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How to Host a Virtual Event: A Step-by-Step Guide

Alex Onion — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:00:00 +0000

At this point in our post-pandemic world, none of us are strangers to virtual events. From all-company meetings to virtual fundraisers to livestreams of in-person concerts, galas and more, we’ve all gotten pretty comfortable with watching events from the comfort of our own couches.

But when it comes to producing your own virtual event, lots of folks are still in the dark. And that’s okay — we’re here to help! Even if you’re planning a return to in-person events, the truth is that a virtual component is no longer optional. Allowing attendees to engage remotely expands your reach, makes your event more accessible, and helps you spread your message to those who may not have otherwise received it.

So after partnering with SmashFly Technologies to stream their event, Transform Virtual, we caught up with their Event Marketing Manager, Shannon Pierce, for her expert insights on how to plan a virtual event successfully. Here’s what she had to say.

How to Host a Virtual Event in 7 Easy Steps

1. Getting started

The first step in hosting a successful virtual event is to determine its theme and content. Branding and visual communication is one of the most important factors to consider as you start planning, and will determine all of your event messaging, speakers, marketing strategy, and more.

So start by outlining your goals and budget. What are you hoping to accomplish with your event, and what metrics will you measure to define your success? From there, outline the main talking points and tone you want your event to take.

For SmashFly, they wanted to leverage the success of a recent in-person event in an effort to continue to engage their audience.

“We hosted a super successful in-person conference – SmashFly Transform – and it created so much buzz we knew we had to do it again. The only problem was cost. In-person events can be incredibly expensive. We wanted to keep the momentum of Transform going and continue growing this community, but can we get everyone together virtually and still have a great event? Turns out you can!

Transform Virtual was branded the same, the virtual experience was just like our livestream experience from the Transform event and the content was presented by practitioners so it’s all peer-to-peer learning (same concept that was so well received at our in-person event).”

2. Outline your content

Once you have a general sense of what you’d like your event to look like, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. What kinds of content will you include in your event?

Just as with any event, your content should include a mixture of different presentation formats. This can include keynote presentations, breakout sessions, and panel discussions. And as Charlie Kennedy reminded us in another recent panel discussion, virtual events come with their own sets of challenges when it comes to programming. He says:

“We have to think of this like we’re producing a TV show. We have a much shorter amount of time to keep the viewer’s attention. Whereas in a ballroom, we always knew where people were, if they were paying attention or not — it’s a whole new challenge when we can’t see our audience.”

— Charlie Kennedy, Founder & Creative Director, Show Up Event Consulting

So it’s not enough to prepare a Powerpoint presentation and call it a day. We have to work a lot harder now to keep audiences engaged while they’re distracted with everything going on behind their computer screen. So think about how you might educate your audiences with interesting speakers, while also keeping them entertained and present. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

Offer a panel discussion with a diverse range of voices, with the option for attendees to submit their own questions
Host a DJ set between speakers to drive energy
Run polls or quizzes during or between speakers
Organize a contest that attendees can vote on during the event (like this chef and mixologist competition at a Marriott-hosted event a few years ago)
Get people out of their seats with a virtual dance party

3. Choose your format

Next, it’s time to choose a format (or “container”). Where will your virtual event live? How will your audience engage with your content?

These days, there’s no shortage of options for hosting an event remotely. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and LinkedIn all offer live streaming options, giving audiences the ability to react and comment on the content they’re viewing.

Other platforms like Zoom or Vimeo offer a bit more privacy if you’re looking to make your event feel exclusive, or if you’d prefer to pre-record all of your content beforehand. Here, attendees might be able to interact with each other in the chat, or click on links for more information about your brand. These platforms also offer accessibility features like closed captioning or alternative languages, making your event more approachable to more people.

For a fully immersive experience, consider licensing a virtual events platform like Hubilo, Hopin or cvent. While costly, these all-in-one platforms support virtual networking, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration, and built-in interactions that drive engagement through the roof.

