2020 challenged us all and it’s not surprising that event planners took one of the hardest hits. If you were fortunate enough to survive company layoffs, you likely faced one of the biggest tests of your career as you navigated complete uncertainty around your work. It was time to say goodbye to the way you’d always done things, work within difficult restrictions and safety protocols. Let’s step into completely new territory to keep your meetings and events alive with some corporate meeting management software advice. 

The solution to transition to virtual events brought along many more challenges of its own. From keeping audiences engaged in a virtual environment, to a lack of tech knowledge, running into issues securing sponsors, and networking limitations between attendees. This all took plenty of trial, error, and learning through experience. Over a year since the onset of the pandemic, many professionals have started to embrace this shakeup to the industry. They realize major benefits like cost savings and increased reach when hosting virtual meetings and events. 

In a recent interview with Attendease, event expert Tahira Endean shared the example of how IBM set a new record for attendance at one of its major corporate events in 2020. Its IBM Think conference attracted over 100,000 attendees as opposed to a typical 30,000 attendees for its in-person event. 

With COVID-19 vaccinations rolling out, things are looking up. The return to hosting safe in-person events is right on the horizon. In an effort to hold on to the scale advantages of running virtual events while keeping in-person meetings safe, the industry is gearing up to make yet another pivot to hybrid formats — meetings and events that feature both virtual and in-person components. A State of the Event Industry Survey for the first quarter of 2021 found that a good 68% of respondents expect their events to be hybrid events once they go back to business. 

This next transition comes with even more obstacles that can be overcome with the right tools and technology. It’s now on event professionals to source event management software that’s capable of delivering the intended experiences, for both in-person and online audiences.

There are many moving pieces to the puzzle. If you’re a corporate event planner managing a large portfolio of meetings and events, picking the right vendor can be challenging. It can be tough to find suitable event management software that can seamlessly meet the vastly different objectives of your individual events. Be they regional meetings, product launches, lunch and learns, or town halls – to name just a few. 

The problem is that the market is inundated with event tech solutions. This leaves you overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options available. Many of these platforms claim to be “all-in-one” solutions, but we advise you to evaluate these claims with some skepticism. 

Rather than seeking the mythical all-in-one solution only to make costly mistakes and run into limitations further down the line, the way to go instead is to choose foundational event management software that can cover 60-70% of the needs of your event portfolio. You can then seek out additional event management tools that complement it. You can use these dedicated tools to cover more specific aspects of your event like networking and audience response. 

And to future-proof your events, it’s crucial that you take a few steps back to evaluate your event goals. You should also evaluate the experience you’re looking to deliver to your guests before committing to event management software. In other words, you need to think from a design-first perspective. 

Going in on event management software blindly is risky business. Without getting a full understanding of the functionalities you need to support your portfolio of corporate meetings and events. 

Whether you’re planning a product launch for 400 people or hosting an onboarding meeting for a cohort of 10 new employees, any event or meeting needs to be planned with three key elements in mind:

Before shortlisting options for your event management software, review the following questions and ideas for each event in your portfolio. 

A meeting or event can be largely unproductive if the setup and/or the technology doesn’t connect with your audience. For every event you’re planning to host, consider your audience type. That is whether your audience is made up of company executives, senior leadership, new clients, new employees, the general public, or a combination of these groups. Ask yourself: 

The more you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of your audience, the better you’ll be able to fit. You could design your meeting or event to cater to their needs with the technology that makes the most sense. 

If you’re managing events for both internal and external audiences, you might run into issues. You’ll need to promote the public events on your website, but share your internal events exclusively with employees. This calls for a tool that’s able to use a combination of public-facing website, intranet, and emails to manage your events portfolio. 

It’s important to note that although you might have one audience, (let’s say your demographic is young working professionals in the tech industry), it may actually split into different attendee personas. You’ll find that you’ll have a mix of social butterfly attendees as well as dedicated learners. It’s wise to make use of these personas as a tool for further customizing your event experience. Especially to the unique goals and needs of each persona. Designing your experience for different attendee types is something that can be done at every stage of the attendee journey. 

Your event goals will be drastically different if you’re planning a product launch, training event, or seminar, to name a few. You might be looking to improve bonds with clients, connect with new prospects, or strengthen your corporate culture.

