an in-person attendee. In turn, this helps you to better plan and meet your in-person minimums.

Key Takeaways:

How we approach events has been ever-changing – uncertain times have continued to steer our decisions on whether we connect virtually or take a shift to delivering our education face-to-face. But one thing remains clear – we are all trying to build the next normal.

Whether you choose to host an in-person, virtual, or hybrid event in 2022, there are many budgetary considerations you need to think through. Ensuring you are putting your dollars towards event technology, onsite safety protocols, and AV production and services will help to increase your reach, attendance, and value for all your attendees, no matter where they are located.


To hear more from our panel of experts, check out this on-demand webinar: Diving into the research – Maximizing your events & learning investment in 2022

Conference session ideas for virtual and hybrid events

Great virtual and hybrid events require great conference sessions. You might be just getting started with virtual and hybrid events. Or maybe you’ve been hosting them for years.

 

Either way, it’s important to breathe new life into your events with unique sessions that grab (and hold) attendees’ interest.

 

Let’s take a look at some creative conference session ideas to help you pull off more successful events:

 

  1. Get interactive.
    Presentation after presentation of slide decks filled with text can be a snooze. Use interactive elements, including animations, videos, and an event management platform, as well as interactive tools, like Canva, Flowvella, and Google Slides, to interact with your visuals while on-screen. Your attendees will thank you for livening up the sessions.

  2. Use a video wall.
    Helping your onsite and online attendees feel connected makes for a great hybrid event experience. A video wall that shows faces of virtual attendees during conference sessions can help speakers interact more effectively with both in-person and online audiences.

  3. Put attendees up on stage.
    What says attendee engagement more than attendees as speakers? Ask attendees to submit proposals for short presentations related to conference sessions or event themes, and then select a few that stand out. Give them the floor for 15-30 minutes to present to both in-person and virtual audiences.

  4. Chat by the “fire”.
    Mix a few fireside chats into your conference session lineup to stir things up a bit. Select a moderator (from your organization or your industry) to engage a knowledgeable guest in conversation. By adding a few of these less formal sessions, your conference content will have more variety and feel more engaging to attendees.

  5. Make it fun.
    Break up the conference agenda with some fun activities. These might include live music, gamification, a magic show, a painting session – the list goes on as far as your imagination can take it. Just be sure to design the activity so that both in-person and online audiences can participate.

  6. Keep the ideas flowing.
    Keep in mind that there’s not just one way to make your virtual and hybrid events more interesting for attendees. Consider maintaining a running list of ideas for conference sessions as you think of them or come across them in articles or at events you might be attending.

    A helpful way to generate new session ideas is to think about the type of event experience you want to offer attendees. Come up with a list of words to describe it, such as interactive, relaxed, informative, engaging, and fun. Then use each word as the inspiration for new ways to bring that “feel” to life for your attendees.

 

These are just a few ideas for creative conference sessions for virtual and hybrid events. For more ideas, details, and inspiration, check out some of Pathable’s Customer Success Stories and see how other organizations made their virtual and hybrid event experiences more engaging.

 

Get more out of your virtual events with Salesforce

Salesforce CRM is a powerful tool for managing customer insights and streamlining sales and marketing efforts. Meanwhile, your virtual events can offer up rich data about customer behaviors, interests, and preferences.

Use the two together and you have a powerhouse for gaining insights to improve customer relationships, business growth, and profitability.

With this in mind, let’s look at some effective ways to integrate Salesforce with your virtual events:

Use Salesforce to build event invitations.

Using Salesforce CRM, you can send invitations to leads, contacts, and accounts. Simply send them an email containing a link to your event microsite, landing page, or web page, allowing you to easily track their activities throughout your virtual event. Note that if you’re using Salesforce Lightning, you’ll need to integrate additional products to set up and manage events.

Connect your event marketing and registration software with Salesforce.

When using third-party platforms for event marketing and registration, one option would be to connect them with Salesforce.

