Salesforce, and Amazon—the types of brands whose business we had been chasing for years (unsuccessfully, up to that point).
We also received responses from current and prospective investors and most of our biggest clients. We had to figure out a lot for the first time in a very condensed time frame, such as whether virtual events also needed an app (they do) and whether the event should be broadcast live or should rely on prerecorded videos (we did both and learned that attendees definitely appreciate knowing whether or not a session is actually happening live). We experienced a wide array of technical glitches in the days and weeks leading up to the event, as we scrambled to cobble together a viable virtual events platform, but when the moment came, everything went off without a hitch.
It was an incredibly powerful moment for us as individuals, as a company, but above all, as an industry. In the previous few weeks we had all experienced layoffs, budget cuts, uncertainty about the future—nobody in the industry was immune. We had no choice but to build our way out of it, and from that effort we had the opportunity to show everyone that there really was a viable complement to in-person events, that events still had relevance during COVID-19, and that we all still had a future in this industry.
We wanted to bring the industry together not just to commiserate on how unfortunate we all were to be in the middle of this storm, but to shift the narrative and demonstrate how this was actually an opportunity to implement some much-needed change. We had gone from being one of the hardest-hit industries in one of the hardest periods of human history to flipping the script and seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move events toward a better future.
(Almost) IN-PERSON proved to be a turning point for our company, and dare we say the industry at large. Up until that point we felt like we were stuck playing defense, but after just a few short weeks we were now on the offensive. By the end of the year, we had gone from cutting our staff by a quarter to nearly doubling its original size. In December, we closed a $138 million financing round, our largest to date.
A Chorus of Aha Moments
We were an early adopter of a model that proved successful not only for ourselves, but for other major players in the live events space in the weeks and months to come. At the start of the pandemic we thought the future of our company was in jeopardy, but somewhere along the line, in the lead-up to (Almost) IN-PERSON, we experienced an “aha” moment, when all the challenges suddenly felt small, and the opportunity felt immense. As it turns out, we were far from alone in experiencing that sudden transition from a feeling of desperation to a feeling of possibility.
When the pandemic began, Colleen Bisconti was only eight weeks away from producing IBM's largest annual event, Think. Despite the sudden disruption, it was decided that the event would move forward as scheduled, but on a virtual platform. Colleen says she immediately faced a range of challenges, from technical to operational to practical, as she and her team quickly adopted a completely foreign venue format.
In order to redesign Think in a virtual format, she began by deconstructing the event. She identified the reasons people attended in the past, focusing her efforts on delivering that value in a virtual format.
“What we found was that we had way bigger reach; we had over 100,000 people actually register for this, because it was free and available to anyone, anywhere,” she says. “What that taught us was that we could extend our reach way broader than ever before, and it allowed us to reach more clients and prospective clients, more people within the accounts of our key clients.”
On the other side of the pond, Orson Francescone was facing the reality of cancelling the Financial Times (FT) Live's 200 annual global events, which typically included a small in-person crowd of a few hundred each. At the start of the pandemic, FT Live decided to host a three-day virtual event called “The Global Boardroom,” bringing together some of the world's top economists, business leaders, and lawmakers to break down the financial implications of the pandemic.
“We entered day one of the Global Boardroom with 25,000 registrations; by the end of day three we had 52,000 registrations, so basically 25,000 people registered throughout the event as the word spread,” he says. “Consumer behaviors were very different: I can register at the last minute, I don't need to book a plane ticket, I don't need to book a hotel, I don't need to book time off, so I'll decide 20 minutes before if I want to join or not join. That was kind of mind blowing. The fact that our registrations doubled during the event was pretty incredible.”
What Colleen and Orson discovered was that even with limited resources and a condensed time frame, they could still deliver value to a broad virtual audience. After that experience, neither intended to revert to an in-person-by-default mentality, even after it was safe to do so.
And they were not alone.
Digital by Default
As Orson and Colleen discovered early on in the pandemic, and as we did ourselves, virtual events dramatically increase a brand's reach. The initial excitement over registration and attendee numbers, however, was a vestige of the industry's past; event teams have long been accustomed to measuring success in terms of registrations and attendees. As the pandemic progressed and organizers got more sophisticated in their virtual event strategies, they discovered an ability to gather even more telling metrics, and began reconsidering how to benchmark an event's success.
Having a bigger audience is nice, but what really matters is how you engage with that audience—and by extension, how your audience engages with you. That's where data comes in. As events shift to a hybrid platform (where both in-person and virtual experiences are on the table) it becomes easier to track the attendee journey and cater experiences specifically to their needs.
This new approach to event success, ironically, has made it difficult for organizers to see themselves reverting back to an entirely in-person strategy in the future. The data that's generated from hybrid event platforms is so powerful, and the extended reach of virtual events so appealing, that the online format has quickly gone from a last resort to the first.
“What we wanted to do was take advantage of this blank slate that we had and say, ‘When events come back, we really need to think differently about the way that they come back,’ because we knew that the landscape would be permanently disrupted,” explained Nicola Kastner, the vice president and global head of event strategy at SAP. “What we did was take a data-driven approach to formulating our overall event strategy.”
Nicola tells us that in considering the future of events, she and her team studied four specific areas: attendee needs, SAP's marketing strategy, how to define event success, and how other industries had reacted to similar disruptions. Through that exercise, her team identified several findings that matched opportunities and trends raised by many event professionals across the industry, from how virtual attendee behaviors differ from in-person attendee behaviors to a trend toward smaller, local events over major international ones.
“All of these things have formulated our approach, so I believe we will take a much more localized, targeted approach to how we build our events in the future,” she says.
Nicola isn't the only one rethinking the effectiveness of the massive, in-person, flagship event that has long been the centerpiece of many organizations' event strategy.
“We will go back to live events, but we will go back only if and when it makes sense, both from our point of view and our clients' point of view,” says Orson of FT Live's new event strategy. “We don't want to lose hold of those new engaged global audiences, and the only way to do that is to maintain a digital-first approach to our events, even when we go back to physical [events].”
“We're going to be digital first, and physical with purpose,” adds Colleen, describing IBM's new event strategy. “This is a chance for us to reinvent how we think about face-to-face interactions, and where we show up, and how we show up. I think it would be a missed opportunity if any of us jumped back to the old ways of thinking.”