Regardless of what type of event you’re planning, take some time to ask your team:

Consider how you can accomplish the goals at hand through the use of event management software. Would you need a platform to enable individual virtual connections, larger breakout rooms, or sponsor halls? Will attendees be free to network openly, or will they need to be grouped into smaller groups? These are all things to consider when you visualize how you need your technology to run. 

The events industry is essentially the experience industry. Hosting an event is far more than inviting guests to a time and place, but is about what they experience.

The type of experience your attendees have starts right from when they discover your event, to how they register. It also includes what happens when they attend your event (both online and off), and even the after-event experience.

It’s smart to get very intentional when deciding what experience you want to take your attendees through at every stages.

Evaluating the experience you want to deliver to your guests will already start to tell you if you’ll have a need for seamless online check-in, features like live polling, gamification tools, email communication, surveys, or speaker slides. 

By clarifying your audience, your event goals, the experience you intend to create by going through the steps above, you’ll start to recognize what features of event management tools are going to be your must-haves, and what offerings are going to be your secondary “nice to haves”. 

Take a look at the best event management software on the market. You’ll find that they’re stacked with features that cover every step of the event planning process. Some common functions you’ll find in event management software include event registration, agenda management, event ticketing options, attendee management, website CMS, payment processing, lead retrieval, and the list goes on.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty top features looking for the right software, consider which criteria your solution should meet:

Whether you’re hosting internal or external corporate events, you’ll want to keep control over the look of your brand. Many event planning tools will offer a list of pre-built website and email templates you can use for event communication. But you’ll want to be sure they’re customizable enough to create completely on-brand designs.

Can the designs look like they’re coming directly from your company (white-labeled)? Or does the tool pose template limitations or watermarks that hinder the look of your brand?

When evaluating a potential vendor, check to see if the tool offers custom URLs, and customization options. Such as the ability to add your logo, colour pallets, and fonts to make your event website your own. 

Will the event management software you’re looking at be able to support your in-person events as well as your specific needs for virtual and hybrid meetings and events? Can the platform handle the complexities of your events portfolio to provide a cohesive experience to your attendees?

You’ll need to consider whether an event planning tool can support both paid and free events, public-facing as well as private events and whether it can handle all event formats (in-person events, hybrid events, and virtual events). You’ll find that you need one that can handle event registration and delivery for both in-person and virtual audiences. 

If you have a large portfolio of corporate events to support, how well does the platform support multi-event management? Is it easy enough to add new events to your mix without too much time spent building out your events? Or will this require regular effort and constant input from your team?

Event software solutions stand out when they help you save time on manual processes. Check if you can copy over attendee lists, event website designs, and email messages from one top event to another. This help you to avoid wasting time every time you create a new event or meeting.

Consider who the primary and secondary platform users are going to be on your team, both internally and externally. Is the software user-friendly with a digestible user interface and helpful prompts? Or will you need to factor in time to train new users on how to use the event management platform?

If you collaborate with other departments, organizers, or external parties, is it simple enough to assign or limit user permissions?

Ideally, you want to go with an intuitive event management tool that’s user friendly enough. For all those involved in your event management process.

No one wants a standalone solution. There’s no point securing event planning software if it doesn’t play nicely with other tools you regularly use. As you scan the market for an event management platform, you’ll want to check its list of integrations. To check what tools it will easily connect to, and what might be a problem if it is not available.

Popular event management software offer integrations to platforms like:

There is no all-in-one solution that can meet the complete requirements of each unique event in your corporate event portfolio. You’ll need to decide which event management software to rely on for your fundamentals. Then you decide which additional tools you can add to your event technology stack to cover more specific needs. 

This can mean sourcing award-winning event management software that covers most of your fundamental event management needs. Then build an external tech stack that can help you manage additional functions before, during, and after the event. Such as attendee engagement, gamification, or broadcasting. 

For example, you might use a platform like Attendease to set up your event website, send your marketing emails, manage event registration, roll out your surveys, process your payments, and track the performance of your events and meetings through real-time ticket sales. 

But while that covers the skeleton of what you need to create your event, you might still choose to integrate the platform with other niche audience response software, conference intelligence software, or lead retrieval software. 

Here are some examples of live streaming, audience response, and gamification tools you can consider to get the most out of your event:

The state of the events industry is changing as we’ve begun to welcome back in-person events. Virtual events are here to stay and hybrid events are only projected to grow in popularity moving forward. To keep up with the new demands, event planners will need the help of tools and technology that will help them manage all three of these different formats to future-proof their events. 

