 Hello and welcome to today's webinar where we will be discussing conference contingency and making sure you have a plan B. My name is Sarah Drury and today I'm joined by Michael Bunker. How are you today? Very good. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Michael has a wealth of experience working with large corporates, associations and government departments to execute seamless hybrid events and actually make money. So Michael, today we really want to think high level and we really want to not get into the outbreak and what's happening in the world today. We want to get into some hard facts and some action items to make sure that everyone online can actually take something away and apply it in whatever their issues are today. So what are we going to cover? Well we've got a lot to cover today in a short time. We've only got 30 minutes. So what we're looking at is your options. So what do you guys need to know right now with planning your events? What to focus on before your event? How to gain that budget and that's because a lot of this is unforeseen costs. So there's a new cost to the business so where can we look for some money? Making the live event work. So your physical events going ahead. How are we going to do that? How to maximize afterwards? So what are we doing with our on-demand content and our action plan moving forward? Absolutely. So we're getting into some real hard tactics now to make sure that all the everything that we're talking about can be applied. But like Michael said we do have a lot to cover. So we have actually also uploaded some resources for you all to download and to refer to during today's event. So if you look on the top right hand corner you will see a light blue arrow pointed down. You can access all the resources there. And we will also ask you to interact with us throughout the event. So there's a dark blue raise hand icon on the top of the screen. Enter any of your questions in there. I'll get them through the iPad and then I can actually discuss them with you all. So let's talk about options. Like I said, let's not get into any of the nitty gritty and what's happening. But let's talk about the scenarios that are most likely happening for everyone online. So if we have conferences planned at the moment there's two likely scenarios here on what might be happening. So the first one being you may have a physical event that's still going ahead. However, there may be travel restrictions that apply. What can we do in this situation? Well look, so the main thing is your events going ahead, which is great. But now we need to get people in there. So the main one that we're seeing right now is presenters who have been told that they're not allowed to travel to conferences. So how do we get your presenters into that physical event? Well, there's a number of easy options for it. So there's traditional methods like video conferencing, where we can beam your presenter into the room, they'll be up on the big screen, and they'd still be able to have that two way communication. Now for presenters that don't have that luxury of having that equipment available to them, there are facilities where you can hire out the rooms. But also with today's technology, you can use desktop provided software. It's about working with a provider that has options for this that will be able to easily enable your presenters to be physically in the room. Excellent. Now the other one, sorry for cutting you off. No, no, I was just saying because I feel like every day I turn on the news or the radio and conferences are being cancelled. So it is a reality. But it's important to note that there are also backup plans if you do have to cancel your conference. So delivering content from a remote webinar platform is also an option if everyone can't be in the same space, isn't it? Absolutely. So with that one, it's looking at the technology that you can use. It's utilizing things like we're doing right now. So we're doing a remote based studio webinar. That's one way of getting present your presenters to come in and deliver their content. There is desktop availability as well with using things like web conferencing tools, webinar platforms, the thing at the end of the day is you want to be looking at how can you utilize all these different technologies to create an online conference? Where can you host this all together? And for a lot of events out there, you've already built your event pages, you might want to look at providers that can embed that directly on there. So then you're not providing new information to your audience. Yep. And these days, a lot of these platforms are easily accessible by delegates, aren't they? It's not the sort of thing where it's a big burden for people to join, no matter what sort of generation they are or what sort of industry they're from. So what I really want to do now is speak and talk about planning your event because we may know what the situation is and we may speak to technical providers that can help us. But when it actually comes to planning, it looks like we're going to have to move quite fast. So I just want to talk about the marketing and content bit for a moment because a lot of people actually mentioned they want to hear more about that during the registration process. I'm then going to handle all the technical stuff to you because that's your domain. But firstly, let's talk about content. We've done all these hard work to get all our events and conferences planned and we've done the marketing component. But now we're going to have to change things up. So first of all, it's important to look at all your content and understand that not everything that you were going to have at your physical event may be catered to the online event as well. So think about the content and different streams that you have and then think about the types of interactivity. So for example, if you have keynote speakers and you have maybe three different sessions in the morning, they agree to stream online and get people to ask questions. If you have interactive workshops and things like that, you may need to adapt to a different technology and bring it all into one. So think about more collaborative software. So keynote sessions, one to many, like we're doing now with no audio, sorry, and that's a lot less techy. So there's not a lot for the presenter to worry about anything interactive. You want maybe people to hop online, use a whiteboard, share some documents, type and ask different questions and have a discussion. You really need to break down the content for your conference. Absolutely. And think about how you want to use it. Live or recorded, another big thing. So not everything has to be live. And a lot of people out there and a lot of speakers out there as well are intimidated by the fact that it is live. I personally think even if you are pre recording something, it's best to act as though it's live. Absolutely. Anyway, but really, really think about what is appropriate for your event and your audience. So my advice would be to look at your content, map out exactly how you would want to run some of those sessions online and then speak to a professional conference provider that can help you. Now the marketing is another thing as well. So if you do have people still attending your conference, you want to try and go out to those people who maybe you couldn't attend in the first place or maybe