Designing a hybrid event is like designing any event—effective event design begins with the end in mind. When designing your hybrid event, it’s essential to keep your event goals in mind.
This article, excerpted from our eBook "Keeping Up With the Connectors: The strategies, tactics, and tools from the minds behind Cvent CONNECT," walks you through the process of designing Cvent CONNECT Hybrid 2021, sharing the best practices documented along the way so that you can apply them to your event.
Understand The Goals of Your Event
Every event has a purpose. When designing your event, it’s essential to keep your event goals top of mind.
Step one is to take a look at your hybrid event through the lens of your total event program so that you can then contextualize your intent and goals.
In the broadest sense, Cvent CONNECT is a conference for users and potential users of Cvent products. Our ultimate goal is to build relationships with customers and prospects. Those relationships lead to new sales, renewals, cross-sells, and upsells.
More specifically, Cvent CONNECT is a product showcase. We share best practices, key learnings, and major takeaways with our attendees as we demonstrate our products and our hybrid event platform. We’re showing people what’s possible as they experience Cvent products first hand.
We want attendees to leave with the insights, tips, and tricks they need to manage their events professionally from start to finish. After experiencing how they could be running their events, we hope they will go home and say things like:
- “I’m going to implement the way they executed the general session.”
- “I’m going to take how they organized their product showcase and use that with my attendees.”
Apply It to Your Hybrid Event
Ask yourself these types of questions to help define the scope of your event program:
What’s the core goal of the hybrid event you’re planning?
- Do you want to grow your customer or membership base?
- Are you hosting a user conference for a product or service?
- Is your event a revenue-generating expo?
To achieve your objectives, does it make sense to host programming that is:
- In-person only?
- Streamed to a virtual audience?
- Uniquely accommodating to a virtual audience only?
- A combination of the above?
Design One Event With Two Experiences
Keeping in mind our hybrid event’s north star as a product showcase, we then took a look at the experience from our attendees’ perspectives. By considering the different needs of in-person and virtual attendees, we could design two distinct experiences to serve each group better.
Drivers for Attendee Types
In-person attendees want proximity, exclusive access, and a hands-on experience they can’t get from a live stream. They want to touch and feel the products, interact with people, and be immersed in the experience. FOMO is a factor too!
On the other hand, people attend events virtually because it’s convenient and inexpensive. They can save time and travel expenses while still getting to know our brand through a high-quality experience with interactive content—all in real-time from anywhere around the world.
To determine which elements would be offered in which format, we had healthy debates and great discussions with our stakeholders. Ultimately, we decided on a great mix of showcase opportunities to satisfy our stakeholders and both audience types.
Knowing the virtual component would expand potential reach, we focused on top of funnel programming to attract the broadest virtual audience. We also recreated the trade show experience for our virtual attendees by giving them virtual booths to browse.
Based on historical data, we knew more in-person attendees are either existing Cvent customers or further down the funnel. For that reason, in-depth product sessions, training, and 1:1 appointments to talk through specific account needs were only available onsite.
Since networking is an integral part of any event, in-person or virtual, we had unique networking opportunities for both groups. In-person attendees had breakfast roundtables in the morning while the virtual audience had virtual networking sessions mid-afternoon.
Apply It to Your Event
Consider these questions before you commit to a design:
- Will registration paths differ for in-person and virtual?
- How long will sessions be, and how many per day?
- What sessions will be exclusive to each attendee type?
- How will you facilitate networking and create a sense of community?
- What sponsorship opportunities do you want to create?
Think Like a Producer
A producer is like the ultimate project manager. They’re thinking about all the moving parts and building blocks of the event production. They aim to create the experience they believe their attendees want, both in-person and virtual. Producers have A LOT of things going on behind the scenes—this was definitely the case for Cvent CONNECT.
To create a compelling virtual experience, we added many unique production elements to the scope of the event this year. We had to consider additional types of content delivery, production tools to deliver virtual content, and how our attendees would find and experience live and on-demand content.
We produced three different “live” session formats: in-person, live stream (simultaneous virtual broadcast of in-person sessions), and simulive (pre-recorded, but broadcast to the virtual audience at a “live” time), all via our Cvent Hybrid Event Platform. Additionally, recordings were made available on-demand after the live sessions ended and would be available for 30 days after the end of the event.
Simplified Virtual Content Systems
One of the new elements we added this year was CONNECT TV. We set up an onsite studio where a host interviewed in-person attendees about what was going on at the event. The interviews were streamed live to the virtual audience to provide unique glimpses into the in-person experience.
With two audiences, we also had to think about time zones. Our event was in Las Vegas, but since many were attending virtually from the East Coast, we thought carefully about what content to schedule at what time. All live-stream sessions were early afternoon Vegas time to air during the East Coast workday.
Apply It to Your Event
The session plan of each hybrid event will be unique, but here are some essential elements to consider when creating yours.
Answer these programming questions:
- Which elements should be available to both audiences?
- What content do you want to pre-record?
- Which sessions will you live stream?
- What technology and tools will you use to deliver virtual content?
Consider these crucial venue factors:
- Do they offer enhanced audio-visual equipment?
- Is the Wi-Fi reliable?
- What are their streaming capabilities?
- Does the venue size allow extra space for distancing?
Pro Tip: Use an event diagramming software like Cvent’s Event Diagramming to get a clear view of your event and how it all fits together.
Want to learn all the best practices for a great hybrid event? Download "Keeping Up With the Connectors: The strategies, tactics, and tools from the minds behind Cvent CONNECT" to learn hybrid design, staffing, reporting, and more!
