Virtual Event Planning

If you have ever attended an event that was professionally planned and executed, chances are you didn’t realize how much work went into making it a success. Events, regardless of their size, are complex things to manage.  In every event, something goes wrong, and if you are lucky the only people who notice are on the event management team. An issue can be something minor like forgetting to bring the right color socks, or a major catastrophe, like leaving the wedding ring behind at the hotel. Whatever it is, events and uncertainty go together like two peas in a pod. This may be why so many amazing events are unable to add a live streaming element. It’s very common for event planners to become overwhelmed and unable to add another layer of complexity that is live streaming. Selling virtual tickets is one thing, accommodating a live online audience is another.

Planning for your Virtual Ticket

Therefore, whether you are a professional event manager or a one-time event planner, having a framework that introduces order into the messy process of event-planning is crucial. A systematic approach allows you to deliver excellent results even when you do not have the help of a professional event planning team. An event planning system saves cost, reduces work, removes uncertainty, and makes your success repeatable.

Event Management Software

Event management software solutions can give multiple teams in your organization access to critical information during the event planning process. Having a single online dashboard for sales, marketing, human resources, sponsors and affiliates helps to simplify the complex job of event planning. New cloud-based tools now allow event managers to streamline an efficient workflow that keeps internal and external parties involved in the planning process. Effectively streamlining an event management workflow requires integration with existing systems your organization already uses such as Salesforce, Marketo, Eventbrite, WordPress and Cvent.

Integrating your workflow

When you are choosing an event management platform, draw out a plan that starts with the promotion of your event. It’s ideal if your event management software makes relevant information readily available to all members of your team and at the same time passes the data to the primary systems your organization already uses. For example, your event management software should be able to pass usable data directly to your sales team for immediate follow up. If your marketing team is using a platform like Marketo to nurture new leads, the information collected by the event management system should pass back and forth naturally. In this way, you can make intelligent decisions about how you are communicating with your event attendees.

Perhaps you only want to offer attendees who have purchased virtual tickets a discount for in-person tickets or vice versa. With the right amount of information passing through your streamlined workflow, sales and marketing teams especially can make educated decisions about your event. In this book, you will learn the basics of applying a project management approach to event planning in order to properly add a virtual attendee experience to your event. A project is typically described as an endeavor that is temporary and undertaken with specific objectives in mind. Projects have a time element and they require resources in order to produce the desired outcome.

Managing a Virtual Attendee Experience

Managing a virtual attendee experience will leverage similar types of knowledge, skills, and tools event planners are used to managing already. The goal of event planning is to remove or reduce uncertainty and to make sure the event is executed on schedule, within budgets and on target for intended goals (“What is project management?,” 2017).

By applying project management knowledge and skills to event planning, you can more easily add live streaming and virtual ticket sales to your event. Even if you do not consider yourself an event planner, this book can still help you learn about new ways to monetize events. Almost every profession involves events at some point and this book will teach you how to successfully plan and execute them. The “Experience Economy” is a #1 bestselling book that outlines how changing consumer demands now require any competitive business to create experiences for their customers. All businesses are now “competing for customer time, attention and money” where the ROI (Return on Investment) of traditional marketing methods continue to become less valuable.

Summary

By understanding both the in-person and online sides of meetups, summits, concerts, and conferences you will start to see the advantages of event streaming for marketing any type of business product, service or experience. If you are only thinking about the people who can attend your event physically, it will become clear in short order that this audience is only a small segment of the total accessible market. In the following chapters, you will learn how to identify and market your event to online audiences around the world. Depending on your event, the online audience may surprise you in its size and willingness to pay for virtual access (Pine, 2020).

Learn more on Monetizing Live Streaming

1. Get your free copy of the Virtual Ticket here.
2. Take an online course on hosting private live streams here.
3. Learn what virtual tickets mean for the events industry here.
4. How to monetize your next live event - here
5. How to accept donations on your Facebook and YouTube live streams - here
6. Selling Event Virtual Tickets and Private Live Streams - here
7. Viewer Statistics for live streaming – here
8. Here’s why Twitch is such a BIG opportunity for live streamers - here
9. Did you know your town may have a Business Improvement District? They may help your set up a live stream! More here
10. Selling Virtual Tickets with Event Planner Derral Eves - more here
11. Learn about three events that are already selling virtual tickets here.
12. A look at the technology needed to host private live streams here.
13. A look at planning a virtual event here.
14. Review your virtual ticket pricing strategy here.
15. Preparing your event for live streaming here.
16. Learn how to build your event live streaming team here.