JOB TITLE – Event Coordinator, Planner
EVENT DESCRIPTION – Live Virtual and Self-Paced professional learning events for our member base that provides training courses for educational institution accreditation reviews are some of our most popular events. We host up to 50 courses each year, and we rarely have to promote the events!
EVENT DATES - (most successful to date 2020-2021 year) 8/25/2020 - 11/30/2020 with the series averaging registration at 89%.
TYPE OF EVENT - Live Virtual Preparing for the Engagement Review, a series of 11 courses each containing 3, 90-minute live virtual training sessions.
WHAT WORKED FOR YOU (DO'S - write at least 2) -
PLAN WHAT TO SAY & HOW TO SAY IT - We worked with our client care team, client support team, improvement services team, and marketing team in a very collaborate and frank way to understand how to speak to our audience in a more concise way. We also made a better plan so that separate teams were not overlapping each other in communications. Too much, and we get opt-outs. Too little, and we get low registration numbers. We searched for the 'sweet spot'.
DROP THE EGO - Our events are about our members or potential members. We are providing information and training to better serve them. Sometimes our thinking was clouded by how we understood our events internally. We got stuck in a pattern of referring to documents, shared work spaces, and communications by nicknames (and not everyone called these the same thing!). We also focused too heavily on our goals. Do we want higher registration - yes. However, do we want people to register and attend and have a stellar experience - even more yes!!! Being egocentric is so easy to do, but it doesn't put the best foot forward.
WHAT TO AVOID (DON'TS - write at least 2) –
USE COMMON TERMS - Keep things simple when it comes to engaging with registrants. They want to know the 5 Ws and not a whole lot more than a sentence or two beyond that. Pontification leads to confusion, and it excludes several of the reader types - 'skimmers', 'swimmers', and 'divers'. Our constituent base are rarely 'divers' because they work in education! They don't have time to decipher our event jargon.
K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple... uh... Staff :D We had documents awry everywhere online and on our servers and on cloud spaces. No one could find anything. You would try to "get back to 'that document" and not be able to pull it up in a planning meeting without hunting and pecking and opening the same wrong one multiple times - Yikes!! Our company is a merger of two other companies that had vastly different workflows. Plus, our staff has changed or shifted dramatically from 2019-2021. We ended up attempting to track so granularly that we had a mountain of data with no purpose for it. Having data for data's sake is something that can be a time-waster. Simplicity, consistent tracking that is frequently talked about in meetings, and naming conventions for our planning documents really helped. Also, repeating the name of a document, no matter how long, keeps everyone on the same page.
------------------------------
Amanda Adams
Mid-Atlantic Territory Client Services Coordinator
Cognia, Inc.
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 02-10-2021 11:07
From: Megha Jetley
Subject: "Share & Tell" Your Successes - Template Included
Hi Cvent Community! Greetings of the New Year. We hope you are staying healthy and keeping safe!
We are so excited to kick off the new year with our new 'Share and Tell' series in the Open Forum. Through this Share & Tell series, we encourage you to share the industry 'do's and don'ts' that you have learned from your event experience. This series is a by the customers and for the customers, format focused on best practices and adapting to the changes in the event industry (virtual & hybrid) through your real-life stories.
Learn from your industry peers through their stories on what worked well for them, and what to avoid, as the event industry has changed rapidly over the year.
I am sharing the template of the discussion below which you can use to start your own Share & Tell story in the Open Forum. If you have a success story to share, we would love to hear it from you in this new series! So why wait, share your best practices that you tried and tested and worked well for your event. Copy the template at the end of the post and don't forget to use the hashtag #ShareandTell when you post your story.
To get started, share your story by copying the below template > pasting it to a new discussion post > fill in the details and post! Speaking with @James Rose and @Maribeth Bluyus I believe they may have success stories to share.
*Note to venues: Feel free to share your story from events at your property/in your destination city!
TEMPLATE:
Check out Cvent Connect 2020 success story below from Taylor Bohn
JOB TITLE – Event Technology Lead
EVENT DESCRIPTION – Cvent CONNECT is our flagship user conference. We took things fully virtual in 2020 and executed a 40,000-person event all on our brand-new virtual platform, Cvent's Virtual Attendee Hub. We were the first event to ever use the Virtual Attendee Hub, and it was a smashing success!
EVENT DATES - August 25-26
TYPE OF EVENT - User Conference
WHAT WORKED FOR YOU (DO'S - write at least 2) -
TESTING, TESTING, and MORE TESTING - We did a test run of using the Virtual Attendee Hub with our internal employee base a couple of weeks before Cvent CONNECT Virtual. We were able to work out all the kinks and also gather a great sense of confidence going into the event, knowing that we were going to be able to do it, and it would work and work really well.
The end is near - Remember your end goals of the event, and keep those in mind when building, architecting, and working towards an event. Data output and engagement tracking are more important than ever. Keep all of that in mind when building your event. Collect the necessary fields in registration, utilize Engagement Scoring in Cvent to track your highest engaged attendees, and follow up with them afterward.
WHAT TO AVOID (DON'TS - write at least 2) –
Less is more - Keep things simple when it comes to virtual events. There is a TON out there, and attendees are getting bombarded every day with advertisements, invitations to events, etc. Keep yours simple and enticing. Do not make a lengthy/complex registration process, do not overwhelm invitees, and do not let them leave your virtual event, keep them engaged!
Relax, take it easy - Things happen, it IS technology. Do not panic at the moment if something goes awry. Have a backup plan in place, and then have a backup plan for that backup plan. Being prepared is a must and will let the show go on. Prepare emergency comms for attendees, and contingency plans for all aspects of the event. If you are hosting live sessions, pre-record one of your dry-runs and have that recorded asset ready to play in case of emergency. Remember, these things happen all the time, and often, the attendees do not even notice.
ADDITIONAL EXCITING NEWS:
Start sharing your stories now and help other users incorporate your successes in their events. Once you post this to the Open Forum, you will receive the 'Story Teller' badge within a week of the post. Check out all of the Community badges you can receive here.
Be sure to support your peers by clicking the 'Recommend' button or replying to their post with words of encouragement or questions on their strategies.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback on our new series! #ShareandTell
Copy the template from here
JOB TITLE –
EVENT DESCRIPTION –
EVENT DATES -
PHASE OF EVENT PLANNING: (Event/Web Build, During Event, Post-Event)
TYPE OF EVENT -
WHAT WORKED FOR YOU (DO'S - write at least 2) -
WHAT TO AVOID (DON'TS - write at least 2) –
#BiddingonGroupBusiness
#Miscellaneous
#ManagingVirtualEvents
------------------------------
Megha Jetley
Team Lead
Cvent Marketing Department
------------------------------