A Chorus of Aha Moments
We were an early adopter of a model that proved successful not only for ourselves, but for other major players in the live events space in the weeks and months to come. At the start of the pandemic we thought the future of our company was in jeopardy, but somewhere along the line, in the lead-up to (Almost) IN-PERSON, we experienced an “aha” moment, when all the challenges suddenly felt small, and the opportunity felt immense. As it turns out, we were far from alone in experiencing that sudden transition from a feeling of desperation to a feeling of possibility.
When the pandemic began, Colleen Bisconti was only eight weeks away from producing IBM's largest annual event, Think. Despite the sudden disruption, it was decided that the event would move forward as scheduled, but on a virtual platform. Colleen says she immediately faced a range of challenges, from technical to operational to practical, as she and her team quickly adopted a completely foreign venue format.
In order to redesign Think in a virtual format, she began by deconstructing the event. She identified the reasons people attended in the past, focusing her efforts on delivering that value in a virtual format.
“What we found was that we had way bigger reach; we had over 100,000 people actually register for this, because it was free and available to anyone, anywhere,” she says. “What that taught us was that we could extend our reach way broader than ever before, and it allowed us to reach more clients and prospective clients, more people within the accounts of our key clients.”
On the other side of the pond, Orson Francescone was facing the reality of cancelling the Financial Times (FT) Live's 200 annual global events, which typically included a small in-person crowd of a few hundred each. At the start of the pandemic, FT Live decided to host a three-day virtual event called “The Global Boardroom,” bringing together some of the world's top economists, business leaders, and lawmakers to break down the financial implications of the pandemic.
“We entered day one of the Global Boardroom with 25,000 registrations; by the end of day three we had 52,000 registrations, so basically 25,000 people registered throughout the event as the word spread,” he says. “Consumer behaviors were very different: I can register at the last minute, I don't need to book a plane ticket, I don't need to book a hotel, I don't need to book time off, so I'll decide 20 minutes before if I want to join or not join. That was kind of mind blowing. The fact that our registrations doubled during the event was pretty incredible.”
What Colleen and Orson discovered was that even with limited resources and a condensed time frame, they could still deliver value to a broad virtual audience. After that experience, neither intended to revert to an in-person-by-default mentality, even after it was safe to do so.
And they were not alone.
Digital by Default
As Orson and Colleen discovered early on in the pandemic, and as we did ourselves, virtual events dramatically increase a brand's reach. The initial excitement over registration and attendee numbers, however, was a vestige of the industry's past; event teams have long been accustomed to measuring success in terms of registrations and attendees. As the pandemic progressed and organizers got more sophisticated in their virtual event strategies, they discovered an ability to gather even more telling metrics, and began reconsidering how to benchmark an event's success.
Having a bigger audience is nice, but what really matters is how you engage with that audience—and by extension, how your audience engages with you. That's where data comes in. As events shift to a hybrid platform (where both in-person and virtual experiences are on the table) it becomes easier to track the attendee journey and cater experiences specifically to their needs.
This new approach to event success, ironically, has made it difficult for organizers to see themselves reverting back to an entirely in-person strategy in the future. The data that's generated from hybrid event platforms is so powerful, and the extended reach of virtual events so appealing, that the online format has quickly gone from a last resort to the first.
“What we wanted to do was take advantage of this blank slate that we had and say, ‘When events come back, we really need to think differently about the way that they come back,’ because we knew that the landscape would be permanently disrupted,” explained Nicola Kastner, the vice president and global head of event strategy at SAP. “What we did was take a data-driven approach to formulating our overall event strategy.”
Nicola tells us that in considering the future of events, she and her team studied four specific areas: attendee needs, SAP's marketing strategy, how to define event success, and how other industries had reacted to similar disruptions. Through that exercise, her team identified several findings that matched opportunities and trends raised by many event professionals across the industry, from how virtual attendee behaviors differ from in-person attendee behaviors to a trend toward smaller, local events over major international ones.
“All of these things have formulated our approach, so I believe we will take a much more localized, targeted approach to how we build our events in the future,” she says.
Nicola isn't the only one rethinking the effectiveness of the massive, in-person, flagship event that has long been the centerpiece of many organizations' event strategy.
“We will go back to live events, but we will go back only if and when it makes sense, both from our point of view and our clients' point of view,” says Orson of FT Live's new event strategy. “We don't want to lose hold of those new engaged global audiences, and the only way to do that is to maintain a digital-first approach to our events, even when we go back to physical [events].”
“We're going to be digital first, and physical with purpose,” adds Colleen, describing IBM's new event strategy. “This is a chance for us to reinvent how we think about face-to-face interactions, and where we show up, and how we show up. I think it would be a missed opportunity if any of us jumped back to the old ways of thinking.”
CHAPTER 3 After the Storm
COVID-19 marked a permanent shift in the events industry—one many felt was badly needed—and we are humbled and motivated by the opportunity to play a role in its evolution.
Ever since we founded Bizzabo, in the dawn of the age of mobile technology, just about every industry around us has gone through a significant transformation. When the company was founded, we were still phoning taxi dispatchers, renting movies from a store, buying (or burning) CDs, and doing most, if not all, of our shopping in person with cash.
Much about our world is dramatically different now, but until recently the events industry remained largely the same. Previously, the industry had no external pressure to evolve, facing no outside threats to its supremacy, with no reason to believe change was safer than the status quo. Unlike other industries, disruption would have likely never come in the form of a smaller, nimbler, well-funded start-up, and the industry could have continued on gently tiptoeing toward progress at a safe speed for the foreseeable future.
Instead, our disruptor came in the form of a global pandemic, and now events will be rushing toward the kind of innovations that will make the industry more resilient, more sustainable, and more impactful moving forward.
The Event Impact Gap™
Event professionals now have a mandate to create immersive, personalized hybrid experiences, combining their deep knowledge of in-person event strategy with the opportunities presented by digital tools and capabilities.
