 Hello and welcome to today's Redback webinar where we're going to be uncovering the Redback report for 2020. We're so excited because as we all know, it's been a crazy year for online events and this is our eighth year where we've actually gone and discovered insights and trends into how people run webinars and what people's preferences are when they attend webinars. So we know that 2020 has been like no other. The impact of COVID has changed the world of events forever, especially those that are virtual. Today is all about uncovering the findings that have come up in the report, going through them to make sure that you understand them in detail, and then also providing you with some tips to make sure that you can run awesome events that really stand out from the rest. So we encourage you to participate and ask questions as we'll be going through them throughout the webinar. I'd like to welcome Michael, how are you? Good Sarah, thanks for having me. Great, so Michael's going to be discussing some of the content with me as we go through today and it's great to have you on Michael because we're both very passionate about different types of events and different applications in events as well. Before we get started and get into the data, I really want to encourage you to submit your questions throughout. So to do that, please click on the dark blue raise hand icon in the top right corner of your screen. We will also be referring obviously to the report and some other accessible material. So to access your copy of the report and also additional information, you can click on the light blue drop down arrow. And of course towards the end of the webinar, we'll be asking you to submit your feedback, obviously because we like to improve our own webinars. Absolutely. Okay, so let's get straight into the respondents and the sort of data that we collected. So we actually surveyed over 100 qualitative respondents. Very nice. So we went out and they completed around a five to 10 minute survey and if you are online and you do complete that a huge thank you because the insights were amazing that we captured through there. And then we also went back and we actually looked over 1500 events in the past 12 months. And we've had such a huge variety of events, haven't we? Oh God, they've all been the three standard ones, the normal ones, the remote studio and customer venue, but the applications for how they've used have been very varied. And this data was great because it allowed us to understand how our customers are running events. But then the other data that we captured in terms of people's responses allowed us to understand people's preferences. So combined in the two of those made for some great insights. As you'll see by the graph on your screen, this actually goes through the types of people who completed the survey. So one in three are actually from the corporate sector and 42% hailed from the not for profit sector. And I think a big part of this Michael is that we know that associations and membership organisations have been using webinars for so long. And when COVID did hit, they really adapted quite quickly because they already had these in place, didn't they? They did. Well, they were able to utilise their programs for CPD and other stuff to use other external communications. So it was really great to see them pivot quite quickly. And I know everyone's heard pivot way too much, but we'll see it a couple of times today. So I do apologise for that. But it was great to see so many people from the third sector. It was also nice to see 7% came from government. And I think stakeholder engagement is definitely on the increase when it comes to government organisations. And the applications as we'll see in this report have just blown us out of the water. People have been so creative. So why do we attend events? And I think it's important for us as webinar organisers and planners to understand this when we're creating content, to understand why people attend and the types of events that they want to attend. So 30% first of all, I'll just give you a stat which I thought was very overwhelming. 30% of respondents said that they attend over 10 events per month. Which is massive. Which is huge. And a further 34% said they attend 6 to 10 events per month. So that's more than two a week. Absolutely. It's more than two a week. But you also got to wonder is, have these increase in events just not just replace the physical trainings and stuff they were doing face to face, but are people doing even more because they can't? And I think the insight from that as well is when we did this survey last year, when we asked people the same question, only 2% said that they were attending over 10 per month. And when it came to those who attend between 6 to 10, that was 5%. So as you can see, there's been a huge increase from 2% to 30% and 5% to 34%. And that just goes to show how people are attending and what will they're actually expecting. Another thing I'll also note is we conducted another survey during COVID, around remote working and people's experiences. And 80% of people who have been working from home said they want to continue when they re-enter the workforce. And I think we've seen that shift as a lot of the restrictions have been lifted as well with people adapting this sort of hybrid approach where some are still going into the office. And I think it's going to be like that for events as well, where you're never going to replace that face to face component. And as face to face events and physical events really come back into play, you're still going to have that hybrid approach because people want it, don't they? They do. They do. And it allows you also to come expand that physical event into more touch points as well. So a great hybrid approach is definitely on the rise. And you know, we can see here learning, education, development is still one of the top reasons when they're all combined why people actually attend. So we know that events are on the rise. There's no secret there. But can we just take a look into how much we think they're on the rise and do people expect it to attend more as we move into 2020 and 2021? Oh, absolutely. I think looking at the stats and seeing that they're going to be attending more. And it's just because of the ease of the technology now. The apprehension of running digital events a couple of years ago where people were really scared about the technology, they now see it works. So people are looking at their programs or looking at what they're going to be doing. 