Before committing to a corporate meeting management software, it’s worthwhile to revisit your event design for your diverse portfolio events to evaluate your event goals, the experience you intend to deliver, and your audience’s unique needs. Choosing the right corporate event management software should be the subsequent step. 

All-in-one solutions that claim to do it all come with hidden costs and can cause a number of issues when they fail to meet the specific needs of each of your events. What will serve you well is deciding on a foundational tool that can give you the versatility and scalability you need to manage the intricacies of each unique event, and then plugging in specialized software that can deliver the additional capabilities you need to deliver truly memorable event experiences, whether your guests are joining you in-person, from the comfort of their homes, or both. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to major shifts in the events industry. Event planners everywhere had to get creative to switch events to online affairs. 

At first, the novelty of attending a conference from your living room couch excited people enough to pay attention for hours on end. But now, almost one year into mandated distancing, many people are struggling to find new ways to keep online events engaging and meaningful.

Digital fatigue has set in and it’s making virtual events difficult. So what can you do to make sitting in front of a computer fun again? Our team has a long list of great ideas you can easily implement to make sure attendees of your next virtual event don’t get bored, burnt-out or otherwise uninterested! 

Gamification is the process of turning participation and interaction into a scorable system of points that incentivizes people to engage with your event. It looks different depending on the kind of event it’s used in, but the basic ideas remain the same no matter what. 

The trick to pulling off gamification is having a clear set of goals you want to achieve. For example, if you’re hosting a networking event, your main goal is to generate conversation between as many people as possible. It makes sense in that situation to award points every time someone speaks with a new person! If you’re hosting a virtual trade show, it might make sense to give points for interacting with different sponsors. 

Once you pick out what activities you want to award, all you have to do is assign points to each one and let people know how to rack them up. Maintain some sort of leaderboard so people can keep track of who’s winning in real time. People will like to earn points if you make it fun, but they’ll love to earn points if there’s prizes awarded to the winners.

For events like sales kickoffs, quarterly retreats and other team-building experiences, being virtual instead of in-person can sap all of the enthusiasm right out of your virtual event. When the whole idea is building unity as a team, you need to find ways to overcome the distance between people. 

One way to create this connection is by sending everyone involved something physical that can link them to the rest of the participants. You’ll also want to make time for everyone to share a moment using that touchpoint. For example, sending custom t-shirts for all participants to wear makes for a moving screenshot of unity— ditto for hats, hoodies and even socks! Mugs and water bottles also work great as small tokens that can connect teams across the digital divide. 

Something about seeing a group in uniform (or in unison when using the same mug) makes people feel closer. Even if it’s just for a moment, using these touchpoints can help get the people participating in your virtual event more invested in one another, and more likely to engage at a deeper level. 

It’s no secret that digital fatigue poses one of the biggest threats to engaging virtual events, especially when they take place over several days. There’s only so long that people can sit in front of a screen before they start to glaze over. 

To keep people on board with your virtual event, offer people the chance to participate in activities that give them a break from talking and listening to floating heads. We’ve seen people host virtual yoga classes, virtual meditation sessions, and even guided breathwork to all participants looking for a reprieve from formal activities. Of course, you’ll want to give people the option to log off completely for a while too, but you may be surprised how many folks are in need of a relaxation session these days!

The goal is to let people decompress so when they report back to the parts of your event that really matter, they feel ready to engage at their fullest level. 

In-person events often rely on swag and fun items to get people excited about the day’s activities or the brands behind them. Deliver that same feeling by creating fully customized swag boxes with items your attendees can use throughout the event. 

Swag.com can help you put together an awesome interactive box that makes it easier for people to get engaged with your event. Random things some of our customers have included are:

We recommend telling people not to open their boxes until the event begins: this will build excitement and give people a shared unboxing experience that they will remember for a long time. Remember, Swag.com can help you send these boxes to hundreds of addresses at once, anywhere around the world!

Incorporating a social event into your larger digital event can be a good idea— if it’s done right. But after a year or so of Zoom cocktail hours, most people have had enough. Just because it feels like the easiest or most traditional social mixer you can organize doesn’t mean it’s the best option! 

Think about offering opportunities for socializing that are not based around drinking, or trying to talk over one another after a long day of listening to speakers and breakout sessions. Arranging a virtual book club, or TV show club, or movie club, for example, gives people a chance to get to know one another without being so mundane. You could also hire someone to lead a virtual cooking class or similar creative activity.

