How to Run a Hybrid Event with Anca Trifan

Well you got to change when you lesson, right, you got to change instead of commuting and maybe working out you change it to while you’re running errands and you’ve got it in your ear while you’re grocery shopping. Or maybe when you’re doing chores around the house or whatever the thing is, I had people listening to the nonprofit architect podcast, in physical locations, they were listening to it in the office. So everyone in the office was hearing A. my beautiful voice and B. all my great guests and all the wonderful things they had to share and teach. They were listening to that in the office throughout the day. And they were like, hold on, go back, I got to take notes on this thing, I got to write this down, which was cool for me. Because I’m just here to provide value and provide the conduit really for my guests to share their, their expertise and the cool things that they do. So it was really cool for me to hear something like that, you know, and if you’re listening to this right now, let me know hop in the Facebook group, or send me a message and say, This is how we listened to your show or when we do it, we found that this works best for us. During the pandemic, it closed off times where i have to do a schedule change how you do that best, please drop me a note so I can know how you all enjoy this and what app you listened on. That would be fantastic.

{18:39} Using crowdsourcing and data. 

And that’s actually, Travis, that’s something very awesome that you just said there. Right now you’re literally crowdsourcing and using data to help your podcast, right. And to make sure that you provide value to your audience. The same thing happened with us moving into this virtual event format of events, because in person events, for the longest time, have been kind of like a leaky bucket when it came to data and metrics. We didn’t really truly measure you know, what people did and how they engage and how they- how do you get you know, all that data that helps you improve your event. But with virtual event, we are able to capitalize on so much of that information, and realize, “Oh my gosh, there’s a lot of things we didn’t know about events until we were able to measure it in a way that we can see it” now, when you see someone drop off, you know, 20 minutes into your event or five minutes into an event that tells you a lot about your event, right? It tells you a lot about like the type of formatting or maybe the type of like, you know, storytelling or whatever is good or not good with a event you can now go back and start manipulating a little bit of the formatting to make sure that you can generate a better event next time. And that has been one of the biggest things that I can take away from you know, the fact that we did so many virtual events in 2020. But because we’ve learned so much of like the audience persona and the audience interaction, the audience engagement, how do they actually consume those events? Now we can apply some of that data for our future of events. And, and that is priceless. If you asked me.

Yeah, if you’re in the nonprofit space, and you’re not collecting data for everything that you do, you’re doing it wrong. Because how on earth do you have any clue if the things that you’re doing are working if you don’t collect the data? you know, reach out to the people that dropped offline? Did they drop off because they had something else scheduled? did something come up? or did they switch off because it wasn’t interesting and didn’t grab their attention? They didn’t feel involved, or they didn’t feel like your messaging, met them. So you can find out why that is, so you can adjust what it is that you’re doing. I’ve talked to a lot of event coordinators, and their biggest goal is to keep the engagement high and really how to monetize every minute of this thing. So I mean, what does that event look like when you’re trying to put on events both in person and online, this hybrid event? How do you keep both audiences engaged? And do they see the same thing?

{21:05} How do you keep both in-person and online audiences engaged in a hybrid event?

One example, just one quick example, I’m going to give an actual fundraising gala that happened just mid June, which was a hybrid, right? So what we had, we put this event at a winery, a beautiful winery, in Oregon and we had a venue which was more like a tent, but it was dressed up beautiful, like, people were there because they want I mean, it’s sold out in the first week when we, you know, put out the the opening of the registration because people wanted to be in person. And we still want because we sold out for the in person, which was only about 200, then we’re like, Okay, well, normally, this event usually holds about 500 600 guests, let’s open up the virtual aspect and create something just for our virtual audience so they still join if they can since they can’t do it in person, right? So, you know, a regular fundraising gala, like the regular model of a fundraising gala, where you, you have you know, maybe a keynote speaker or something, you know, talking about the mission, the reason for why we’re gathering, you know, obviously, you have all the food and beverage and all the booze because you want people to have a good time. But we started with the VIP reception, and then we brought everyone to dinner, then we had you know, the opening, we had someone’s partner speak about why we’re, there the reasoning for it. And then we had an auctioneer do the ask. Now during the ask, this is where we wanted to transition from for the online audience. Because online audience they already had a different experience where when we had a VIP reception, we had an actually a concert violinist play separately in a separate location that was set up with a separate camera, separate feed for the virtual audience so they can tune in and still partake. But instead of like seeing people like mingling and like getting drinks, which would be super boring to like, yeah, okay, I can see that you guys are having fun, but right now I’m having a really bad case of FOMO, because I’m not there, right. So you don’t want to show that I mean, you know, it’s happening, but at the same time, by grabbing their attention to pay attention to this entertainment act, we basically give them something to be engaged into and we, you know, you could even do things like, hey, drop in the chat, you know, your favorite song or something that you want our performer to, you know, play next. So that way you grab a little bit of their attention, but also you involve them so they’re not just spectators, but they’re also involved in that production, you know,

So, do you have an online producer that helps coordinate the chat?   