To make it easy to track leads and learn how attendees discovered your event, you can also embed Salesforce-generated forms into your event microsite to capture event registration and ticket sales. To gather richer data, create event registration tiers with different packages so that attendees can select them based on their budget and preferences. You can then present attendees from each tier with information, products, and services that might appeal to them based on the option they chose.

Use event software that integrates with Salesforce.

To get more customer insights from your virtual events, be sure to choose a virtual event platform that integrates with Salesforce. Ideally, the platform should offer an open API to make the integration easier.

Generate the data you need.

It’s important to have a plan around how you will collect attendee data so you can use it later for customer insights and analysis. Here are some ideas for data collection:

  • Polling:  While your event is in progress, use push notifications to drive attendees to participate in polls, which can be used to measure attendee engagement or to ask attendees product-related questions.

  • Q&A: Allow event attendees to make use of interactive tools in your virtual event platform to submit questions, which can help you know their concerns and interests.

  • Surveys: Use Salesforce to send pre-and post-event surveys so you can capture and use the response data to plan future event strategies.

  • Online store: Offer some merchandise for sale to test consumer behavior and buying preferences. You can use the resulting sales data to determine what attendees and other customers are most likely to consume in the future.

Your virtual events have the potential to generate rich data to give you insights into your customers and potential customers. By using the powerful data gathering and analysis tools in Salesforce CRM, you can gain and use more data than ever to help you improve not only your virtual events, but also your general sales and marketing activities.

The ideas in this article are just the beginning. For more details and inspiration, read the full article, along with other new ideas, on SalesforceBen.com

How Virtual & Hybrid Event Solutions Create Meaningful Connections Both Online & In-Person

Sure, we all long to meet in person again soon. But the lessons learned during the pivot to this new virtual world will surely change the future of in-person gatherings, with innovative hybrid solutions opening up new ways to engage worldwide attendees and add value for sponsors.

Here at Pathable, we help event planners to plan, promote, and host events of any type. Our virtual and hybrid event platform and mobile app are designed to power virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. Our solutions provide an easy-to-use, all-in-one tool for interactive education, real-time networking, and more. 

Some of the platform’s powerful engagement features include: 

  • Versatile Live Streaming Solutions
  • Group or Private 1:1 Virtual Meetings
  • Private Messaging & Meeting Scheduling
  • Interactive Engagement
  • Gamification
  • Virtual Trade Show with Group or Private 1:1 Connection

With platforms like Pathable, virtual event elements will shift from a temporary solution to a lasting staple in the event, meeting, and conference industry, for both hybrid and fully online events. Here’s why virtual event elements are here to stay—and how Pathable can help facilitate them.

1. Virtual and hybrid events create opportunities for engagement and on-demand connection.

Relationships are hard to build through webinars alone—so the best virtual and hybrid events offer a plethora of ways for attendees to exchange ideas, converse, and build their networks. 

Immersive virtual and hybrid events allow remote attendees to participate in engaging and relevant conversations in a variety of formats. They can enjoy experiential connection to speakers through sessions, to fellow attendees through networking, and to exhibitors through an immersive virtual trade show. Hybrid events can provide unique experiences for both in-person and virtual attendees, allowing individuals to choose the form of attendance and engagement that is right for them.

Pathable uses a variety of engagement features to highlight the human element and the power of connectivity at events. Attendees can connect with each other through tools such as interactive session chat, private messaging, meeting scheduling and group or private virtual meetings. As a result, they can connect in the format that they choose and on their preferred timeline.

Pathable also provides on-demand connection in the virtual trade show space. Exhibitors can embed product videos, share collateral, host video product showcases, and chat one-on-one with the push of a button. With on-demand video calling through the Talk Now feature, attendees can instantly connect 1:1 with exhibitors. By allowing exhibitors to choose their availability and encouraging attendees to call exhibitors in real time, the virtual trade show offers a flexible experience for meaningful connection.

