The following list are suggestions on the ways you can approach the planning and implementation of a virtual event. As always, you will use the tools and processes that best suit your organization.
Make the most of the Agenda Builder
The agenda builder is great place to build your program, whether live or virtual. In virtual events, the flow and timing of your sessions and functions is especially important to visualize, and the agenda builder provides an interactive way to build, view and adjust your virtual agenda.
A few suggestions when designing your agenda:
- Think about scheduled start and end times
- Allow adequate times within a session. It’s OK to have it end a minute or two earlier than planned!
- Time between sessions is also important. Remember, your virtual attendees need time for personal breaks, and they can also preview a Virtual Exhibition if you have one
- Meeting Hub is another way for attendees to engage and connect with other attendees during breaks
- Virtual Exhibitions can be viewed even when not open, providing a way for your virtual attendees to previewed prior to the exhibition being open
- Remember to include clear and concise descriptions for all sessions and functions
- Consider your participant time zones
Using other EventsAir tools
It’s important to remember that EventsAir, first and foremost, is a complete, end-to-end event management tool. Whether your event is live, virtual or hybrid, you have a common platform for managing communications, registrations, profile tracking, reporting and more.
Think "end-to-end"
No matter what type of event you are creating, everything starts with defining sessions, functions, exhibitions, sponsorship and registrations. Once you have your program in place, it’s very easy to “virtualize” these items and start the process of testing your virtual event.
Testing and Practicing
It is crucial to test your virtual event several times well in advance of your actual event. While setting up a virtual event in OnAIR is straightforward to accomplish, there are many different moving pieces and you want to make sure you and your team are comfortable with how these processes operate.
A few reminders:
- Large sessions will need to be started by virtual meeting manager directly in your webinar platform
- You can always use the Virtual Global Education Summit Sandbox Event to test your connections and processes before building a live virtual event
- Take the Fast Track training on Virtual Events – this training takes you through a structured series of lessons covering all aspects of the OnAIR platform
- Allow yourself a little time to become familiar with the tools and processes surrounding virtual events
Running a Virtual Event in OnAIR
An important consideration in running an OnAIR event is having someone on your team actually “run” the event from behind the scenes.
This includes running OnAIR from the Control, a powerful environment that lets you test all connections, recordings and provides single location for sending out alerts, chats and other communications.