Has anyone here organized virtual events with something other than Zoom?
August 17, 2020 11:48 AM Subscribe
There are some useful tips in this article, but I'm curious to hear what's worked for you with virtual events and meetings beyond Zoom. What's the best non-Zoom platform? How do you engage attendees without it becoming a cacophony of voices? Have you been to any virtual events that you really liked and would recommend? (Feel free to link to them if they're up on YouTube!)
Google Meet has very good live captioning, which could help reduce the negative effects of cacophony as well as making the meeting more accessible.
posted by babelfish at 12:33 PM on August 17, 2020
posted by babelfish at 12:33 PM on August 17, 2020
What kind of event? Based on the article you shared it sounds like some sort of professional conference or convention, but I don't want to go too far down that road if you're thinking of something different. My company had to cancel last-minute a 5,000 person in-person professional conference that was supposed to happen in late April. We switched to hosting a digital conference and did use Zoom but I have plenty of tips that are platform-agnostic.
A few things off the top of my head: Differentiate between content/educational sessions and networking sessions. For the former, attendees only see the speakers and interaction is via text chat and polling features. Much more of a live webinar format. Social media is also a possibility for attendee interaction with the use of an event hashtag. For presentations, make sure the presenters know how to use the tech and do walk-throughs beforehand with a knowledgeable organizer. Also have an organizer running the show (starting/ending the session) and hand off to presenters as it is their turn. Content-wise, we had a mix of sessions that would have been presented at the in-person conference and totally new ones because COVID was of course a huge topic that didn't exist when the in-person conference sessions were originally chosen.
For networking, everyone can see everyone else but size of rooms/breakouts needs to be limited to facilitate conversation, and if possible it's helpful to have one moderator to help break the ice in each networking room. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get people to start talking in a virtual networking event; the ideal is to find the sweet spot between enough attendees that there's a conversation flowing (given that some folks will just lurk) and not so many that a conversation becomes impossible. That's probably around 12-30 people, I would guess. Sometimes it's helpful to have a "topic" for networking sessions even if there isn't a formal presentation - gives people something to talk about.
You may find - or at least we did - surprisingly little overlap between the people who were registered for the cancelled in-person conference and the people who registered for our online one. Also, people register VERY last minute for online conferences; if you have a max capacity, make sure you communicate that loud and clear to get people to register early. We didn't think we'd get anywhere near maxing out our 5k attendee limit and then 1k people registered in the last 24 hrs before it started and people missed out and were upset.
posted by misskaz at 12:34 PM on August 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
A few things off the top of my head: Differentiate between content/educational sessions and networking sessions. For the former, attendees only see the speakers and interaction is via text chat and polling features. Much more of a live webinar format. Social media is also a possibility for attendee interaction with the use of an event hashtag. For presentations, make sure the presenters know how to use the tech and do walk-throughs beforehand with a knowledgeable organizer. Also have an organizer running the show (starting/ending the session) and hand off to presenters as it is their turn. Content-wise, we had a mix of sessions that would have been presented at the in-person conference and totally new ones because COVID was of course a huge topic that didn't exist when the in-person conference sessions were originally chosen.
For networking, everyone can see everyone else but size of rooms/breakouts needs to be limited to facilitate conversation, and if possible it's helpful to have one moderator to help break the ice in each networking room. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get people to start talking in a virtual networking event; the ideal is to find the sweet spot between enough attendees that there's a conversation flowing (given that some folks will just lurk) and not so many that a conversation becomes impossible. That's probably around 12-30 people, I would guess. Sometimes it's helpful to have a "topic" for networking sessions even if there isn't a formal presentation - gives people something to talk about.
You may find - or at least we did - surprisingly little overlap between the people who were registered for the cancelled in-person conference and the people who registered for our online one. Also, people register VERY last minute for online conferences; if you have a max capacity, make sure you communicate that loud and clear to get people to register early. We didn't think we'd get anywhere near maxing out our 5k attendee limit and then 1k people registered in the last 24 hrs before it started and people missed out and were upset.
posted by misskaz at 12:34 PM on August 17, 2020 [3 favorites]
I was in a in-company conference a couple weeks ago. And the breakout sessions were all in https://borrel.app.
(They were planned so every group had their own room).
It's like being in a 3D space, where the people close by are louder than the ones far away - which finally takes away the whole pain of Zoom/Meets where in a group everybody needs to talk consecutively.
posted by Thisandthat at 1:08 PM on August 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
(They were planned so every group had their own room).
It's like being in a 3D space, where the people close by are louder than the ones far away - which finally takes away the whole pain of Zoom/Meets where in a group everybody needs to talk consecutively.
posted by Thisandthat at 1:08 PM on August 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
Similiar to Thisandthat's suggestion, my company recently ran some tests with Virbela. You get to make an avatar and you walk around meeting people. Distance defines how much you can here and further more if you are under an "umbrella" only the people in your immediate circle can hear you talk.
The free, exploratory "conference center" had lots of rooms, auditoriums, a courtyard, a beach, a lighthouse, etc. for you to explore. I could see people arranging things like "the break out area for the left handed engineering group is at the beach and the folks interested in learning via podcasts will meet at the lighthouse", etc.
posted by mmascolino at 1:17 PM on August 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
The free, exploratory "conference center" had lots of rooms, auditoriums, a courtyard, a beach, a lighthouse, etc. for you to explore. I could see people arranging things like "the break out area for the left handed engineering group is at the beach and the folks interested in learning via podcasts will meet at the lighthouse", etc.
posted by mmascolino at 1:17 PM on August 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Teams Live Events is more-or-less designed for this, and nearly the whole of Microsoft Build (over 100,000 attendees/participants) this year was run using it.
Essentially, there's a tiered system of producers, presenters and participants - producers get to control what is shown, presenters have a video/audio feed that producers can share, and participants can watch/listen. There's a shared text-chat type side channel that is moderated and can be up/down-voted for Q&A style interaction with the presenters/producers, to manage the everyone-talking-over-everyone-else problem. It scales down well, too (we're using it for what would have been site-wide all-hands in normal times - about 300 participants).
posted by parm at 3:12 PM on August 17, 2020
Essentially, there's a tiered system of producers, presenters and participants - producers get to control what is shown, presenters have a video/audio feed that producers can share, and participants can watch/listen. There's a shared text-chat type side channel that is moderated and can be up/down-voted for Q&A style interaction with the presenters/producers, to manage the everyone-talking-over-everyone-else problem. It scales down well, too (we're using it for what would have been site-wide all-hands in normal times - about 300 participants).
posted by parm at 3:12 PM on August 17, 2020
Cisco WebEx works fine for this, although it's gradually getting less distinguishable from Zoom.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:42 PM on August 18, 2020
posted by aspersioncast at 8:42 PM on August 18, 2020
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posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 11:57 AM on August 17, 2020