51% expect to attend more, which is great. And it allows people to be a little bit more creative with what they're trying to achieve as well. So that's the exciting stuff to see here. I love the fact that 2% nowhere near as many after this. And you're always going to have those people in your stats. But I reckon we'll see a continuation of not just more around the digital events that we see, the traditional live ones, but a lot more around the on-demand strategy, a lot more around the content creation strategy, because not everything needs to be live. Do you think we've hit our peak? Definitely not. No, no, no. I just think the peak it's, I don't think it's going to be a peak because it's going to be a ever-evolving landscape of how these virtual events are being done. Okay, the next section I want to go into now is live and on demand. And I want to spend some time on this because it's always contentious when we speak to our customers and consult with our customers. But it also has seen a massive change over the past 12 months. So while we're attending more and more events, we're also attending more and more live. And Michael, I think this is interesting because over the past probably five years, we've seen a dramatic decrease in the types of people attending events live. So your average attendance rate has dropped to around 35 to 40%. And that's average. And that's just because it's the way that we digest content now. It's on demand, it's this Netflix generation, we want to watch stuff when we want to want it. We don't necessarily want to watch it live. And there's pros and cons for both, we understand. But it's important to note that this year, 83% of respondents are attending at least half of all the digital events they watch live. So that's pretty huge. That's massive. And then you've got people who always register and wait for the on demand version. And for everyone out there looking to create their series, one bit of advice is to make sure that you don't get hung up on your live attendance rate. And I think that's one of the mistakes that many people make early on in their webinar programs. They tend to focus on the live attendance and they use that as a measure of investment. So, okay, what am I measuring the success of my event on? I'm going to see how many people attend live. Just because those people are live, it doesn't mean that they're necessarily more engaged. So you really need to consider your on demand strategy, but I think it's really interesting that people are attending more events live. It is. And I think it's also funny to look at the stats where people still say that they're registering just for the on demand. But I wonder how many people that register for the on demand actually then go back and watch it. Yeah. And I think it's well like people are just busy. They are, they are. And they want to, when people are digesting content and that very much Netflix style, it's not the click of a button. You don't want to be waiting for something. So what does this all mean? And how can this help us as event organizers and planners? And when it comes to increasing live viewership, I think you mentioned prerecorded content before and that's on the rise, isn't it? It is. People are wanting more polish professional looking content, but it's also removing the burden of, again, a lot of our presenters aren't used to digital events. So that security blanket of being able to know like, look, I can prerecord it, I get to review it, maybe edit a bit and then play it back as if it was live. So then it could either be some live engagement still or just purely on demand content. But this prerecorded content is it's again, people are aware of the fact that it's not all about the live, you can still have the live element of that you are trying to create a really professional piece of content as well that's going to live past that live event. So prerecord definitely gives you that ability to do that. I also think there has been increasing prerecorded content. And this is also something to consider when it comes to planning your events is because we've seen such an increase in people attended remotely. So people, presenters are attending statistically, the more people you have present remotely, the more issues you're going to have as far as I'm concerned. So we've got more remote presenters, we've got more unreliable internet connections and doing on demand content just gives you that peace of mind. But I still think there is room to mix up your live and prerecorded content. Absolutely. And look, and as you talked about remote presenters, that's just risk. And the more remote presenters that you have is the more failure points that you can potentially have with internet. So especially high profile international speakers or anyone that's coming in, think about like, can I have this prerecorded and then create a polished piece of content that I can insert into my live event? And every time that you do that, it removes one failure point for each one of those that you do. So it's a great strategy to do. It allows you to also put to ease the presenters apprehension for maybe having to use their own technology because remote presenters, they are controlling their slides, their computer, everything, and it can be a little bit daunting. So by removing these things, you're trying to more focus on making that presenter comfortable and creating the good content. And so while we all know that prerecorded content is great, there is obviously still a place for live. So what are some tips for increasing live viewers? Because I think at the end of the day, the pros of live viewership are the interaction, the ability to ask questions and interact with people. And it's also depends on the types of people's personality. I always think the people who are going to attend your events live are the ones that are going to attend network events, the people who want to participate and engage. So we need to cater to all types of people. So how do we increase live viewership? There's a couple of easy tips. And one of them is I think our standard, our favorite one is get people to pre-submit questions. By getting people to pre-submit questions, it does get them invested in the event because I want to want to see if that question was actually answered online. So that draws them into the event. Create some urgency with simulive events. And when we talk about simulated live, that can be the prerecorded content played as if it was live. But what it also can allow you to do is instead of having these massive lead times of like two or three weeks of registrations, if you have that on-demand content pre-recorded and created, you could do a last minute event. So there's a sense of urgency for it. So it's like, hey guys, this week on Thursday, you've released