Whatever platform you choose, make sure you do plenty of research to understand how the tech works before the big day. (We know this piece of the puzzle can feel like a lot — so we’re always here to support you with the right technology and help you produce a seamless event! Get in touch to learn more.)

4. Secure (and prep) your speakers

Once you’ve outlined your content and platform(s), do some research to determine who the best speakers would be for your event. Perhaps it’s a client, or someone who works for your company. Or maybe it’s a highly-regarded expert who can speak to your event topics. Going big? Maybe you book a big-name celebrity as your keynote speaker!

When your outreach is complete and you have commitments from your speakers that they’re willing to participate, the Mainstream team always recommends scheduling a “dry run” tech check call with speakers before the event (or pre-recording). This ensures they are comfortable with the recording software, have adequate internet speeds and proper lighting. It will also give you a chance to control the background of the speaker to avoid distracting images or bad patterns.

Shannon offers this helpful advice:

“Honestly, the hardest part about planning a virtual event is scheduling your speakers, internal stakeholders and your production team for all the calls that it takes to pull the event together.

Our goal was to have 3 calls with each speaker: first the kick-off call to introduce the event and discuss a topic, next a dry run to walk through the entire presentation and make content suggestions, and then the final session call as if they were presenting live.”

Set expectations with your internal stakeholders that they will need to be flexible to accommodate your speaker’s schedules during the weeks leading up to the event.

5. Promote your event

What’s an event with no attendees?

Before your big day, be sure to include marketing in your overall event strategy. It starts with a strong landing page where audience members can find more information and register.

From there, schedule promotional email blasts and social media posts. For larger events, maybe you’ll even reach out to local media to promote and help cover the event. Here’s what SmashFly did:

“In order to get the word out about Transform Virtual we used email marketing, mobilized our internal sales reps and customer success team to send personal invites to their accounts, social media including Twitter and announcements to our Transform Community Facebook Group, retargeting ads and partner marketing. Our content team was constantly writing tweets and sending them out internally and to our speakers to activate as many people as we could on social and make is super easy for them to spread the word.

One of the biggest differences between an in-person event and a virtual event is that the bulk of your registrations for a virtual event come the week prior to your go-live date. We heavily exceeded our registration goals, but over 50% registered in the last 4-5 days (including the day of!). It’s always a little stressful waiting for your pre-promotion campaigns to convert into registrants.”

Even though you may get a slew of registrations the week before the event, it’s still important to keep audience members engaged before you hit the “Go live” button. Send regular reminders to registrants with a sneak peek at what they can expect, and instructions for how to join on the day of the event.

6. Run your show

Congratulations! You’ve produced some exciting content with world-renowned subject matter experts. Whether you’re live or streaming pre-recorded content, the last step is to push “Start” on your event and engage with your audience in real time—by monitoring your social media outlets and responding to chats and Q&A during the event.

Think about what hashtags you might use to drive community conversation on social, and understand where your audience is spending the most time so that you can maximize their event experience and meet them where they are.

And if there are any questions that can’t be answered during your event, make sure you flag those too so that you can follow up with event attendees after the fact. No one likes to be left hanging!

7. Analyze, analyze, analyze!

Now that your event is over, it’s time to look at the data and see how it went. For SmashFly, they wanted to keep their audience watching the content as long as possible. Their average viewing time was about an hour, nearly twice the industry standard. Other points of data may include:

Email open rate
Total ticket sales (if paid), total registrations (if unpaid)
Conversion rate
Total audience size
Average view time per audience member
Engagement during broadcast (tweets, shares, comments, etc.)

With data in hand, you can understand how to make your next event even more successful.

Final Thoughts

With proper planning, SmashFly knocked their first virtual event out of the park. SmashFly leaves us with this wisdom:

“Besides the obvious need to deliver great content and work with your speakers very closely on their presentation development, make sure you have an awesome production partner if you plan to host a virtual event. You content could be awesome, but your production partner can help make the viewing experience more dynamic and interesting.”

