Virtual (Event) Insanity
How to get your event moving without travelling…
Today I wanted to write about the world of virtual events. It’s yet another covid crisis-accelerated area of video and event production.
It’s a lifeline and potential future for event organisers and this article aims to give you a few ways that you can use video to boost your virtual event.
Why should you explore how to virtualise your event?
It can save your event in light of travel restrictions and broaden the audience, as well.
Back in the early days of the covid crisis we worked with the organisers of London’s Calling, which is the major user community event for Salesforce software developers and administrators in Europe.
They had a major headache, as they had booked an expensive venue, had top speakers lined up and delegates that were passionate about learning.
Sadly, the government had all but banned travel and events. Things looked bleak.
Francis and team at London’s calling are, by nature, solutions people, and they weren’t going to settle for defeat.
Within a matter of days they repurposed their event as a virtual one and used the power of live and on demand video to keep it on track, and we are proud to have helped them deliver Live speakers, Pre recorded video and interviews as well as a post-event film.
3000 paying delegates virtually attended the event and enjoyed the speakers during the event.
It was a crazy hectic mission but we learnt a lot, and wanted to share some things with you here.
What are the ways you can virtualise your event?
Platforms for Virtual Events
Imagine the platform as your virtual venue. It’s a cloud based system where you can feed in content and manage participants.
Off the peg systems like Zoom or ON24 are great for hosting a virtual event, there is no need to reinvent the wheel as these platforms are well developed and user friendly.
Multi speaker and multi stream events
You can use easy to master platforms like ON24 and Zoom to deliver a live video stream from each “room” to mimic a real live event. Delegates from a given stream can follow their area of interest as if they were at the venue.
Local or remote based delegates participating live or as-live
You can hire a studio or space and, obeying social distancing rules, have delegates present, with someone mixing in a feed of their slides or you can feed them in via zoom or skype TX.
Remember, a great advantage of going virtual is that you can also pre record presentations and speeches and cue them up on the day.
Keynotes
Keynotes might demand higher production values and it’s childs play to feed a couple of camera angles and slides and play in pre recorded interviews or video segments to add a bit of va va voom.
Keeping it secure
It’s easy to manage delegates and logins and make sure that only those permitted to do so can access talks.
Adding interactivity
It’s as simple as setting up a zoom meeting to allow delegates to get involved in Q and A sessions via video or via a chat function. Just make sure someone is moderating to avoid stressful moments caused by rogue questions!
We’ve got Zoom fatigue, how can we make it look slick?
Easy, get a pro crew to film it for you either live or pre-recorded. With a proper video control room in the process speakers can be fed in via technically superior (in terms of video quality) systems like SkypeTX or LiveU to avoid that grey-out look synonymous with a webcam.
This is a very shallow dive into the world of virtualising events but I hope it is of some use to you and demonstrates that it’s easy and accesible to go virtual.
