Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid. The new buzzword on everybody’s lips. Event industry professionals and researches claim that it is here to stay – and we believe them !
But do you know what a hybrid event is and how you can approach and leverage it for your business?
If you want to stay on top of the events game in 2021 and beyond, it is high time to familiarize yourself with the concept of hybrid events and how to ace them.
What is a hybrid event?
In essence, hybrid events present the best of both worlds. Executed properly, they bridge the gap between on-site and virtual amplifying reach, impact, and the value of your event.
On the flipside, executed poorly you will end up with a strange and disengaging experience for everyone. Simply putting up a camera, live-streaming or recording your on-site event and calling it hybrid won’t bring you any added value.
It is zero engaging or captivating for your remote audience. And it will bring no additional benefit to your on-site audience.
Your on-site audience will probably forgive you the strange experience of being filmed. But you will lose your remote audience. And this is the major pitfall of hybrid events that you want to avoid by any means: making your remote attendees feel completely isolated.
Imagine an event where you are standing by yourself on a balcony while everyone else gathers in the crowd on the ground. Technically, you are part of the experience – you have a great view and you can follow what is happening on stage.
But your role remains pretty much passive and you can only watch how the people in the crowd mingle and engage with one another. This sucks, right?
Hybrid events have the potential to maximize inclusivity.
Adding a virtual component opens your door to a much wider (remote) audience which would have otherwise missed out on your event. But remember this: just as your on-site audience, your virtual attendees expect an engaging and interactive experience with you.
This is the key challenge posed by hybrid events: you need to cater to two different audiences at the same time now.
To some extent, you can certainly use the same content and create a shared experience when it comes to speakers and panelists on stage.
But given the fundamental differences between your two audiences, you still need to individually address their special needs and wants. Consider how you can simultaneously provide two unique experiences.
What you ultimately want to achieve with your hybrid event is that your on-site and remote attendees will have quite different but equally powerful experiences.
Let’s now focus on how to best establish and integrate this virtual component in order to transform a (standard) on-site event into a smooth, state-of-the-art hybrid experience!
How to design the ultimate hybrid event experience?
You can break down your efforts towards hybrid into the following four pillars:
1. CONTENT
Of course, the overall topic of your event and the main contents will be the same for your on-site and remote audience. But you want to adjust the way you deliver this content to maximize its impact.
Curate the agenda that you have set up for your on-site audience so that it resonates better with your remote attendees. What is crucial to consider here is:
Attention spans differ between on-site and remote.
Make sessions shorter for your virtual audience or consider providing a mix of live and on-demand content. While keeping the live sessions shorter, on-demand content can be a bit longer because it can be viewed, paused, and continued at the attendee’s own convenience.
Perceived velocity differs between on-site and remote.
Your online attendees will perceive the event with a much higher velocity. This means, they will always have an eye on “what’s coming up next” on the agenda and they will most likely not need the 15-20 minute breaks scheduled in your on-site agenda.
Address these gaps, for example by providing short and prepackaged on demand content or by livestreaming brief interviews with speakers while the main event is on pause.
Offer exclusive virtual content.
If you want to convince your remote audience, that face-to-face is not always better, you have to offer them something that is exclusively available to them.
Just like the non-replicable personal touch of the event is exclusive to the on-site attendees.
Therefore, you should create exclusive virtual content. Like for example collaborative virtual breakout sessions, interviews with industry experts or keynote speakers, or have a commentator functioning as a summarizer or analyst filling in when the event is not in progress.
2. COMMUNITY
Live events are essentially one thing: a shared experience.
A high value hybrid event gives everyone involved a sense of belonging and community.
Bring this notion into your hybrid events, blur the lines between your on-site and remote attendees, and make them “one community” as best as possible.
Connect your attendees via shared live engagement activities (activity feeds, polling, Q&A) and use adequate audience response technology to give both your on-site and remote attendees the right tools to express their thoughts and opinions.
When it comes to networking…
By nature, your in-person attendees will most likely mingle and network with the other people who are physically present at the venue. And that’s perfectly fine.
You can however consider setting up special on-site 1:1 networking booths to connect offline and online.
For this, make sure to offer both audiences a shared platform for pre-event engagement and networking. Enable a guestlist on your event website with features to connect and chat online. That way, your attendees can identify like-minded people and schedule meetups for during your event.