Yeah, so you have separate teams, you know, doing the in person. That’s why somewhat, you know, when you talk about hybrid events and the budget, either costly or not the, you know, the answer is yes and no, it depends how involved you want to be, right. So because we had these, two different experiences of the same event, we had to have a team that was doing that, like regularly, like your normal audio visual in person production team. And then we had to have a virtual team, that you know, it was a smaller team, but you still have to have a camera, you still have to have a producer, you still have to have someone mixing levels, you know, you still have to have a little bit of extra help with that production, and we had someone you know, to call the show, so that when that entertainment part was over, then we transition into some content and we’re playing you know, a few videos and things that highlighted the missions storytelling of what exactly is happening here. And while all of this was happening in the tent with the ask, we had a few like five minute interviews for some of the top donors or sponsors just give them five minutes in a primetime to talk about the heart behind their mission, like “why are they there?” “Why are they supporting this nonprofit?” And “what impact did this nonprofit have on them?”, right? And their work and their company and their, wherever they, today, work. So that was fantastic because now you drew people in with seeing those CEOs of companies that you’ve heard of, you know, like, we’re talking about California closets, and we’re talking about big names that, you know, in this particular area, the nonprofit that we were with, had a huge impact in what they were doing, right. And then talk about how they support this nonprofit with their resources to continue the mission. And then, once we’ve done you know, all that, we went back to entertainment, and we went back to having a few more songs played, and then just towards the end, we transition the feed from the virtual for the separate experience, back to the in room experience for the closing. So that’s kind of like a model of it doesn’t have to be the model, but it can be one model. Because this can be done in so many different ways based on what your organization is about, based on your audience, based on who is your donor base, based on who are your sponsors, based on so many like stakeholders? Again, going back to that data, and you’re going to have to pull a lot of that information on strategy on how you’re going to make this event based on data and based on like, what you know about your event, what you want, what are the goals? And what are you trying to accomplish? You know, with with the information I’ve had, and I feel like the biggest challenge for some of the event coordinators, event planners, event organizers, is being able to read this data. Because not everybody is a data analyst, you know. Not everybody sees, like, looks at a spreadsheet and be like, “That’s right, I can totally see the trends here” like, no, most people, they just see numbers like, this doesn’t tell me anything. So sometimes, you know, the next role you’re gonna want to add maybe to your board is someone that can analyze that data. And that’s someone that can actually take that, all those numbers and all those graphs, and create a plan for your next event, because that’s going to be priceless. In the way you’re going to produce your, your next event, you know. So going back to the cost of that production, just on this example, I can tell you that that event, compared to the 2019 version of the same event was about a time and a half more expensive. But again, it’s because we wanted to spend our money not just on the in person experience, but also giving the virtual audience a separate experience. Can you do it on a budget? Sure, here’s where I want to give you the tip of how you can do it on a budget. Say you go in person you meet, I don’t know 200-300 People in a in a room, you’re going to want to have some AV you’re going to want to have some production, you’re going to have someone to you know, monitor your audio levels to project things on screens. Lighting is going to be important as well. So you’re going to have a team, even though in the back in the back of the room, you never pay attention. They’re there, they’re going to take care of your event. But now how about we add an extra element to that and it could be as simple as one camera at the back of the room can zoom in. And now we can send a feed online, that is leveraging what you already have in the room with adding a little extra, which probably is going to be the cost of the camera, cost of the extra person that’s going to have to run, it and a cost of the web streaming service that you’re going to have to use somehow, right? I mean sure you can just stream it to YouTube on a budget. Yes, there’s ways in which you can produce a hybrid event, but I would say the moment you allocate a little bit of extra money to that production that goes to the hybrid to the virtual where you could have this emcee that only is there for entertaining and engaging the virtual artists, because that was another key element of our fundraising gala that I talked about. We had an emcee that was just for the virtual audience. They are there to tell them what’s happening, to introduce the next element, to you know, engage them. And it wasn’t the person on stage in the room that did that. That person on stage in the room was paying attention to what’s happening in the room because we want them to, you know, to engage who’s there. And I feel like a little bit of the mess happens when this one person is trying to do both jobs. And you can’t, you know. I mean sure you’re going to engage in personalities, but then you’re going to have to talk about, you know, this invisible audience, that’s somewhere watching you and it’s gonna feel like, a little weird. I tried to do that actually. One of the first events I’ve done was in March, that was hybrid, and I was also the emcee and I tried to engage both audiences. It felt so weird because you’re like, people in the room do not see the people online, but I know there’s people online because I see it on the screen in a preview monitor in front of me. But as I’m talking to these people online, the people in the room, are like “stop talking to someone that I can’t see” you know, “this is weird”, like, “just focus on me, because that’s why I’m here”, you know? So that’s why, absolutely, if you can manage to do two separate emcees, and then allocate a little bit of that budget, because let’s talk about budget, right. You’re not going to have the same food and beverage budget and the same venue size budget in the beginning, because our gatherings are gonna be a little smaller in the beginning, right? We might meet in 50 numbers 100, 200. But I highly doubt that you’re going to go from like 0 to 1000 in the span of a few months, right. So then that budget that you used to have for a gathering of 1000 people now is shrank to maybe a gathering of 200. You now have some room to allocate to the production to the technology that makes this experience now the hybrid, right? So there’s ways to maneuver numbers. I mean, if you’ve ever worked on a spreadsheet, you know, you can maneuver the numbers to work in your favor, right? So that’s the same way with the  event budget, you know, is it costly? Yes and no, but at the end of the day, you’re going to want to know what is the reason for your event in the first place, and what are you going to do to create this event to be memorable, but also engaging for your own audience, whatever your audience is looking for.