Event planners are busier than ever. Since virtual events have seen explosive growth these past few years, scaling events has become a key component of a company’s overall strategy. While savvy event planners adopted the use of event templates to help ease their load, the increase in volume also meant the complexity of event program management increased as well.
While lead generation events such as thought leadership webinars and weekly product demos bring a strong return on investment (ROI), driving leads is not the only motivation for adopting larger scale event programming. Virtual events such as daily Ask Me Anything live webinars, software training, product roadmaps, company investor meetings, and user conferences can be leveraged to grow brand awareness, increase customer satisfaction, and support company communications.
While an event planning checklist helps event planners stay organized, the sheer volume of tasks to manage a growing list of events can become overwhelming. From content development, promotion, registration management, and security to technical considerations, the potential for critical details to slip increases. Event catastrophes can damage your event ROI, company reputation, and even compromise intellectual property if embargoed content is leaked.
Accessibility and inclusivity are additional and necessary components of successful virtual events. Ensuring attendees can access your events and customize their experience as it best suits them is not a “nice to have,” it’s a must-have for successful event programs. Virtual and hybrid events can maximize the potential for audience reach and participation by having supports in place like closed captioning, customizable screen controls, live sign language interpreters, or virtual event technology that meets WCAG web accessibility standards.
Event templates take the cyclical work of selecting registration page layouts, adding company branding, and standardizing registrant emails for events off the event planner’s list, reducing setup time required for each and freeing them to focus on more critical tasks.
Map out the year’s events and prioritize them based on whether they are critical, important or nice to have. Focus on the critical events and allocate sufficient budget to them. On a quarterly basis, examine your important and nice to have events and allocate budget based on ROI.
Key components to supporting a strategy for scaling events include a dedicated virtual event program manager and technical staff. The efficiency achieved by tapping the experience of a team already familiar with their roles, the technology, and the previously-gained experience from past events reduce the need for re-training.
Don’t miss critical steps, leave it to our seasoned virtual event experts to keep things moving. EventBuilder’s team of dedicated specialists can plan, manage and report on all your events. Are you ready? Check out our Infographic: When to Outsource Virtual Event Services