2. Virtual and hybrid events allow you to offer versatile content and high-quality production elements.

The 2020 pivot into the virtual space sparked creativity and ingenuity by encouraging event planners to create unique virtual and hybrid experiences that were just as fruitful as previously planned in-person events. The virtual space allowed them to source top-notch global talent and think outside the box when it comes to presentation and experience. 

As hybrid events increase in prevalence in the coming year, remote attendees will be able to tune into world-class events and entertainment, even if they are unable to attend in-person. By producing and recording live sessions and broadcasting to both live and virtual audiences, hybrid events can create an engaging experience for any and all attendees.

As many planners have seen in the last year, AV Production is just as important for the virtual components of your event as the live elements. Producing a high quality experience and showcasing polished and thoughtful event content requires special attention to AV planning, production, and logistics. The hybrid event model demands a team of highly knowledgeable subject matter experts who have experience in both in-person and virtual events. With the right event technology, an experienced audiovisual team will be able to produce a cohesive event that connects the two worlds of in-person and virtual through one platform. Furthermore, as we look to the future of events, we realize that there is a longing to return to gather in-person. A hybrid event allows planners to create a space for attendees to safely gather in-person while still supporting the technical needs of connecting virtual and in-person audiences. 

The Pathable platform supports a variety of events, through the customizable virtual components and a mobile app for both virtual and in-person events. To meet evolving event needs, Pathable offers a suite of Premium Services to support the virtual and in-person components of hybrid events, including AV Production Procurement & Execution, Graphic Design Services, Event Planning & Management and Premium Implementation. We can also connect you to our network of trusted vendor partners, who can support a variety of session types to bring the agenda you envision to life.

The playbook for hybrid events is still being written, so the sky’s the limit for creativity and innovation in connecting remote and virtual attendees. But one thing is clear: virtual event elements offer an incredible level of lasting value and connectivity to your audience — and take events to the next level. At Pathable, we’re reimagining event management to help you do just that.

3. Virtual components allow for year-round community. 

At an in-person-only event, you may get three to five days to engage with the audience members who had the time and resources to travel to your host venue. A virtual or hybrid event, on the other hand, can easily be leveraged into a 365-day community. Not only does your event website offer opportunities to network during the event, but it can also serve as a continued point of connection long after your event has ended.

With Pathable, attendees can revisit session content, continue discussions through forums, peruse vendor materials, and connect with each other through a searchable attendee and vendor directory. For up to a year following the event, hosts can make live or pre-recorded webinars available through on-demand playback. Allow discussion forums and chats to live on for long-term conversations surrounding a specific topic. The virtual event website can provide continued opportunities to pursue networking and serves as a hub of lasting engagement.

4. Attendees from all around the world can easily connect. 

Virtual events allow participants to schedule live video meetings, join breakout sessions, and call exhibit booth staff on-demand from anywhere in the world—leading to more diverse and well-rounded gatherings. As planners continue to creatively host virtual and hybrid events in the coming months, we will see in-person and remote attendees sharing integrated experiences that welcome attendee participation, no matter where they are attending from.

In July 2020, the Association of Proposal Management Professionals hosted a virtual summit with Pathable, welcoming more than 2,200 worldwide attendees. With Pathable’s help, the association hosted 32 consecutive hours of content—a total of 120 sessions—that took place continuously, meaning there was always new content and interactive chats, polls, and Q&As, regardless of an attendee’s time zone. (All sessions were also recorded and available on demand.)

When the event wrapped, the website stayed live so attendees could catch up on anything they missed, and see new content such as recaps and thank-you videos. Pathable reports that the site saw nearly 2,000 additional visits in the week after the event ended. (Want to learn more? Click here for an in-depth case study on the summit.)

What’s more, Pathable’s own team members work from five different continents, so they understand the importance and power of staying connected around the world. 

The power of virtual event elements is here for the long haul. To learn how you can reach a wider audience and create meaningful connections through your virtual or hybrid event, connect with a specialist from our team for a personalized tour of the platform.