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At Engage 2020, Gather Voices’ first annual conference event, we brought together leading experts from the association industry to talk about the power of video for creating long-lasting engagement at your virtual events and all year long.
Our first session, Adjusting to the World of Virtual Events, was moderated by Martha Awojobi, a Non-Profit Consultant and the Curator of the BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) 2020 Fundraising Conference.
Throughout the session, we learned about everything from required elements for creating a compelling virtual experience that attendees will love to delivering value to your sponsors at the virtual event and beyond to strategically pricing your event for success.
Let's dive deeper into a couple of key themes from the session:
If you want to create content that will engage your virtual event audience, you have to work with them to curate content that meets their needs. You’ll have success if you focus on listening to your target audience and discovering what they want to get out of your event. Listen to Martha Awojobi, Director at JMB Consulting:
You also need to incorporate a diverse group of speakers into your program schedule. If you want your content to resonate with your event attendees, make sure that they see themselves represented at the event. Listen to T Ferguson, Founder & CEO of Backstory:
Keeping an audience engaged in a virtual experience isn’t an easy thing to do. Zoom Fatigue is real and something that most of us have probably dealt with at this point. To keep things interesting, make sure you incorporate elements of surprise and delight for your audience. Listen to David Title, Partner at Bravo Media:
Once you’ve created compelling content to attract and engage your audience throughout the experience, it’s time to focus on adding value for your sponsors. But what works for in-person meetings and conferences isn’t always what works at the virtual event. Listen to Edward Wendling, Global VP of Marketing at Advanced Solutions International, discuss the opportunities sponsors really want at a virtual event:
Pre-Recorded Video Content offers your sponsors the opportunity to tell their stories in an authentic, engaging way, both at your virtual event and beyond. For our own Engage 2020 conference, sponsor videos were featured at the event and then again in the On-Demand Content Library that attendees and other subscribers can access year-round, extending the sponsors’ reach. Listen to Dr. Michael Tattonetti, Founder of Pricing for Associations:
It’s important to remember that authenticity is a critical component of sponsor success at the virtual event. People want to make meaningful connections with other people. Arianna Rehak, Co-Founder & CEO at Matchbox Virtual Media, described how her team discovered that sponsors whose Virtual Event content felt less like an ad and more like a real person, saw the highest conversion rate. Listen to her:
If you’d like to learn more from all of the thought-leaders involved in the Adjusting to the World of Virtual Events segment, you can watch the entire thing in our Engage 2020 On-Demand Content Library. For example, you’ll hear:
