Hosting a virtual event is very different to organising a face-to-face event.

The Civic Tech: Tech for Social Impact event was originally planned for the 18th March 2020, the week the Covid-19 restrictions started in Australia. We decided to postpone it for a month and the event was held on Wednesday the 8th April.

Adapting the highly interactive, participant driven format, designed for face-to-face engagement to virtual was a bumpy ride. I’m really proud of my team all of who volunteered (including me) to deliver the event while struggling with the impact of Covid 19 on their families, incomes and businesses, and lifestyles. Thank you Samantha Hickson for supporting me with production, and space Dane Murray who helped to assessed options and hacked a solution together to create our virtual space for us. I’m also grateful to our speakers and founders and participants who stuck with us through this process. We’re pretty happy with the outcome. I’d give it a 7/10 but I have high expectations about participation and delivering value to participants, and I am probably too hard on myself.

This blog summarises the lessons we learned, and we are sharing with you now in the hope that it helps others adapting and planning virtual events. We’ve also shared a summary of the event here.

We are also doing what we can to enable those who were involved in the event to continue asking questions and engaging with each other. Please complete the survey at the end of the summary if there are any specific questions you would like to ask, sessions you missed, or a speaker and founder you would like to engage with? We are happy to make connections and facilitate ongoing engagement where viable.

Tech

• We struggled to find a tool with good UX that could enable the same kind of participation and engagement we had planned virtually. We decided on Zoom but struggled with their daily changes.

• Zooms update on the day of the event included a requirement to download the application to my desktop. Unfortunately this caused problems during the opening of the event, as I was logged in as the administrator on the desktop and Samantha was also logged in as administrator on her machine. Zoom also allowed me to log in as a different user in the web application so it took me a while to determine the issue and hand over control to Samantha.

• We originally thought we would have eight zoom rooms, and invite questions and encourage discussion among participants verbally / through audio as well as text (Q&A and Chat), but the zoom rooms were $50 each per month as add-ons to our pro account at the time which would have cost $450 for the event. Tickets were $15 each and did not cover hard costs. Zoom rooms are now free on a pro account for a limited time.

• Transitions. We had eight founders hosting sessions during the event. Participants had time to go to two founder sessions. Zoom Rooms have a breakout feature but participants need to be allocated beforehand or a coordinator can add them manually during the call. If allocating manually facilitator will need to ask participants to raise their hands so that the coordinator can add them into a breakout. But we wanted participants to be able to select their own ‘rooms’ / founder sessions they wanted to attend themselves but even if we’d paid for zoom rooms this process would not have been smooth.

  We ended up coming up with a hacked solution where founders created their own Zoom meetings and participants were invited to leave our meeting to go to a founder session, then move to a second, before coming back to ours. It wasn’t smooth. If your process is to click links in chat like ours, make sure you explain that to participants very clearly or find another way to do it. Another alternative would be to have a landing page for the event which links into all the video conferences from the 1 event webpage.

  Some Zoom accounts / meetings require passwords, others don’t. Founders who had an enterprise license also required a log in using a business / an email or invite from someone in the organisation.

• Waiting rooms - this feature is now automatic on Zoom meetings if you do not turn it off. Some founders were unaware of this and were not aware they had to ‘let participants into their rooms’. We tried to add music to ours by playing it on the same computer which didn’t work well - we’re now playing with the integration functions.

• Zoom Webinars versus Meetings. You can share screen on a Zoom meeting and give a powerpoint but it looks a lot better if you use webinar option. The webinar also allows Q&A function and a split screen feature. We also learned that the gallery view which add a lovely social element to the event is better in meetings than webinars.

• Recordings. We learned the hard way that Q&A are not recorded. Chats are, and so is the video and audio of the event if you enable it but not Q&A. Please share your questions with us if you missed out on getting an answer during the event!; C

• Finishing with a holding slide and music would be nicer than an abrupt finish to the meeting.

Time

• A way to show a timer to all speakers because some people are not aware of how long they have spoken for once they get started, which leaves less time for others.

• Allow time for participation, balance content and process. Our pre-planned event program was too full for a virtual event and our timings were affected by the tech issues at the start of the event. This limited how much there was for questions.

• Events required engagement beforehand and afterwards. Engagement with the project team / coordinators, facilitators, participants, speakers, partners and in our case founders who hosted their own sessions. This takes time. A lot of time.

Participation

• Open-space enables deeper engagement. There was an accidental up-side of keeping the webinar open when participants went to the founder sessions because it became 'openspace', allowing us to ‘hang-out’ and provide tech support to participants left in the room.

• Communication, facilitation and coordination. Look at ways you can communicate with your speakers and MC. You’re not in the same space as they are, so the opportunity to pull them aside and let them know with a quick chat isn’t an option anymore. Will you set up a private chat with them? Within the platform? SMS? Call? Give them an earpiece? Who else are the key players who can communicate and need to be communicated to? Do you have someone allocated to answer the Q&A? Do you have someone allocated to monitor the chat? The speakers?! There’s a lot of elements in play here just like any other event, so if you have extra sets of hands available – use them!

• Set participation parameters for your event. How do you want people to engage with one another? Can everyone see the Q&A panel? Can attendees communicate to everyone in chat?  Do you want your attendees to see who else is attending? Do you think you’ll need to moderate the questions coming through for your speakers or would you like your attendees to ask questions directly (audio) to the speakers? These are just a few of the things you need to consider when choosing the online platform you’ll use and which feature of that platform you’ll use. There’s a big difference between a Zoom webinar and a Zoom meeting.

Preparation

• You need to have a rehearsal.  You and your speakers need to make themselves available for a rehearsal just as they would if it’s a live production to test sound, audio and run through their presentations and panel discussions.  It’s key to having seamless transitions throughout the event.

• More engagement with founders before the event. Because of the technical issues outlined above we needed founders to host their own rooms / their own zoom meetings. We were so busy setting up our own event and working through the 1.5hours and seven speakers we were managing that we didn’t spend enough time pre-event engaging with our eight founders. If you have people hosting their own meetings as part of your event you will need links and a practice run so that they understand their role beforehand. Or if you want to host your own rooms, you will need to account for and manage it.

We hope this helps you to design and deliver better virtual engagements.

To all the participants please provide your feedback about the event through this survey.