this on Monday. Tune in live, we're going to have this person. It's an easy way of knocking out quick events if you have that content pre-done and definitely that urgency would drive numbers up because they're not competing against other things in the calendar. Use the blended approach, play recorded files at the end, have one of your speakers and moderators appear live to answer the question. So that's combining the simulive with create the content before and then at the end of it, still beam in your presenters that you use to do the live Q&A. So you don't lose out on those elements. There was one more that I was going to say, but it's just completely lost my mind. So we're just going to move on to it. So we also mentioned virtual conferences and applications and things that we've seen come out of the pandemic and the way that people are being more creative with the types of events they're running. So what types of events are people attending these days or have they been attending over the past six months or so? I love looking at the stats that we have right now because I think a lot of these things, people are classifying as a digital event as a very broad spectrum. It's very broad. And there are the two different platforms that you look at. Like right now, we're doing a live webinar. It's broadcast only. A lot of the stuff that we see that came back from the report are generally collaborative meetings. So like briefings, workshops, those are the two way communications, but we can see webinars are still number one. 26% of people have come in for that. The customer meetings at 11% some briefings like I like the fact that we're seeing an incline of these, but what's really stood out this year and forced people to do it is the virtual conferences. People have done the hybrid approach for years of streaming a couple of the keynotes or maybe streaming the whole thing, but having the physical audience there, people are forced now to take a fully digital approach to it. And it's pushed our boundaries of what we were doing beforehand and how we're going to change the technology, but it forced a lot of event organizers to be really creative, not just for delivering the virtual event, but also how they're going to benefit the sponsors and everything and what they were doing for them as well. And I think to the point here, there's going to be different types of speakers and topics and different types of audience and that should dictate the format of your event. We've also got a comment here from one of our audience members that prerecorded content looks more polished and cleaner from an audience points of view, not limited by the constraints of a live delivery platform, which I think is, you know, so valid. Yeah, definitely. It does allow you, especially with look, feel, branding, especially for like really important presenters and everything, you get a more controlled environment doing that. So yeah, definitely props on the statement there. Yeah, great. Thank you for that, Henrietta. So tips for taking your physical conference. I know, this is what you're talking about. And I'm just, I'm smiling because you are so passionate when it comes to physical conferences. And I know that you've consulted with so many customers over the past few months. And the biggest thing that I think you've taught me is that just because you do, you're going to have your agenda and you're going to run your event this way live and in a physical environment, you need to change the online environment because people, as you can see, you're attending more events, they're getting shorter attention fans. So what are some other tips for taking your physical conference online? The number one is reworking your agenda. What you were doing for a face-to-face event isn't going to translate well for a participant experience, especially for asking them to commit to eight hours behind their desk at home. When they've got kids at home. Yeah, they've got kids at home and they've also got so many different applications for their working environment right now, because they're not able to physically take themselves away from their work situation and go to a conference. They'll still have teams open, they'll still have chat open, they'll still have messages popping up and something urgent's come up. So you've got to be quite clever about how you actually take your agenda. And my recommendations for customers is one, extend it. You have an opportunity to extend your event now beyond that one day or two days. It could be a week, it could be two weeks. So we're talking about having maybe three or four different sessions on a day and then giving people the rest of their day back to catch up on work and then just extending that so your content lives on for longer. Lives on for longer, it also allows your participants to know they're only committing for a small portion of time. So maybe look at your format like you would have a physical conference, have your keynotes first thing in the morning, get them really excited, but then at the end of the day, do maybe a panel session or a fireside chat. The other thing is not everything needs to be live for a virtual conference. You want to commit to your, your big budget one. So your, your keynotes, the really high, I'm losing my words, but the really important speakers, you want them to be live because they're your draw cards. Anyone else in the agenda that you were using for different streams or different concurrent sessions, have those as pre recorded. Have them already pre hosted on the site or each day release new content. So that in between the two live sessions, you send an email to everyone saying, Hey guys, we've just now released three new sessions on our page. Go and have a look and then participate in an interactive chat. There's some really fun ways of doing this. And I guess that gives you more touch points with people. So if you just have like the one day conference and you have everything online and people are watching it back to back, you've had one touch point with the people. So that's not necessarily great for you and your members or the people you're communicating with, but also for your sponsors. Whereas you could potentially have a single day or half a day or certain sessions with sponsors. Can't you? Yeah, you can use pre recorded content for sponsor, pre rolls and post rolls for sessions. Other things like if you are doing back to back sessions and you've got a break in the middle, why not actually have the sponsor come on live and talk about why they're sponsoring the event. Using those simple things of dead air where you were having those catering breaks. So yeah, it's got to be a