Live Events In The COVID-19 Age

We’re all living through some pretty strange times. You don’t need me to tell you that, just look at the world around you. A year ago it would have been impossible to predict a global pandemic and worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism. These seismic changes have affected both our personal and professional lives. Today I’d like to take a look at how one corner of the marketing landscape has been changed by these recent events.

Live conferences and tradeshows are a big part of marketing, both for non-profits who rely on them for operational revenue and for-profit companies that leverage them for valuable customer connections. What happens when a pandemic breaks out and getting large groups of people together no longer seems like a good idea?

A lot of event planners were put in a difficult spot as the quickly-evolving COVID-19 pandemic started to take hold. Planning an event is complex, with some large annual events being planned and worked on almost year-round.

I know from personal experience. Earlier in my career I was responsible for managing the largest national commercial real estate conference in the country. Between securing the venue, creating a theme, lining up keynote speakers, establishing the menu for meals, and marketing it was a nine-month project to execute just a single-day event. How many events were somewhere in development, or worse, about to happen as this pandemic hit?

2020: Year of The Canceled Conference

The largest annual conferences such as South By Southwest (SXSW), The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Game Developers Conference (GDC), and Salesforce’s Dreamforce show that live events scheduled for 2020 have been canceled. These events draw huge crowds of attendees with journalists, companies, and consumers planning their year around them. Not in 2020, though.  For example, South By Southwest was scheduled to happen as it always does in March, just as the pandemic broke wide open. Ultimately it was the City of Austin banning public events that forced organizers to cancel the show this year.

They’re not alone. Events of all sizes in nearly every industry are canceling their live events. Some of these events like the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) canceled their live event and offered no online replacement. Others like SXSW shifted to alternatives like ongoing online events. The bottom line: Put away your suitcases, you’re most likely not going to a live event this year. This is the new reality.

Events Are Going Online

Some events, caught in the clutches of bad timing, had to cancel their live event with no viable alternative. Typically these events had originally been scheduled for March or April. As you no doubt remember, these were pretty uncertain times. The CDC hadn’t even solidified its position on the use of masks in stopping the spread of COVID-19 at this point. Those planning to hold live conferences quickly started shifting to online formats. Many of these organizations had never held a large-scale, all-digital event. Now they were being forced to plan and execute one quickly, while paying attendees were waiting for word on the new direction. 

It’s a tremendous amount of pressure to learn what makes a great online event and execute one at the same time. Even now event marketing is a bit of the wild west, with everyone scrambling to figure out what a successful all-digital version of a live event looks like. Some organizations are lucky enough to have had some form of small scale online events in the past such as webinars. Others are having to figure it out on the fly. While it is mostly too early to tell what will translate well and what will fall flat, there are some key takeaways to consider when thinking about taking your own event digital.

Digital Events Have Some Advantages Over Live Events

Online conferences offer some real benefits when compared to their live counterparts. For one, online events are inherently more accessible. Your audience is global. The number of people who can attend is no longer limited by location or venue size. Events going fully digital should consider how they can expand their audiences, not how those audiences might be smaller. With the hassle of travel taken out of the equation, your event should appeal to a much broader audience, including those tight on time or who have personal circumstances that would limit their ability to travel.

Virtual events offer a real opportunity to lower the costs of attending events as show management no longer needs to pay for a venue, food and beverage, exhibitor setup services, and much more. It’s important to acknowledge that digital events will negatively impact conference space providers and other live show related services. But these savings could be passed on to the vendors and attendees, boosting attendance and participation. Many events are trying to deliver more value by offering continued access to online content year-round through ongoing talks and presentations. It’s a huge win for attendees if events either choose to lower the costs of registration or instead deliver more value to attendees at the same ticket price.

These events can also be made more interactive than they’ve ever been. By leveraging the tools of online presentation and conferencing tools, speaker sessions could include crowdsourced topic selection, democratic selection of questions for Q&A, and interactive polls. There are many opportunities to improve on the classic in-person conference presentation. Conferences after 2020 will adopt many of the innovations that are found to work this year. In the words of Katie Stern, General Manager at The Game Developers Conference, “All-in-all, we know GDC Summer won’t look like GDC itself, but we think there is power in that. It gives us all an opportunity to rethink the experience, how to create meaning for a virtual gathering, and ultimately create a bigger tent.”

Virtual Events Have Real Challenges, Too

Now if you think virtual events are without their own challenges, think again. Many of the practices that make in-person events successful translate well to an online format. Keynotes, breakout sessions, and expert panels all work well even when delivered via online conference. Tools exist to facilitate these structures and have for a long time. However, some aspects just don’t translate well at all.

One of the greatest values of in-person conferences is the serendipity of making a new friend, bumping into an industry expert, or that brief moment where you get to ask a speaker a question about their presentation. These types of interactions aren’t as easy to replicate online. Some events are working hard to add small roundtable groups, facilitated by online conferencing software, to their events. Others are looking at building portals for making connections ahead of the show and scheduling time for one-on-one meetings again by video conference.

Regardless, these tools will feel awkward and forced at times. The in-person events of years past provided a pretense that allowed the interaction to happen naturally in the first place. Without it, what is really the difference between cold emailing someone and these types of pre-show outreach? That’s not to say that these types of interactions will be impossible, but rather that show organizers will have to test a few different methods to see what works best for their attendees.

Attendee fall-off will also be a serious problem. A similar format, the basic webinar, usually has 60% of its audience fall off before it ends. Many of those that don’t attend the live event, usually between 40% - 50%, download the recorded session for viewing later. These digital conferences will no doubt lead to a more asynchronous attendance which might hurt many of the interactive components that will be built into these events in an attempt to make them more engaging. We’ll have to see how this plays out over time.

Change Is An Opportunity

Change is scary. Change brought about by a pandemic is absolutely frightening. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity in this turmoil. Those of us in the social good space can look at some of the positives that have come from current events. The pollutants that are changing our climate have for a brief moment waned, demonstrating what slowing climate change might look like. The world rallying around measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 has shown that action on a global scale is possible when the challenge is seen as a real threat. Many hope that will translate to the climate crisis.

For event organizers, the opportunity is to shape your content to meet these unprecedented times. If this crisis is affecting every industry, then the leaders in every industry should have something to say. SOCAP, recognizing the very important role it plays in helping solve some of the very challenges presented by the pandemic, has taken its entire event virtual. They have also shifted the focus of the conference to address the current health crisis and calls for social change — with tracks covering global health, resilience, the future of work, and racial equity.

My advice would be to think about whether your event can be part of the solution in moving the conversation forward. Do you have a role to play in global health, the new trend towards remote work, or racial equity?

Embrace The Change

We are in unprecedented times. But we will survive and get to the other side together. This is not the time for executing perfectly — there are too many moving parts right now. Instead focus on what benefits come with these big changes. Take some risks with your format or content. People will be more forgiving now and give you the benefit of the doubt as you experiment. This is an opportunity. The world is different now. Things will feel different. And that is okay.

Further Reading: Our client DemocracyLab moved their highly successful in-person hackathons to an online format in only 10 days. See their story and the lessons they learned.