Today, Holly Moore and Paul Cheetham hosted a Pro Manchester webinar on “creating the ultimate experience in a virtual world.” Here are our top takeaways –
1. We’re ready to pivot – With the uncertain future of live events hanging in the balance, there has been a great deal of discussion on taking your conferences virtual. With so much content saturating the digital space already, we wanted to make sure what we produce going forward would be as carefully considered and creative as our live event work! We are now looking at creative solutions to virtual events and ways we can #makeitbetter for our clients, suppliers and team!
2. Split it up – Where we would usually bring together multiple offices for a large sales conference, we would now look at producing these in different locations and possibly streaming between them to minimise travel and large numbers of people in one room.
3. Virtual and Live Events will work together in harmony – Going forward we know that there will be more virtual events and we are excited to start bringing the creativity and excitement of a live event to the virtual world.
4. Pockets full of WOW are more important than ever – At Make Events we are famous for our magic touches and those little things we add to an event that makes it memorable for your delegates. In a virtual world, these are so important to communicate and engage with your audience through your branding, creating digital workbooks and conference packs.
5. There is still a message to portray – With so much uncertainty across the world, employers need to engage their team with a message so everyone is on the same page. Virtual events (and we don’t mean a Zoom call!) are an incredible way to do this. We are in the process of setting up a studio that will be operated complying with social distancing rules to produce virtual events.
6. How to keep your delegates engaged virtually – Just because you’re not sat in the same room, doesn’t mean you can’t keep your guests engaged. A few ideas would be…
– Split teams up into WhatsApp groups to allow them to chat outside of the conference and encourage them to have pre and post event get together.
– Create a branded workbook. It is proven if you write during a conference you retain information.
– Switch between live and pre-recorded content and use graphics to mix it up.
– Keep your content short and add breaks. We are all feeling digitally drained at the moment, so nobody wants to sit for hours staring at a screen with no end in sight!
– Train your speakers to convey a message effectively to an audience. No monotone voices over here!
– Block some time out the next day to plan.
If you’d like to know more about Make Events please get in touch with Holly at holly@makevents.co.uk. As a creative agency we’re still taking enquiries for future events. We’re able to offer virtual events and we have a full design studio for all your graphic, content and branded products.