recess lunch that I met morning tea. You can use that time to your advantage and actually give more value back to your speakers. The other things is when you're looking at the type of technology you're using for virtual conferences, it could be a mix of a couple of different things. It could be studio like we're doing right now and remote presenters. So the real things is making sure you test and test and test, making sure that you're absolutely confident with anyone going live. If there is anything potentially going to go wrong, then you want to look at on demand, creating recorded content that you can play as if live. But I think the absolute number one tip that we have is hire a virtual MC. Yes, we do this for our physical events. We do this for physical conferences that you needed to do it for a digital one because you need someone that's carrying the whole excitement and getting everyone kind of jeed up for your event and they can be hosting it from a studio like we're doing right now. They can do it remotely as well, but that's the person that's guiding your participants through every session and everything and they should really bookend them. And so many MCs are now experienced in the virtual world. I know we've had conversations with so many of them and if you need advice on people to contact, feel free to get in touch. But these are people who have really, there I say, pivoted at a time like this and really, they've really stepped up their game to do things virtually. And I think it's really hard for someone who is used to presenting face to face to actually learn to present behind a camera. And so I think it's important that you find an MC that's familiar with the online environment as well to make that work. But some great advice there. And I think it's great that we've now uncovered the types of people who responded to the event, also the types of applications and what we're actually seeing on the rise. So virtual conferences, like we said, definitely on the rise. I also predict in the next what's happening now, but the next time we do this report, virtual AGMs are going to skyrocket. Because people are now with the guidelines provided by ASIC and whatnot and the extension of that. People are now actually attending and holding more virtual AGMs and they're seeing record numbers. So definitely want to watch out for. I think award shows will also be up there. Oh yes, award shows. We're doing a few of those as well. Okay, let's get into the exciting part which everyone loves. And I just want to preface this part of the presentation by saying these are obviously responses from the people who completed the survey. And when we go through the preferred days and times and durations, it's important not to get hung up and think, okay, this is the most popular date and time. Here's when I should hold my van. It's about looking beyond the data and seeing the different trends and saying, okay, if these are the most common days, why? And what does my audience want? And I think as we go through this as well, start to think about how you can figure out what's going to be more engaging for your audience. So I think it's also good to point out as well that with the responses you had, over a third of it was for professional development. Exactly. So a lot of these times and day of the week and everything that we're talking about right now is majority for professional development. So if you're looking at any other event type, it's probably not going to work for that time. So you need to be just putting that in there. And I think it's important to understand when other people are holding their events and to remember that, you know, there is this thing of webinar fatigue, which people have been talking about for years and it hasn't happened yet. And if we keep running all smear events, and I don't think it will happen, but you don't necessarily want to be holding your events in peak times as well. You want to be different, the application as well. So we can see Tuesday and Wednesday came through as the most common times and days of the week. That's usually the case and it has been for the past few years, but we've seen a drop on Thursdays as well as we head to the end of the week. And but as we can see the Redback customers over the data that we analyzed, 25% of people preferred Thursdays as well. So it's really about mixing up your content and finding out your audience. I definitely think if you've been running webinars for a while, or if you're new to webinars, you should be going to your audience and you should be asking them, when would you like to attend webinars? Because it definitely makes it not only you're getting the right responses and you're then adapting whatever you're doing, but it also means that you're asking for this feedback and that's only a good thing. I also think Mondays and Fridays. I love Monday and Friday events. Maybe some people depends on the types of audiences in terms of Mondays and how hectic some Mondays are for people, but Friday afternoons, definitely mixing up, making it a little bit more casual, your fireside chat, your panel discussions, those sorts of ones. And then we go into preferred times and this is probably just a continuation of what we were talking about because mid-morning has always been so huge. However, I personally think that lunch and learns, and we can see he aren't as popular as they once were. Yeah. No, I love lunch and learns. Yes, we'd all like to have that work-life separation, but it's also a nice time for you. If you are going to unwind and you want to do something, it is that time that you can actually take it. And a lot of people, you look at our customers, 29% of them love the lunchtime slot, which is great to see. Afternoons, I still think, yeah, depending on the time of day when you're choosing to do it, again, to Sarah's point, and I absolutely agree, is that by going out to your community or your members or your customers or anything and getting them involved early will also help you achieve greater numbers in the beginning because people are invested in the communications. Yeah, exactly. And you need to understand, and most of you would probably know this already without even asking your audience, what is your community doing in the morning, at lunchtime and in the afternoon? Are they physically behind a computer? Are they more the types of people who actually just want to watch on-demand content and therefore it doesn't matter when you want to hold your events? So all this needs to be considered in the early stages of your events. And evenings, as we can see, they've always been quite low, but we still have a huge amount of customers that