Open Forum

Hello and happy start to a new week! In our continued times of social distancing, we understand building a sense of community is more important than ever. To provide you an always-on space to network and engage with your peers, we are launching the first of our new weekly series, Huddle of the Week. Every Monday, the Cvent Community Team will post one discussion question focused on the event and hospitality industries, overall best practices, and adapting to the times we are in to be successful and support one another.  

Our first discussion question this week is: What are the differences in KPI analysis between in-person and virtual-only events? Have the goalposts shifted in terms of what is deemed "successful"? 

Please reply with your thoughts/ideas/responses. You can also ask additional questions or share your own experiences based on other users' responses. Initial thoughts can spark more ideas, so be sure to share your insights, even if you don't have direct experience. If you agree with other users' replies or found it helpful, be sure to click the Recommend this Item button. 

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback on our new series! #HuddleoftheWeek #VoiceIt

#Miscellaneous
#ManagingVirtualEvents
#ExecutingStrategicMeetingsManagement

------------------------------
Danni Czark
Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
------------------------------

Thanks for starting this new post theme!  There are many KPIs but a couple of the main ones are:

• Engagement in terms of duration of attendance within a session or virtual event - how long was the attendee in the virtual session/event? 
• If people are using a virtual hub, what is the engagement within each element of the hub/Session (Showcase, Sessions, Polling, Live Q & A)?

I'm interested to find out if people are finding a correlation between providing a tangible item tied to the event with attendance rate and duration.  For example:  a virtual wine tasting or unboxing a gift as part of the virtual event.  Are tangible items more likely to incent attendance?

Thanks!

------------------------------
Loretta Peterson
Events Associate
CDW
------------------------------

Hi,

I agree, great post theme!
I am also interested in the following:

• the attendee is multi-tasking during the event and the webinar is not up in an active browser and just background noise
  • in some virtual events we can not gauge the attendees if their cameras are not on to see if they are smiling, nodding, taking notes
• or how many are just signing up for the post event thank you email with the recording link
  • Some attendees are getting smart and will register just to get the recording link and/or the free gift
    • Its so important to know how engaged they are, is the material relevant, are the facing a virtual meeting burnout, do we need to mix it up more with cooking classes, DJs and other ideas

------------------------------
~
Jo Anna Chapin
Meetings & Events Registration Lead
Accenture
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 09-21-2020 12:29
From: Loretta Peterson
Subject: Introducing Cvent's "Huddle of the Week" Series Kickoff!

Thanks for starting this new post theme!  There are many KPIs but a couple of the main ones are:

• Engagement in terms of duration of attendance within a session or virtual event - how long was the attendee in the virtual session/event? 
• If people are using a virtual hub, what is the engagement within each element of the hub/Session (Showcase, Sessions, Polling, Live Q & A)?

I'm interested to find out if people are finding a correlation between providing a tangible item tied to the event with attendance rate and duration.  For example:  a virtual wine tasting or unboxing a gift as part of the virtual event.  Are tangible items more likely to incent attendance?

Thanks!

------------------------------
Loretta Peterson
Events Associate
CDW
------------------------------

It's a lot less commitment for people to register for a virtual event than an in-person and it's always hard to gage how much they're actually paying attention.

We recently did a virtual version of one of our series -- when it was held in person we tended to aim for attendance in 300-350 as successful. Now management wanted 1,000 virtual attendees minimum to be considered successful.

------------------------------
Rachel Sigley
Sr. Brand Marketing Manager
Tata America International Corporation
------------------------------

Great new series!

Our KPI's for virtual events are based more on click tracking or time the person spends on a particular webpage or section of a website. It's interesting because there is more data available with a virtual event but so many more variables. At an in-person event our attendees walk into the room, scan their badge (data, thank you!) take a seat and watch a presentation. At home, they click into the session, go to fill up their water glass, remember they put a load of washing on and proceed to hang it out, pass the kitchen again for a snack and end up emptying the dishwasher, hear talking coming from their home office and remember they were meant to be watching a webinar and race back to catch the last 8 minutes.  

We have implemented quizzes with each session. I think it will take a few months of collecting data and feedback from these types of events before we can truly measure and improve on our KPI's.

------------------------------
Sharna Pascolo
Program Director
Texas Society of Architects
------------------------------

Hi Sharna,

First of all, you made me crack up with "At home, they click into the session, go to fill up their water glass, remember they put a load of washing on and proceed to hang it out, pass the kitchen again for a snack and end up emptying the dishwasher, hear talking coming from their home office and remember they were meant to be watching a webinar and race back to catch the last 8 minutes. " So very true. :)

What have you been using to implement a quizz with each session? And does the system/platform automatically grade the quizz for you? Does this somehow trace back to the registrant info in Cvent to award them CECs for the session if they pass the quiz? Super curious as that could work for me!

