I’ll be perfectly honest with you, there is very little data available about online events hurting or helping face to face attendance. I get asked this question all the time and, based on the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, it seems like virtual events either have either no impact or a positive impact on face to face attendance. Here are a few things to consider:
- If your company’s travel budget has been restricted and you can no longer travel to the annual *whatever* event, you simply can’t go. Period. This is still a reality, even as we pull out of the recession.
- To the participants, virtual events still don’t demonstrate an equivalent value to a face to face event. They come darn close if you really invest yourself, but if you’re authorized to travel, chances are you’re going to rather than sit in front of the computer.
To sum up those two points: if you can go, you will; if you can’t go, you hope there is an online alternative.
Looking for further evidence, I decided to ask both my Twitter and LinkedIn network what they all thought. Silence on twitter, as expected of a complex question. LinkedIn had some insight to share, however. Here are a few highlights:
There should be a primary reason not to miss the event. Possibly a added value, or bonus for attending. It needs to be powerful enough to take away that “I don’t really need to attend” possibility. – Pete Ticali
Dead on, Pete. For many, the simple fun of attending in a far-off, tropical paradise will do it, but for others there should be some level of exclusivity for the face to face event (and you should really consider exclusive offers for the online audience, too).
The decision makers still attend for face-to-face discussions but many of the influencers may not be able to go so an on-line alternative is a good idea. This allows those who aren’t allowed to go to see what is being offered and shown at the show. – William Howard
William addresses the value of reach. With the events we’ve run our clients have seen roughly a 5x increase in “below director level” attendance simply because it was possible for that level of employee to have a crack at it where the opportunity never existed previously. This metric is significant if your event can utilize that type of reach. The leads won’t be quite as capable of making a purchase, but they certainly can influence the decision.
Did a virtual event actually increase face to face attendance?
Another comment from Erica St. Angel at Sonic Foundry pointed to a post detailing how they actually increased face to face attendance even with the entire conference being available online. This brings us to an interesting fork where we need to factor in the increased use of social media to promote, well… everything. It is important to remember that
- the awareness campaigns you’ll end up running for your virtual event will also generate interest in a face to face event organically
- first time attendees to the virtual event may have more incentive to attend in person the next time around
- the more content you put online, the more content is available for people to share and reference, further driving viral awareness
As we use more and more social media to promote our events, virtual or face to face, we will realize added awareness benefits and the events that will benefit the most will be the ones with the most sharable content.
So will virtual events hurt face2face attendance or not?
You’re not going to like this, but the answer is most certainly “it depends.” The “market” of attendees will gravitate to what is more important to them – and you can’t argue with that. Your understanding of that market will tell you whether or not a virtual component will help or hurt your attendance. For instance, if your audience is made up of high-level business executives it is less likely that they will attend online if there is an opportunity to meet face to face because executive level attendees like to meet that way. Conversely, if your attendees are lower on the totem pole, who tend to be younger and more tech savvy, and are not in it to network as much as for the learning experience, it is likely they will opt to attend online.
The key is really to understand your audience as best as possible and then experiment. If you’re realizing the same benefit from your online attendees that you do from your face to face ones, what’s the difference – wouldn’t you rather find out that saving money still brings you value as soon as possible? Perhaps holding a virtual event will expose a method for segmenting your audience that you never thought of before?
So, have you held a hybrid event with online and offline components? Was the result everything you expected, or was there some learning along the way?
Tags: attendee engagement, events, face to face, meetings, virtual event, Virtual Events
Steve
This is the 10,000 pound gorilla question. We have been recording conferences and selling the education to the attendees and non-attendees for over 30 years. For organizations that have not recorded their meeting, and even for those who do, this question constantly comes up. Yet, I have not seen any evidence that people who can attend live, do not, and opt to purchase the archives. Like you said, it is important to allow your members to migrate to the format they wish to embrace and to meet the needs of all of your members. How can an organization not consider archiving their educational content when only 10% of their attendees attend live. That leaves 90% of them to reach with another format, whether it be text, audio, multimedia, virtual or mobile.
Now, I have heard attendees come up to me and tell me that they purchased the archives last year and attended “Live” this year because of their purchase last year.
In today’s market, organizations should be considering every possible avenue for keeping their members engaged with their organization. Once you lose a member, getting them back is very, very difficult.
I love the anecdotes about online attendees converting to face to face attendees in subsequent years! It’s one of those x-factors that is hard to gather hard data until you have several years of a consistent strategy under your belt.
Couldn’t agree with you more – and thanks for mentioning our recent post!
When we (Sonic Foundry Event Services) do event webcasting, 99% of the time it is for a face to face event where many attendees want to attend but simply can’t due to travel bans and budget constraints. The catalog of presentations (be it streamed live or made available only on-demand) helps them get the information they need to stay current in their respective fields, but so often we see forum comments and tweets that “it’s great to have the info but I miss the face to face networking.
While you are correct it seems to be early for published evidence that attendance will be affected, consistently we see increases in both face to face AND online when a virtual pass is offered, generally to the tune of 10-20% increases on both fronts. For example, last fall the Sloan Consortium (an organization dedicated to online learning) created their very first virtual pass and streamed 18 sessions live. Over 1400 people attended the conference, including 175 virtual attendees, even though it was the inaugural year. That boost from virtual attendees contributed to a 20% overall increase in conference attendance – a result they were thrilled with given the budget challenges facing most education institutions and fears about H1N1/swine flu.
I’m anxious to hear other attendance anecdotes – and hope to compile our customer’s experiences to share them in a webinar this fall. Thanks again for your thoughtful summary – and you are so right, bottom line: it all depends.
Ah, yes. The “it depends” once again rears its head! I look forward to that webinar!
Being a speakers bureau, we have added web events to our services. The timing has to be right to offer web/virtual to clients. Just because a client’s budget is limited, doesn’t mean we automatically suggest they use a web event. If they are planning an in-person conference, then that’s what they want–an in-person speaker. Our goal is to not to replace their “wants.”
Here are some examples of when a client might want a virtual event: the client wants to simulcast (to those who can’t make the event); or for groups like associations–to offer a web event series, real experts to share content; or as a follow up–”sustain the message” event with their most recent keynote speaker.
When people (especially business people) watch any web events/webinars, there must be value–otherwise, it’s no different than watching a half-interesting YouTube video. At the end of the day, we’re here to help deliver a speaker’s message (and add value)–it ultimately depends how the client wants the message delivered.
All great stuff here and one that we discuss regularly with our customers, since my company provides in-cinema events across the country. We’ve seen our clients do webinar series and virtual events and then do in-person or in-cinema events when they want to immerse their prospects in an engaging, one-on-one experience. I think some if it is literally that – you can interest the prospect in a virtual event and then when they’re ready to engage more you can fully immerse them in your brand with an in-cinema or other “live” event. The level of engagement is different and it seems that some of it is based on where the prospect/client is in the sales cycle.
I love the in-cinema option. It is a great halfway point between attending at your desk and actually at a venue. The next step is offering some type of feedback device for audience interaction – and iPhone app or just a website to allow for exploration beyond just the video feed. Very cool.
I agree with your feedback/audience interaction idea in the cinemas. We hear that from our customers and we’re working on options as we speak to make that happen this year. That furthers the “engagement” experience for sure. Thanks for your feedback!