run their events in the evenings. We do, and I think that's a lot of their community. Professional development. Professional development, having to do it outside of ours. The only thing that I would be talking to a lot of people about nowadays is just with everyone working from home and not having to, like, that transition time from, like, leaving the office to go home afterwards, and people are trying to do events over five o'clock or six o'clock at night, is that peak congestion on internet networks at the moment, because people are streaming. So it's, again, knowing about what's happening in the environment when you're trying to do your events as well. And I think this takes us to the next part, which is really what's driving the shift. And I think the biggest thing that I would say when it comes to your times and your times, the days of the week that you want to hold your events is think about what's happening in the world and how our working habits are changing and this is actually, for me, this quote. So I used to love mid-morning webinars, but working from home, my days have changed. My working hours have changed. I don't have to necessarily spend time traveling into the office when I work from home, so I'm working from 7 a.m. I get to, I have breakfast, I get to probably just after lunch, 1.30 to 2 o'clock, and I'm thinking, oh my God, I haven't had lunch yet because you're constantly on and you're constantly working. You're not going for those coffee runs with people in your office. You're not standing by the water cooler and having conversations with people and taking those breaks. You are always on. So having that 3.30 afternoon, that's sort of like the new snack time for me. Okay, can I grab a cup of tea, sit down and watch half an hour, 45 minutes worth of content, think about people's working habits and how they're changing. But then also, at that time of the day, is your audience going picking up the kids from school because they're now working from home and they have the ability to do that. So it really, really depends on your audience and like I said, you're never going to get 100% live attendance, right? Or if you are, it's very well done and I don't know what you're presenting, but really start to consider this and consider people's changing habits and the fact that they're going to continue to shift as well. Nice. I think that when you're looking at the shift and everything, I always go back to the data and everything, and especially like you just said, we're not looking for 100% attendance for the live event, but you are wanting to make sure you're tracking the on demand. So that strategy around actually getting your attendance numbers afterwards and the proof back to the business about the success of it, it isn't the live stats. It's how many touch points, like how many people have actually seen the content and that's when you'll see in the first three months after a live event, if you've done a great job at marketing, getting touch points going back to it, that's when you'll see that drive. Yeah. And this is also duration as well. So our events are getting longer. They are, which I find really funny considering the previous year. We were seeing so many events come up where during working hours of trying to go underneath that one hour into the 45-minute mark, but yeah, 46% of people coming in, 60-minute duration back to the one hour, which was our early days was always one hour for everything. And then yeah, massive drop down to 33% for 45 minutes. I still really like the 45 minutes and not committing to an hour, but again, it depends on content. This report again had a massive contributors of professional development which would need that minimum of one hour for CPD. So that does play into it, but we can definitely see that still, 33% is a large number for seeing different types of events coming in. 16% 30 minutes, they have their place depending on it is. Then 19 minutes, so I find really funny being the only 5%. I think there definitely was this trend that we thought was coming around in the past 12 months or 12 months ago where people wanted a shorter snackable content and it was these 30-minute. I think that definitely has a place for on-demand content. Absolutely. My attention span for on-demand content is going to be different than what it is live. So if you are running these hour events depending on the type of content, when you do host it on demand, consider breaking that up into different chunks. So you may split it into two and have part one and part two so people don't have to actually invest in an entire hour. Or even to four or 15-minute segments. Yeah, if you've got a facilitator that can really guide your content and you can have clean breaks when you edit, that's also another way to sort of mix it up as well. But when we look at the data of over 1500 of our events in the past 12 months, here's the average duration of the events as well, which is also quite large. It's really large and I think this does come into play when we look at the virtual conferences we've been doing because they are just to be transparent with our events that we run, and event duration is off the single one. So if we did a full-day conference, that's just one event. So, and we've done so many of these, so especially for the remote webinar, it's pushing that up to 73 minutes. It's massive. And then we look at our studio jobs as well where we have someone facilitating from a day. Also done up to our customer venue ones before we had to stop going to customer venues. Those are generally your hybrid events. So those were those longer keynotes and plenary sessions and everything that we were doing. So that's why our minutes are so high. But it is it's because people are utilizing, using the event types differently. Yeah, absolutely. And so once again, interesting data, not something that you're going to treat as gospel, but just really interesting to see how others are running their events and how you can adapt that to the way you're running events. So we're two thirds of the way and we've got 15 minutes left. So please ask any questions that come through. We're going to go into the last section now. And this is a fun section. I think it's all fun guys, so really. Let's talk about preferred format because this is something that I'm very, very happy to see in the report. And there's a few things where I was like, yes, I could have written it myself. But I think format is definitely overlooked when it comes to events. We spend obviously a lot of time on content and presenters and technology and so we should. But the format is also something that should be played around with and something, if