As you prepare for your first virtual event, what are you worried about going wrong? Is it a bad network connection? Presenters forgetting to log in?
These worries are understandable, but often the biggest problems we face aren’t the ones we expect. That’s why we turned to virtual event organizers to explain what the real issues are, and what they would do differently. You might be surprised by what problems you hadn’t considered!
Here we summarized 12 mistakes made by the virtual event organizers, and how to prevent them. You can reach out to us to get our full report on ten of these mistakes and their solutions. But in the meantime, here are some of the highlights:
Problem 1: Too much security
We know you want to protect your event, but being overzealous with your security measures can actually end up keeping out the people you want. Some companies found that, instead of experiencing security issues with unregistered attendees, they had actually added too many preventative measures, such as limiting Zoom calls to only authenticated users. The increased security actually reduced attendee participation!
Problem #2: Beginning the conference after a weekend
Beginning an in-person conference on a Monday can be helpful for attendees who have a long way to travel, but you might not want to apply this strategy to virtual events! If attendees use the weekend to start learning the technology, they’ll have to wait until the day of the event for tech support. These requests can flood customer support the first day, causing delays before the event even starts.
Problem #3: Losing track of session streaming/video links
Just like it’s important for attendees to understand the convention center map at an in-person conference, attendees need a clear, central location to find their session links and passwords. When event organizers chose to send out an individual email for each session, links and passwords often piled up, got lost, or were otherwise confusing for organizers and attendees. Especially for large conferences with many sessions, it can be a lot tougher to keep track of than you might expect!
Problem 4-12 and solutions: Just ask!
Due to the space limit, we compiled the full list with their solutions into a full report. Please contact your Whova event consultant to download it. If you don’t have one yet, no worries! If you’re interested in using Whova, just place a price quote and our event consultant will contact you as soon as possible.
While holding an event in a new way is always going to present unique challenges, these issues don’t have to affect your event. Learning from the mistakes is always the best way to achieve your own success. We hope these mistakes from the organizers and their solutions could help prevent you from making similar mistakes.
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