What I learned producing two virtual conferences back to back

The world is rapidly changing the wake of both the pandemic as well as societal issues taking a more public forefront in how we think about our everyday work regardless of our sector or job.

For me, one of the things that is coming into focus for my job is that I will be taking a more active role in planning and executing the experiences that we put together for both clients and the nonprofit sector at large. As I shift my focus away from being a partner channel manager and toward a brand and communications specialist for my company, I am taking a more critical look at how our sector generally puts together conferences to help educate people.

Recently, I helped produce and execute two virtual only conferences that had two different audiences but ultimately were aiming to help nonprofit professionals use technology better while pushing them to think differently about how they do their jobs and their role in creating a more equitable and just world. They supported 2159 nonprofit professionals and I wanted to extend my recap from last year into a more evolved approach to where I think we need to start moving when it comes to educational experiences for our sector.

I'm going to break this into three different sections:

• Planning / Resource Management
• Educational Content
• Technology

Planning / Resource Management

Conferences like the ones we put on take months to plan, so settling on a good team with a clear focus of objectives is key. We started planning our company's user conference called Generosity Xchange as early as March and started planning for the co-produced Nonprofit Social Media Summit with our partner Julia Campbell around summer time. So giving yourself lead time to do things right is critical.

When we did Generosity Xchange last year, we were not given a budget to implement it and had to find innovative and creative ways to pay for the conference itself. This came in the form of both sponsorships from our partner network as well as ticket sales.

This year, we were able to have a bit more cushion because of an exciting partnership with Visa that helped lock in a top supporter for our work. I was then able to go to our partner network and start to offer more personalized options for how to support the conference. I learned last year a few things:

• Virtual booths are not effective and should be more of a baseline of where calls to action can be placed
• Thought leadership of the sponsor should be front and center. This year, I ensured every partner was able to offer an educational session as part of their sponsorship. They were able to do whatever they wanted in terms of content but with direction on the theme of the conference to help make things connect a bit more clearly
• We placed this thought leadership in an on-demand center so attendees didn't feel forced into the content itself but instead were pushing opportunities to have the "hand raisers" really get engaged. Preliminary feedback from partners like The Giving Block is that this worked and led to organic sales pipeline

I've been heavily influenced by Chris Walker at Refine Labs and his approach to Demand Generation versus Lead Generation. I had a few requests for outright email lists to be provided as part of the sponsorship and we did not provide this as part of the sponsorship. I have found that any post conference emails I have gotten were either wildly incorrect in understanding me as a buyer or just rang hollow because of the delay in its delivery. Luckily we have a CEO at Neon One that understands that conferences should be considered brand investments, not necessarily things that are in the realm of PLEASE ENTER THIS INTO SALESFORCE UNDER THE CONFERENCE CAMPAIGN.

Tickets were a bit more tricky because we wanted to ensure that any client or nonprofit had an amazing experience that was free of charge. They already have invested energy and resources into our software so we approached this as a gift to them, not something that was just a box for us to check and say "here's a conference." Many other software providers in our space don't even offer dedicated user conferences for their user base unless they are extremely well funded corporations. We have the capacity and scale now to deliver something special.

Yet we also wanted to give some premium experiences to attendees. With nearly 1000 registrants, it would be impossible to give every single person a fully intimate experience virtually without sacrificing time or resources. So we decided to offer a few ticketed options for attendees.

I learned a few things on this one that especially make me rethink not the core idea of premium experiences but around messaging, naming conventions, and value proposition clarity. But being able to provide a swag box to delight attendees was really great and that wouldn't have been able to happen without offering the ticketed options. We didn't put this on to make money at all and I'm going to outline below what we invested in to make a truly attendee centered experience, but I think we could have focused a bit more on the holistic value proposition here. Yet we also need to break out of the mindset that everything should be free for nonprofits and shift toward an abundance mindset where we are framing investments like this as professional development.