you're running a webinar program, it's good to mix things up a bit and keep it fresh. And I am so glad that we've seen moderators take in front seat. The fact that we have two people discussions as something that's rated higher but then we've got panel discussions as well. So we're talking what 49% almost half of people prefer more than one presenter is music to my ears because it just makes it so much more engaging. It makes it more engaging and it's easier for the presenters as well. If Sarah or I were just sitting here right now by ourselves trying to do this report, it could get a little monotoned if you would lose the excitement but we feed off each other and we bounce different ideas. Having a format where you have the two people, Sarah also does all the moderation for me so I can't touch the slide clicker, I'm not trusted. I don't trust him with the slide clicker, there's difference. But it means that she gets to steer the conversation so she knows her talking points, I have my ones as well and it makes it so much more enjoyable and you get to actually have fun with it. Now it's not gospel, there will be event types where you need to have that single presenter and you can't always have a moderator for it but exactly to your point, it's breaking up your content, knowing how things are going to go. I personally love the panel discussions and fireside chats, more casual approach to them because slides are needed for a lot of things but that's not the be-all and end-all. If you can carry an event by conversation, it's much more enjoyable. And there are certain events where there's definitely the need for a moderator so obviously virtual conferences we discussed. Virtual AGMs are crucial. You need to have a chairperson at those events and also just consider your presenters and as I said, not everyone's going to be a natural presenting behind the camera and we'll go into presenters in a moment but you'll see how crucial it is that your presenters actually convey their passion and enthusiasm and sometimes the best way to do that is to have a moderator or facilitator and these can be hired through managed providers but use someone in your organisation that could be right next to you. What I have seen Michael over the past few months is a rise in the amount of CEOs taking front and centre when it comes to their events and especially when everything sort of hit us in sort of March, April and people started to change all their events and go online, there was an abundance of CEOs becoming the moderator as soon as the webinar started. Hi everyone, thank you for joining. There was this empathetic caring speech around why they've chosen to go online and thank you for helping us on this journey. Most people renamed their series as well so it had this really nice feel to it and I think it's really important to consider the goal of your program and the branding of your program as well. Every single time you run a webinar it is a reflection of your brand. Absolutely. Your brand is much more than just your logos on the slides. It's about the person presenting and how the moderator is controlling that and half the time if you're presenting and it's just a single presenter then you probably aren't going to remember call to actions or time or technology so you need a moderator to actually manage that and they're really underrated and definitely don't sort of pinch your pennies when it comes to moderation. And just on that here's some tips for moderation as well and we've got so much more content on tips for moderators so feel free to get in touch if you want some more but they need to understand the content and presentation ahead of time. It's not a matter of your presenter and your moderator just turn up on the day hi how are you. They need to understand the tone and the energy and the types of events that they want to convey and the emotions don't they. Absolutely like you don't want someone to be called and disconnected from the content that's the main. Yeah scripts are not recommended however it's his fine line I think with moderation and rehearsing and you don't want to be too rehearsed where you're reading from a script if it is more formal maybe an auto cue might be necessary but you want to have this organic flow and this connection between your moderator and facilitator because it will definitely break through the technology barrier as well. And also tips on how to guide them back to the topic if they start to waffle like I generally do. Yeah yeah exactly and the other thing is avoiding the long bios and get into the point. Yeah well look people already know who the speakers are that generally should be on your marketing anyway links off to LinkedIn and you don't want to disconnect people from the content because at the beginning you either started doing a company spuel or you've started being too salesy around the content or anything that's really jarring to it it should just start straight away and go into it the only thing that you might want to do at the beginning is just remind people how to engage with the platform but even that you guys saw it today we had a housekeeping video at the beginning so we don't even have to do that. Exactly keep it simple I say and focus on that. Well here we go this is interesting isn't Oh I like this one Oh look like we look at the most important things at the participant level and what they're doing when they're coming into an event and year on year this comes in and no matter how much time we tell our customers it is the truth it's crystal clear audio quality is the number one like people are gonna forgive a poor video camera from someone's laptop if they've got good audio but if they got bad audio people are not going to stay online that's the main that's just the rule it's so much easier to walk away from an event I know we talk about that a bit but that's the thing like if you don't want anything that's going to discourage people from actually staying online so number one crystal clear audio number two is being able to see the presenters on a webcam which is great but not always needed and that also does come into play that if your presenters aren't really comfortable in front of camera do not force them to have it because your audience don't need it as much as that audio so you are trying to play to the strengths the ability to download resources and additional stuff from the actual page is great to see that it's still in there I find it really funny that zero for being able to ask a private question I think people are getting more into the actual public chats and everything and then the ability to connect with other attendees via open chat yeah that was