If you have any further questions or would like Mainstream to produce your virtual event, feel free to get in contact with us! We’d love to share our expertise with you or even handle your entire virtual event from start to finish.

A previous version of this post was originally published on 7/28/17 by Brian Ciaccio.

The 2017 Guide to Streaming on YouTube

Nick Bacon — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 20:24:02 +0000

Welcome to 2017, everyone! We thought we would kick off the New Year by brain-dumping everything we know about setting up an event on YouTube Live. It’s a great platform that, in our estimation, covers at least half of all use-cases with a live stream. As mentioned in past articles, it is not without its shortcomings. But at the end of the day, YouTube Live is a powerful platform for streaming just about any live event.With that said, let’s dive right in!

Getting Started

First things first: you will need to enable your account for live streaming. You can do this by going to your Live Events Panel and clicking on “Enable Live Streaming.” You’ll need to verify your account, so have your cell phone handy.

If you wish to embed your stream somewhere other than YouTube, you’ll need to link your YouTube account to Adwords. The approval process can take up to 48 hours, so make sure you get this done well before you intend to stream!

Once approved, you’ll simply go into Creator Studio > Channel > Status and Features, and turn on embedding.

Next: selecting your streaming software!

Choosing the Right Streaming Software

There are more and more software packages available that offer streaming to YouTube every day. Luckily, YouTube keeps a list of recommended software. All recommended software integrates natively, meaning that by inputting your YouTube login credentials, you will be able to stream to YouTube Live directly. This is actually A Big Deal: it takes out the complex (and error-prone) process of entering your RTMP address and unique stream key.

Want our recommendations on which software to use? Well, sure! Here you are:

Streaming from your iPhone? Use WireCast Go. Very robust for a free app and for $6 you can turn it into a mini live switcher.
Prefer open-source software? Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is for you. It’s well-documented and the gaming community loves it.
Want to use the industry standard? Stick with WireCast Pro. Version 7, their latest release, has some remarkable features. . You can get an overview from our friends over at the Tech Buzz here.

Let’s Go Live!

So we have enabled our account, and we’ve selected our software. We’re now ready and able to start streaming! If you look in your Creator Studio > Live Streaming sub-menu, you have two options: “Stream Now” and “Events”.

Using the “Stream Now” Option

Selecting the “Stream Now” Option pushes you directly to your public live stream control room. Here, you control your entire public broadcast. (If you want to create a broadcast that isn’t publicly available, you’ll want to read about the “Events” Option.)

Your stream will show as Offline until you start pushing content from your encoder. Prior to streaming your show, it’s helpful to change your video title and description. This will display on your stream’s watch page as well as the archived recording of your event.

When you begin pushing content, you will see a light turn green. At this point, in the parlance of Google, “people can totally see you now.”

Links to share your stream are located at the bottom right of the page. You can use that link to go directly to your stream’s watch page, where you can also get its embed information. IMPORTANT NOTE: this code will change every time you go live, so you can’t just continuously embed your public live stream. If you are embedding regular streams, remember to swap in your new embed code!

During the stream, you can also manage your chat from the same Control Room.

BONUS TIP: If your YouTube Live event becomes popular, you will see it pop up on YouTube’s Live Stream front page This can introduce your event to a whole new audience!

So, “Stream Now” is great if you want an impromptu, public event. However, if you need control over who sees your stream or when it begins, you’ll need to manually create an event.

Using the “Create Event” Option

First: schedule an event. When creating your event, you’ll enter the same info as you would any YouTube video: title, description, keywords, and so forth.

Next: choose your sharing options. If your event is meant for a closed audience, then select “unlisted”. That keeps your event from being indexed for search, though it does not prevent people from publicly sharing your link.