I've seen other conferences in our space where they tout that it is free and that is fine. But at the same time, I also know that those conferences are falling short on:

• Compensating all speakers - exposure does not pay the rent
• Skimping on the virtual experience itself - logging into a bunch of Zoom URLs is confusing for attendees
• Not providing a holistic experience and feeling pressure to only deliver product aligned content - if the event is positioned ONLY as a lead generation channel to benefit the business then content will suffer
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion - this is tightly tied to the first bullet point. We have a set of thought leaders that tend to be at many of the sector's events and that's because they either are okay not getting paid due to various factors OR they know how to navigate these spaces in order to get into the conference itself
• Creating spaces for either quiet reflection or social engagement. We commissioned a 46 page workbook for an at home mental health retreat as well as some fun experiences like a jazz concert and a mixology course for attendees to take part in. People really loved these!

Being able to have a set budget were we prioritized an equity forward planning model was extremely liberating in our ability to create an amazing experience. Between Generosity Xchange as well as Julia Campbell's Nonprofit Social Media Summit, we were able to deliver on a planning framework that has been evolving since I started speaking to Nikki McCord about it in May 2020. Way more to come here but if your organization wants to take DEI and community building experiences seriously, then being able to budget properly for the entire thing and not skimp on the foundational needs is key.

Educational Content

I touched on this a bit already above and this section just came down to understanding your audience. When we did Generosity Xchange in 2020, it felt ultimately that there were too many cooks in the kitchen on what we should offer.

This year, we had a more focused approach while we also took a chance on a few different types of formats and sessions. Choosing keynotes is an important first choice to help set the tone of the entire experience and that's why I was thrilled to work closely with Denise Barreto on bringing Imani Barbarin to Generosity Xchange while leaning on Julia Campbell to have her choose really exciting keynotes from Suhailah Waheed and Alejandrina Guzman for The Summit.

Another great talk at #NSMS21 on movement building from @alejandrinazoom and accessibility and ableism. Grateful for an expert-facilitated *conversation* where people in the room are engaged and openly sharing how we can show up as movement *learners*. - Kate L.

These were wise choices - by centering voices that folks may not typically hear from, it pushes the experience in exciting and new directions. We had a lot of positive feedback on the diversity of our speakers in general and even had prospects let us know that our choice of keynotes were helping them choose our company as their preferred vendor. Product is very important but companies should be mindful of the larger brand implications that come into play when you put on events like a conference or your webinar schedule for the year.

We also made more explicit decisions to align with the things people want. Last year people wanted way more product trainings at Generosity Xchange. So this year we offered a ton more - but I think we can go further and this is the big lesson I learned from the ticket items - if you're going to offer premium educational content then do NOT necessarily gate that during the conference itself. Place these workshops at a different time. This worked really well for us at both conferences. We didn't do these experiences for us, we did it for the audience and needed to center their experience and comfort first and foremost.

It is also important to make sure that there are a variety of experiences for people in different formats. We had traditional lecture style sessions, we offered breakout workshops, we offered audio-only sessions were we told people there wasn't any need to watch a screen, we offered panels, on-demand sessions, and networking rooms and even speed networking. Some were more successful than others and I feel the workshop style interaction will be where I think more firmly about a hybrid model were those happen in person, but overall this was a big key to why people felt heard and appreciated.

And I cannot understate the absolute necessity of captions moving forward. I am going to try to shift our entire experience model into offering live captions during webinars and conferences, but the platform we chose had some limitations here that I will cover in the next section under technology. Yet there was nearly universal happiness that we offered captions and even did American Sign Language for our biggest keynotes at Generosity Xchange.

Final note is that you should think about the overall flow and support for both speakers and attendees while setting a bit of ego aside if you end up being the "face" of the conference OR if you do most of your marketing around celebrities speaking at the event. I felt like I was in our user conference way too much so when I took a back seat role with the second one, the times I was on screen were more effective. I called it "not pulling an Urkel" and becoming too much of the focus - people are there for the content you put together, not famous stars (which can be cool, we had Team Visa Athlete Noah Lyles join us!) or things that distract from the core point of centering the attendee's experience first and foremost. Personalization of the experience is also key - you can create base templates for different audiences but I did that and then adapted messaging for attendees, presenters, sponsors, and keynote speakers.