If they happen to each be part of the other audience, your networking booths come into play! Your on-site attendees can just walk in and connect virtually with remote attendees.
It’s a great hybrid feature which bridges the gap between your two audiences.
At the same time, remote attendees should have the opportunity to interact and network among each other via virtual chat rooms and meetings, virtual business card exchange, interactions on social media channels dedicated to the event, and so on.
These measures will foster community building at your event that grows your and your attendees’ networks and paves the way for future business opportunities.
Thinking about community, you should also restructure your event team for going hybrid!
For a smooth hybrid experience, it is impossible to have one single host or moderator who guides both audiences through the event. Just like an event is unimaginable without a facilitator who helps the on-site audience, it is absolutely vital to have someone of your team on-site who represents the remote audience.
Have a virtual host or moderator who is only dedicated to your remote audience and who facilitates the engagement and interaction with them throughout the entire event.
3. PRODUCTION VALUE
Zoom fatigue is real.
Video conferencing drains people’s energy. Sitting and staring at a screen for an extensive period of time in order to absorb information highly challenges people’s focus and attention.
And with distraction always just a browser tab away, people’s minds are much more likely to drift off.
While this mental fatigue is definitely caused by poorly curated content and lacking community building features, high production value is the foundation of a valuable virtual experience.
Your event production value is determined by all the equipment you use to deliver the virtual component of your hybrid event. Always aim for highest quality in your entire technical set up: sound, camera, video streaming, lighting!
Embrace technology and carefully design the set up for a virtual experience: good video cameras, tripod, adequate lighting, microphones, required bandwidth, appealing venue set up with reduced onscreen stimuli (use plain backgrounds, etc.) ….
It sounds basic but it is absolutely crucial. You want to look professional, not amateurish.
Nobody enjoys watching a broadcast with bad lighting, low video quality, and malfunctioning audio.
Plus, people now expect to see the speaker. Putting voice over a powerpoint presentation is an absolute no go and your attendees will log off in an instant.
But there is more to a high, memorable production value. Having a perfect set up will still cause people to drift off at some point if the experience is static and motionless.
So, the secret ingredient is: dynamism. You want to offer a multidimensional experience.
If you don’t sit in the middle of a big conference hall, it is much more difficult to feel immersed in the experience. That’s why your remote attendees are much more likely to get distracted.
To prevent this from happening, you should change dynamics often (if possible every 5 to 10 minutes), so that your audience won’t get bored staring non-stop into their screen.
Some ideas are for example: switch between livestream and on-demand, speaker change, camera angle change, screen change, switch between presentations, storytelling, and taking questions.
Be creative. (Almost) anything that spices up what your remote audience gets to see on their screen will keep them engaged and curious.
4. ANALYTICS
We have covered this as one of the main benefits of virtual events, and it also goes for hybrid events: the virtual component presents a goldmine of data and attendee information.
Make sure to have appropriate data analytics platforms in place that help you
- understand which content resonates the most with your (remote) audience
- uncover key signals of intent for each individual (remote) attendee (for example, how long did they follow sessions? How much did they engage?)
- track overall attendance
- score your attendees based on their level of engagement (fly by vs. engaged) and then activate them post-event
Results are created after your event – and having in-depth analytics insights helps your marketing and sales team identify and focus on highest priority customers, prospects, and opportunities. Making your lead generation much more effective and efficient.
Conclusion
When planning future events, hybrid is not just optional. It’s crucial.
It doesn’t require huge budgets to add some sort of engaging, virtual component for a remote audience and it opens a lot of promising (business) opportunities.
It’s called the virtual multiplier effect and it will guarantee you returns much higher than the additional effort needed. So there is no excuse, no reason NOT to design hybrid events from now on.
Of course it all depends on your event goals and there may be scenarios in which your event concept only allows for an in-person experience to deliver true value. But generally speaking, it is always worthwhile to consider taking your event to hybrid level.
But remember – just because we focused a lot on how to include a smooth virtual component to make your event a hybrid experience, the on-site component is just as important for overall success.
You want to balance your efforts and dedicate the same amount of attention to both your virtual and in-person elements for a full-on hybrid experience.
Want to read more about hybrid event trends?
Check out this article by Eventscase.com
https://eventscase.com/blog/25-rising-hybrid-event-trends-eventscase
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Together we can make events easier.