You will then want to check out your Advanced Settings. Here you can enable or disable chat, prevent the stream from being promoted on your page, and so on. For an unlisted stream with no chat, here is how we commonly set our advanced settings:

Once that’s done, choose your encoding options: Google Hangouts or custom. Google Hangouts recently folded some of its technology into YouTube Live, so if you are planning on broadcasting a conversation between you and up to 10 Google Hangouts participants, you will actually create that event through YouTube Live. We have used it to host some great Q&As. Here’s an example of it in action. For most broadcasts, however, you’ll use the “custom” setting.

On the next page, we’ll set our ingestion settings. Choose a thumbnail if you have a special one for your event; if you do not, YouTube uses your profile image as a place holder. Next, set the maximum sustained bitrate for your encoder. Very recently, YouTube Live has enabled 4K Live Streaming – which is very exciting! There are very few places that can support a 30Mbps upload speed, but we hope to see it more widely adopted in the future.

YouTube provides its own guidance on the relationship between bitrate and resolution, but our experience has led us to different conclusions. Here is our loose guide for choosing the correct resolution and bandwidth. If your venue has:

15Mbps upload speed or better: use 1080p
10-15Mbps upload speed: 720p
6-10Mbps: 480p, though there are some cases where 720p is okay (i.e. not a lot of animation or dramatic scene changes)
3-5Mbps: 360p-480p
Under 3Mbps: 240p

In most cases, you should not have to use custom ingestion settings: just select one of YouTube’s presets. In fact, many encoders will not like custom ingestion settings and may throw an error at you when you attempt to broadcast.

When you have selected your bitrate, then you will be prompted to select your encoder. If you are using one of YouTube’s (or our) recommended encoding platforms, you should just leave this set to “other encoder”. IF YOU ARE USING WIRECAST PRO, DO NOT SELECT THE “WIRECAST FOR YOUTUBE” OPTION. I know that’s confusing, but “WireCast for YouTube” is a different piece of software entirely, so just leave the settings as is.

Once you have authenticated YouTube in your encoder, you should be able to see your event as a stream location. Simply select it, press stream, and you’re good to go! To confirm your stream is working, go to your event’s Live Control Room. It might take a couple of minutes for your stream to come through once you have begun streaming from your encoder, and you may have to refresh the page a few times. (Don’t worry! Refreshing the page won’t break anything!) When the signal comes through, you will see the green light.

Click on “Preview to send your stream to the Preview window. Again, you might have to refresh a couple times before it actually plays, and that’s perfectly fine. Once it’s there, you’re good to go: hit start streaming, and you’re live!

BONUS TIP: Use YouTube’s Live Editing Feature! It’s especially useful if you’re producing a long day full of numerous sessions (a conference with many panels, a tournament with many games, an awards ceremony with tons of speeches) – you can upload those individual clips in real-time to your channel. Very handy!

Engaging the Audience

There’s nothing like connecting to an audience in real-time and interacting with them directly. What a powerful tool that we use, where we can connect to thousands of people instantaneously!

The standard tool for engagement is the Chat window. Chat is a fantastic tool to engage your audience or to let your audience engage itself. Unfortunately, you cannot save the chat logs after an event: however, you can add moderators, who can highlight questions, ban bad actors, and so on. This is especially important if your event has a Q&A aspect to it.

Another engaging tool that is unique to YouTube Live is Interactive Cards. This will throw an overlay atop your live stream that directs your audience into action. Features include:

Video or Playlist: link your audience to another video
Channel: Promote another channel
Donation: Raise funds for a verified non-profit (more info here)
Poll: Get your audience’s opinion in real-time
Website: link to an approved website

Summing Up

YouTube Live has made some great updates this past year, and still largely remains unchanged from a functional perspective. With plenty of other players entering the market, it will be interesting to see how Google responds. One weapon they have added to their arsenal: VR live streaming. We are very interested in seeing that space develop!

Questions? Comments? Hate mail? Feel free to send it to nick@mainstreamchicago.com. Happy New Year, everyone!