The Five Stages of Virtual Event Acceptance

These past few weeks, I've been on calls, emails, phone chats and zoom meetings with a single topic on the agenda.

The topic is depressingly familiar: What the heck do we do about our business networking event later this month. Or summer. Or fall. Or anytime in 2020.

And in each case, there are five stages of discussion before everybody - including our own team at Pacific Coast Business Times - realizes that live events are almost certainly not going to happen this year.

So with apologies to Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler, who came up with the original five stages of grieving for a personal loss, here are my five stages of grieving for the loss of a live event. I hope it helps you and your enterprise adapt to the brave new world of the COVID-19 economy.

Stage 1. Let's wait. This is the denial phase in which you hear people say things like "it will get better" or "we don't have to decide just yet." Trust me, as someone who has canceled two events and gone through the process, this never works.

Stage 2. We can scale it down and be OK. This is skipping over the actual Stage 2 and headed to what Kubler Ross and Kessler described as the bargaining phase. Ideas like "we can distance" or "we can wear masks except when eating and drinking" will be floated. But bargaining is actually just illusion. We are bargaining with ourselves and we are going to lose.

Stage 3. Zoom sucks. OK, so now we are at anger. Yes, Zoom is a very flawed platform and meetings on zoom are potentially proof that dark matter exists and that black holes do crazy things with time. But have you actually tried Webex? It sucks way worse. To move on from Stage 3, try a glass of white wine or a dirty martini made with very good potato vodka.

Stage 4. What about our sponsors? How will this ever work? Will anybody attend? This is the depressing moment when you realize you actually need to make a virtual meeting work. Actually if your sponsors are banks or large corporations they will be thrilled that you are not putting their reputation or employees at risk at a live event. If you work at it, your audience will show up but you will have to find somebody with zoom expertise - maybe your niece who just got laid off from that big ad agency - to put it together.

Stage 5. Let's give it a try. This is acceptance. If you play with the platform you will learn that Zoom has a way cool chat application. So, some of the time, the actual presentation is the background and the real action is connecting with friends and colleagues who haven't seen each other since March. Things will go better with a clever host and a script. And you are saving a bundle on meals, booze and the venue. It's time to take that risk. You've been through the five stages - seize the moment.