at zero as well so just actually don't listen to me well I think it just reinforces the fact that you really want audio to be your priority you do your event and I think having backup plans is really important when it comes to audio and testing and training and we could do a whole session more on the sort of technical stuff when it comes to your webinars but definitely some room for expansion on that topic isn't there the passion is everything yes it is so this is something there's so many things that have changed in the report over the past eight years however this is something and you can go back and read every report it's been the same every single year and this is when we ask people what is the most important thing to you when it comes to preferences and presenters and your events presenters are enthusiastic and engaging so this is huge because in an event an online event people can just close down your browser and leave they don't have that embarrassment of getting up and walking away so it's really important to understand what's going to keep them online and what's going to keep them engaged and an engaging presenter online obviously trumps everything else everything else and it's important that you have these things you want easy technology but you don't need to you can't control that or you can but your provider who you work with can assist with that the content needs to be delivered as promised but you need to work with your presenters to create content and make sure what your marketing is the same as what's been spoken about but passion and enthusiasm is so important and as we can see almost half of the people actually said that and also we also ask people around attendees personal preferences if they could improve online events what would they actually want so 51% want access to presenters after a webinar and we've seen this rise in online forums after events as well so people redirecting either to discussion groups or create their own online communities and there's platforms out there that do that now 22% want to submit questions verbally so there's sort of two ways to do this and that's hoping up the lines for people on the actual event through VoIP which isn't really recommended because you don't know what you're going to get on the other end but there is another way where you can actually help people dial into a teleconference and you can have a managed solution you can have people dial in and ask questions that way or video chat as well and I I don't guarantee anything but I think that in the next 12 months we're going to see an increase in this so if anyone's watched Q&A on the ABC you will actually see a lot of people pre-submit video questions beforehand so getting your audience to pre-submit those questions beforehand and we do that in the registration like written but getting them to do that via video and then playing those videos in the event I think is a great idea it's a good opportunity for you when you've done the text-based pre-submission questions and you're reviewing them leading up to the event you're like you know what that would actually be a really good video one reach out to the person who's been it you've got their email and the address and say hey would you mind using your iPhone yeah just take a quick little yeah I'll put it up the other thing is like and this is what I was going to talk about for increasing live attendance I finally came around to it is with that 51% of people who want to actually access the presenters after the webinar this is really good to have that secondary event that happens straight afterwards but limited seating so first 100 people that register will get invited or first 100 people who attend the event will receive the invitation afterwards to join our LinkedIn discussion group so then that way it drives more people into it because they have another touch point afterwards yeah absolutely and this is just another thing as well and this also talks to why do people drop off their events so 86% admit to dropping off events and that's a reality it's also 20% up from last year as well so we've got high expectations here are some things that you need to make sure you have so the content like I said make sure that it's shared with your presenter so you're marketing and talking about the same thing if you're running lead generation events call to actions need to be really subtle I think and it's more about nurturing people after your webinar which is once again a whole different topic you need to make sure your event runs to time and I'm a stickler for this and I understand that we've only got seven more minutes so I'm going to be really really just yeah I'm going to make sure that I get there in the end but if you do run over time that's okay just let people know that that's going to be the case and respect people's time but I definitely think if I register for something and I hop online and someone starts talking about themselves for about 10 minutes then talking about their product or service I'm done yeah no well it's also when you're looking at the um the increase in volume and webinars as well if you haven't grabbed their attention the beginning the next thing online there's another one happening yeah exactly and I think yeah I just want to spend a few moments just talking about the future of digital events before we get to a few questions that have come through so you know 79% say virtual is as good or better yeah but what do you think we need to make sure that digital events are here to stay and completely compelling oh look there's I keep looking at the strategies that we're working with some customers and it's not the one size but it's all or even the fact that you're looking at replacing all your physical events it is really having that defined strategy about how virtual is going to work with physical and how live is going to play in and where on demand is going to play in and how you keep getting people back to your content those are the kind of the the main things that you're looking at like virtual is definitely so a lot of people saying it's better and I think that's just because it's easier access to different speakers it's present it's present it's it's right now we have it's right at our fingertips so afterwards people are going to be expecting the same international speakers are going to expect the same events and so there's going to have to be that really cool strategy but I think yeah the definitely not at the peak like we talked about before but that peak is going to constantly involve and I think it is this unified strategy around what's live what's tied in with a physical event can my content be on demand only so