Thanks,
Tanya

------------------------------
Tanya Nieto-Winzey
Conference Coordinator
Pilates Method Alliance
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 09-25-2020 10:25
From: Sharna Pascolo
Subject: Introducing Cvent's "Huddle of the Week" Series Kickoff!

Great new series!

Our KPI's for virtual events are based more on click tracking or time the person spends on a particular webpage or section of a website. It's interesting because there is more data available with a virtual event but so many more variables. At an in-person event our attendees walk into the room, scan their badge (data, thank you!) take a seat and watch a presentation. At home, they click into the session, go to fill up their water glass, remember they put a load of washing on and proceed to hang it out, pass the kitchen again for a snack and end up emptying the dishwasher, hear talking coming from their home office and remember they were meant to be watching a webinar and race back to catch the last 8 minutes.  

We have implemented quizzes with each session. I think it will take a few months of collecting data and feedback from these types of events before we can truly measure and improve on our KPI's.

------------------------------
Sharna Pascolo
Program Director
Texas Society of Architects
------------------------------

Thanks Danni,

I think it's difficult to find the fine line between in-person and virtually-only events and we all have to find a way to shift to this new process or at least to a hybrid version.
- Attendance is for sure one - in-person attendance might be low right now due to COVID, travel restrictions or Budget cuts but if you are hosting a virtual event, you can drive attendance to a larger number as people don't have to travel and you can reach a broader market
- Personal engagement is another one - in-person will be an easy one, as you can set up events to mingle, breakout sessions, etc. but you might have to adjust if hosting a virtual event, as there is to think about how you can manage the same/similar events and you are not there in-person
- Profit could be one - you have to consider the cost for an in-person event (registration cost, venue, F&B, hotel, transportation, etc.). For the virtual event, you could get away with lower registration cost, no F&B cost, however you need to consider a potential higher cost for AV requirements 

Andrea



------------------------------
Andrea Timbes
CRM Administrator & Lead Catcher
Visit Fort Worth
------------------------------

For KPIs, session attendance is a big one! And so hard to know since we haven't been enabled to use RFID badge tracking or having people at doors to scan badges as people enter sessions. We'll want to know:

• If the screen has been minimized (like WebEx does)
• If we get answers to poll questions peppered throughout the presentation
• What the survey results are

Also, the NETWORKING is a huge factor. We'll be using the Exhibitor functionality for networking, but I'm fuzzy on how to measure it. I'd love to have big networking sessions that then break into smaller sub-sessions the way the Cvent Virtual Happy Hours managed this. 

And of course, engagement across the board will be different. We'll want to measure engagement through the VAH rather than through CrowdCompass.

------------------------------
Brenda Ainsburg
Channel Program Manager
brenda.ainsburg@siemens.com
Siemens Aktiengesellschaft
United States
------------------------------

Our goals are creating fatigue-free events that give people the opportunity to fit our trainings around their typical work day. Success to us is providing content that people will use, absorb, be able to use to help their internal teams, and work more closely with our evaluation staff. Success is also filling our sessions so quickly that we have had to open new sessions 3 separate times for the most recent training. We hear feedback that our courses work to make registration easy, made access easy, and give people valuable information upfront. When we have people recommending their colleagues and people from other states to attend our events, we call that a win!

We work with educators, so they tend to come in early and stay late. A lot of our content for events has been morphed into longevity courses (lasting 6 to 8 weeks for ease of training), added video as well as downloadable content, given access to registrations to materials until the end of the calendar year, and we are focusing on specific company facilitators for each course that focuses on particular skill sets. We host a weekly Zoom touch-base, promote people to register for our event to have the assistance of the course facilitator, and we are giving some time for people to network!  It should be excellent and fun!

------------------------------
Amanda Adams
Mid-Atlantic Territory Client Services Coordinator
Cognia, Inc.
------------------------------

I definitely believe one of the most important KPI's is engagement. With this pandemic it has definitely brought some new hurdles but with virtual conferences are are now able to reach way more attendees. Since we can provide a recorded version now we are interacting with way more of our attendees since they are able to fit it within their schedules and attend or watch when they have time, we have seen our engagement certainly increase.

------------------------------
Coy Rushton
Graphic Designer
Primary Residential Mortgage
------------------------------