No matter what kind of fun social event you set up, make sure to keep group sizes small so people have a chance to have meaningful conversations and not just listen one person speak the whole time. 

These are just some of the ideas we’ve seen our customers come up with to make their virtual events more engaging for participants. We’re sure there are tons of others, and can’t wait for the next creative planner to blow us away! What are you doing to make your virtual event the best it can be?

This article was written by Andrew McMaster, Swag.com’s resident content marketing specialist. Swag.com helps you customize, shop, store and ship the world’s best promotional products.

You need to make sure you prepare…a lot… for your virtual events, because they are part of today’s new normal. In fact, the virtual event platform market is predicted to skyrocket, with Travel News Daily reporting how enterprises are now pivoting towards hosting virtual events instead of in-person ones to adapt to the changes brought about by the pandemic. And available technologies making it convenient to attend events hosted in the digital sphere only strengthens the case for virtual events as the industry’s next big thing.

This bullish outlook underscore an increasing reliance on digital meetings, and it is a trend that is likely to continue as organisations worldwide look to reconvene online. And as our previous article ‘Future-Proof Your Events’ points out, many in the industry are done reacting to the fallout of this pandemic, and are now proactively future-proofing their events.

Despite these inroads, the reality is that a lot can go wrong in these virtual setups, from platform limitations to your connection breaking down and your attendees losing interest. Having said that, you can’t let your fear of failure paralyze you. Instead, you’ll need to be more proactive in how you prepare for your virtual event. The post ‘5 Strategies to Improve Your Online Event Experience’ already outlines a few steps to take your events to the next level, including building brand consistency, getting sponsorship and using music as a mood setter. Next, you’ll need to be on top of things on the actual day of your event, which you can do by following the pointers below.

Days of preparation for your virtual event have likely left you stressed out, and that stress could very well manifest when it’s showtime. This is why you need to be in the right headspace and in a relaxed state. Thankfully, you can achieve this by doing breathing exercises and stretches throughout the day. And you needn’t do anything fancy or elaborate either. Pain Free Working suggests some simple stretching exercises, including shoulder rotations, which help relieve stress, and arm stretches, which relieve pressure off of your fingers, wrists, shoulders, and elbows. You can also take a few deep breaths to calm yourself down and help you zone in on your tasks for the day. Don’t skip this step. It’s in important one when you prepare for your virtual events (and in-person events, too!).

Virtual events are vulnerable to glitches, and proof of it was Canada’s first-ever virtual House of Commons proceedings. Commons Speaker Anthony Rota pronounced the event as a relative success, before admitting that there were some technical hiccups. Such glitches aren’t entirely unavoidable, but you can minimize the likelihood of them happening by performing tech check-ins hours prior to your event’s start time. Make sure that your connection is strong and stable, and that everything — webcams, microphones, and presentation equipment — is working. Prepare contingencies as well, like getting a backup connection or procuring extra cameras and mics just in case. In this way, you lower the probability of technical breakdowns disrupting your event.

In Julia Sousa’s article in ensuring memorable virtual events emphasizes how taking time out to rehearse will help ensure the smooth flow of your events. In particular, it’ll let the moderators and speakers get comfortable not only with one another, but also with the tech at their disposal. It’s also a great way for everyone to iron out the minutiae of your event, like how to do the introductions, how to transition from one segment to the next, and how to reduce potential dead air during the proceedings. Rehearsing, not to mention, is a great way to do a final tech check to see if everything is truly good to go.

The last thing you’d want in your virtual event is to feel discomfort or even any kind of pain during the event itself, as that will compromise your ability to lead it. This is why you must take the necessary steps in preparing for your virtual event to ensure that you’re as comfortable as possible for the duration of the event. That can mean a lot of things, like adjusting the lighting and temperature of the venue, finding a comfortable chair and desk, and clearing out any potential hazards such as wires and power cords. Doing these will all but guarantee that you’ll be at your best once the event starts.

Whether you’re hosting a virtual event or an in-person one, the only thing you have full control over is how you prepare for your virtual event. So, make sure you leave no stone unturned in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the big show. In doing so, you increase the chances of holding a successful event significantly.

Article contributed by Brianne Watson

Exclusively for eventupplanner.com