there's a lot of different touch points to do so but also just be creative you guys are only limited to your creative creativity when it comes to digital events so be bored to try something new and I think the other thing is people's attitudes are changing they have changed to events so therefore you've got huge potential when it comes to create your events and you can have so much fun with these now I also think the fact that four out of 10 people have attended for online entertainment I think there's going to be a huge increase in that just to further engage people and resonate with your employees especially if a lot of businesses continue to work from home so like you mentioned earlier we're doing a lot of virtual awards now there's charity fund raises there's meet comedy events as well so I think you're right it's definitely endless in terms of what you can achieve but I I just want to get to some questions now for me it is a bit of a meaty report so definitely download and take a look at some of those results and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions yeah feel free to connect on LinkedIn yeah I just that we've got a question from Melinda around the findings of the report so are we going to change up the way that we run digital events so this is very interesting so Melinda we have actually done a few things and I've sort of taken I've sort of extracted a few things out of this and there's two parts it's what we're consulting yes to our customers on how to run their events but also for our own internal events so we are experimenting a lot more with on-demand content as well so one of the things that we've done is training presenters is huge for us and the report telling us or reinforcing that presenters are very crucial when it comes to your events we've actually created an online presenter hub full of on-demand content which we're launching next week and that's on our webinars.com.au website which is getting refreshed so I think for us hearing what people are wanting and the fact that presenters are so important it forced us to look at our content because all of our content was for our customers whereas we had to create content for our presenters to help them run better events so that's the first thing the other thing we've done is we realise that on-demand content is important but I also think it needs to be more accessible and I think in the past for all of our on-demand content people would go watch it afterwards but they'd have to enter their email address to join what we've done is we've changed it up a bit now and we've given it access to everyone so all of our webinars are on our website we export the video file and we actually caption it so we've got burnt on captions so anyone can actually read it and it's completely compliant and accessible for anyone and then we actually export a transcript of our content and then we create a blog on that as well for marketing purposes so we're starting to reuse our content in a variety of ways and just get more creative with it yeah we're definitely doing things differently with our customers from the report as well and I think it's some customers are really open to trying new things others steer a little clearer of it until they're forced to do it and everything but I do think it's actually a good challenge for us it's to look at a couple of these things and maybe create an example of saying hey from the report findings this is what video questions look like this is what this and actually created a dummy we'll do it instead of a live one maybe it's an on-demand piece of content but that'd be a fun thing for us to work on yeah and the whole virtual AGM side for us has just opened up a huge number of possibilities a whole new product line we're working with a lot of peak bodies as well to make sure that people are running successful virtual AGMs and one of the things we started to experiment with but we didn't really continue but I want to continue is the whole concept of short snappy webinars on a Friday afternoon and running events at different times I still want to do webinars in wine yeah I know he's been begging me to do that for a while but we'll see okay we've got another question so what are your predictions for live events making a comeback so you just briefly alluded to this yeah I did and I think they're absolutely going to be coming back but there's going to be now I think every live event will have some form of virtual element tied to it whether it's a pre-event or post-event so you're extending the touch points of the event or actually streaming that event out to people that couldn't travel yeah I think event like physical events are definitely coming back there's always going to be a need for them but they're going to completely there will always I feel have a virtual element somehow I can't wait for physical events to come back I can't wait to cheese that glass of champagne with someone and have a conversation with them that's different but I think the thing to remember is in that for the past 10 years especially in the US physical events occur with a hybrid element so people don't run physical events or any sort of virtual or any sort of conferences especially when it comes to membership-based conferences unless they had that hybrid event because it does work and there's so much success so I feel like this everything that's happened in the past few months has forced us into that and I feel like it's just going to open up so many possibilities not only for you as organisers and your attendees but also for your sponsors as well look at the big change that we've looked at this year and I never read on time but we stream to all platforms that's the other main thing like we're not limited by this sort of stuff so when we look at especially the virtual conferences there are amazing platforms out there that we are working with customers now to their platform of choice and helping them with the streaming stuff so yeah possibly do the endless yeah and we recognise now there's different platforms for different things and sometimes our streaming platform isn't always relevant sometimes we'll actually use another platform that a customer has so I think it's about us all working together to develop great content and compelling content to deliver your message when it matters most and that brings us to 1145 and I promised you guys I was data time so thank you everyone for joining it's been great having you online download the report contact us for information but thank you Michael it's great always having you on us thank you Sarah I loved it hostess with the mosters that's me all right thanks guys enjoy the rest of your day bye