Technology

The final note I want to talk about is the technology needed to make all this happen. In short, I have had to learn a lot fast. Given that my background is not in video production, A/V stuff, livestream tech, etc. this was a bit daunting but I had gotten some comfort since 2020's absolute debacle.

Choosing the right platform for your event is important. We went with a newer platform that was partially out of a favor between a former executive team member we had and someone they knew. This had pros and cons - it was under baked on ticketing and actually didn't even receipt people who paid for tickets so we had to create brand new emails on our own in order to make sure people could submit for professional development funds. I felt really crappy about that and wasn't told it didn't receipt people so that was a bummer. We fixed it quickly. The other con was that in the very middle of gearing up for our second event, the platform itself was sold to another company and I had to break my ticket system in the very middle, lost a bunch of time to fixing things that got dropped, and generally was on my own for the second event. So next time I'll likely invest in a more established platform with better support infrastructure since I had to create a lot of things on my own to help speakers and attendees feel comfortable.

Yet there was some pretty cool stuff that folks should keep in mind when looking at platforms. Key items to consider on a virtual conference platform are around:

• Ease of onboarding / profile management for attendees - if people get frustrated even getting into the platform, you're losing out of the gate
• Options for communicating before / during / event the conference - some of this had to be done outside of the platform
• Speaker support in both presentations, screen sharing, getting into their presentation, seeing the conference chat, etc. - hit or miss here with us but I did do several documents for speaker support and dedicated trainings. I also sent calendar invites to each speaker with their direct login URL
• Caption support and other accessibility considerations - we can do better here but it was great to work with a company like Ai-Media who found translators and CART professionals for us. The platform didn't support this natively so we had to pipe in Zoom but once that was on, we were golden and it came through great. Zoom now also has auto captions that can get generated for presentations, but I do suggest budgeting for a live translator for your biggest sessions at the very least
• Another note on accessibility - we created an internal committee to help review and field any issues in the run up and during the conference. We also made commitments to captioning all recordings and are working on that now, Adobe has been helpful in post production here for our team. And we used this W3 Website Accessibility Statement Generator Tool and loaded it into both conference website's to help make things clear what will be and not be supported. Highly suggest developing your own process and support for this
• A note on using Zoom and then beaming into an external platform. There WILL be lag and you need to keep this in mind during your presentations. I attempted to do live trivia for the Nonprofit Social Media Summit through Zoom and the delay was so bad it nearly made it possible to play the game
• Presentations and our swag box actually folded in QR codes to help create a physical to virtual connection between some of the content. For example, our swag box had a note to the recipient and scanning it brought you to our Spotify playlist for the conference that could then be synced to the Bluetooth portable speaker we gave as a gift. But I also saw different presenters do QR codes for contact information, follow up opt ins, etc. This will be an awesome thing to keep in mind!
• Do pre-recorded content and caption it. The platform didn't support a native "on demand" feature so we had to use Restream to schedule things to align with the schedule. But it was awesome to have really awesome looking content like our awards show, product keynote, or a set of six sessions back to back in an hour just really flow. It also means as an organizer you can take a break once it is on. And encourage presenters to join the chat during their session
• Interactivity is also key. If you're doing breakout rooms, speed networking, doing polls and questions, etc. then you need to test test test test this a lot. Everything from naming the rooms down to the tags you use, the color scheme, the branding elements, etc. should be absolutely clear. Don't be cute and try to shove your brand or conference theme unnecessarily into this - just name stuff what it is to make it easy for people to find

I could go on but this is already pretty long. Hope it was helpful in thinking about your own conferences and experiences. Comment below if you have found something very effective in your own virtual experiences and I can't wait to see how we can create a highly interactive hybrid model for some of our experiences we're thinking about for 2022.