Travel Restrictions Affecting Your Event? Go Virtual!
This article originally appeared on the Blue Sky eLearn blog.
We’ve seen it in the past. Outbreaks, travel bans, terrorist attacks affecting travel around the world, and as a result – your events. As the current Coronavirus outbreak continues to grow, more and more organizations are being forced to cancel their events and conferences, and in some cases stop employee travel completely.
While there is uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead, there are things you can start doing now to ensure the show does still go on!
Offer a virtual component
Is your face-to-face event still happening but it’s clear attendance will be lower than normal? Now is the perfect time to develop a hybrid strategy for your event. You can sell access to the online portion of your event just like you would the face-to-face and utilize interactive tools so that those watching online can be engaged as well. It’s true, if you weren’t already planning on have a hybrid event there will be additional costs incurred, but now you’ll be opening your event up to a wider audience and forging a new path you can repeat and refine for the future.
In addition to the live portion of the event, now that you are streaming it to virtual attendees you should also record the content to repurpose at a later date. You could replay the content as a live event with the presenter(s) available to take Q&A, or you could simply make it available on-demand for anyone to watch on their own schedule. Doing both allows you to have more chances to get your audience to engage in your content and extends and increases your revenue building opportunities from singular events.
Turn your face-to-face event into a webinar or live stream
Is your entire event getting canceled? It doesn’t have to! While the face-to-face component may not be possible, those presenters are ready to go with their presentations – bring them online instead! Just like you were going to charge your attendees to attend the face-to-face event, you can charge them to attend different webinars and even plan to hold them at the same time the sessions would have been held in person.
You’ll also be widening your audience – allowing those that wouldn’t have been able to attend your event in the first place to attend virtually, and you’ll be able to easily record your webinars for replays and on-demand viewing.