who are too scared to travel, whether they're local, national or international as well. So I think we have a huge opportunity here to promote and market any sort of hybrid event that you're running in a really positive way. Absolutely. So I think you can have a bit of fun with it. I think you need to think about using social media, recording some videos as well. So maybe getting your presenters who are presenting online to record some maybe 30 second videos promoting the online portion of your conference. There's a lot of animated tools out there that create short videos for you as well that you can use and use those on social media. Go out to people who you were promoting the event to that maybe didn't open your emails or maybe didn't convert on your registration pages and look at those touch points and actually get those people to register for the online component as well. Now location is a big one I want to go into because internet connectivity is everything in this situation. So what do we need to ask how they use? Well look for the physical event if you are still conducting your physical event and you're wanting to stream the content out because your attendees are now not able to come into it. What you want to be looking at is internet connection first and foremost, is it a dedicated internet connection? Now the reason why we're asking for a dedicated internet connection is because it doesn't want to be shared with the rest of the attendees there, especially for giving up free Wi-Fi which we normally do at conferences. That's going to really pollute what you guys have going over that bandwidth. What we need to ensure is that it's a stable internet connection. There's a minimum upload speed of about 1.8 to 1.2 gigs or 2 megabits per second. Sorry. From there you'll know that your content is going to be streamed out. You know that your attendees online will be getting a good experience. If they can't offer you that as a dedicated one, there are backups and redundancies but your venue should always have that. The next thing is have they done this before? Most venues across Australia have now done streaming. They've catered for this. It isn't so new. It's not so scary as it used to be. So you shouldn't really be worrying about that. But with this location these are unforeseen costs because you wouldn't have budgeted for this beforehand. We'll be talking about budget in a little bit. But your AV, what have you already booked for that venue? Do you have an iMac? Do you have a video camera showing your presenters up on a big screen? If you do, the webcast or webinar provider will be able to take that video connection. Don't let anyone convince you that they have to bring their own. That's a non-needed cost. So there's no more additional, like you don't need to worry about that component because you don't need to go source another biography. You can use the same guys which is also great to know. We also want to make it easy for you guys as well. We don't expect everyone to understand jargon when it comes to working with your venues as well. So if you click on the light blue resource folder, which is a drop, it's an arrow pointing downwards, I always get that mixed up, there's actually a one page cheat sheet. So that has questions that you can just send to your venue. They can answer them and then you don't have to worry about that component. Presenters, so important. Yes. What are your tips? Well look, with the presenters right now there's a couple of things. So first and foremost if you're physically streaming out your physical event, then you do want to make sure you have permission from the presenters so that their content can be shared online, that they can be seen. Nine times out of ten presenters don't have an issue with that nowadays because this also builds their brand and a nice added value to a presenter is to offer them the actual recorded video of just their session as a little enticement. The interactivity component, so if you are looking at more the digital aspect and you're having your presenters for the first time doing webinars or studio-based jobs, you want to remove as much of the fear as possible. So maybe not having them control the interactivity, maybe give them a facilitator. Someone from your business to actually control that, so they can be the ones that are just concentrating on their content and being really passionate and enthusiastic in their session. We also, if you just wait around for the next 20 minutes, we also have a video which is five power tips for presenting online from one of our friends, Warwick Merrie, who is one of the best MCs in the country when it comes to conferences. So we're going to play that video as well and that will give you some extra tips to also hand over to your presenters. So we've covered the planning stages around it now and one of the things that you mentioned, Michael, was the fact that we have an allocated budget to this and this is a very important point because we've done the budget for our physical events and this has happened. Where can we go to find this additional budget? Are there some tricks of the trade that we don't actually know about? Absolutely, like there's always places to find new revenue and the first and foremost one is go to your sponsors. Like going to the sponsors that are already saying that they put their hand up because they want to physically be seen at that event, they want their information to be going to these delegates. What a digital event offers now, on top of it, is no longer just that one-day conference or two-day conference. The content that you produce in a digital event is hosted for a minimum of 12 months or indefinitely depending on what you're doing with it and that sponsorship exposure is all over it. So you can have their logo, you can have call to actions. This is a real big value add and your sponsors still want to be going in front of these delegates and attendees. Going digital opens it up to even more people, more exposure, especially if you do some fun things with the on-demand afterwards to really drive attendance. So they're the first one. Reach out to your sponsors straight away and see what they can do for you. I think on that point as well, coming from the marketing side of things as a marketer, if I sponsor an event, I want data and I just don't want to see bums on seats or maybe just some sort of vanity metrics. I want to see data and the beauty of an online platform for your sponsors is the fact that they can actually see how many views actually occurred on the actual platform itself. They can actually see how long people were online and exposed to the brand. We'll get into the platform in a little bit, but it's also important to note that sponsors can have additional content and also videos online. So if you're a sponsor, go into a physical event. It's great to have your banner up and your logo everywhere, but the online platform offers your sponsors with so much more opportunity that also lives on for maybe 12 months as well. So very, very important to speak to your sponsors and to reach out to them at this stage. And talk to your provider about how you're conducting the digital side of things and what can be offered to them as well. Cost breakdown. We all love cost breakdown, don't we? We do. And I actually think this is kind of an interesting one because it is an unforeseen cost expense that we're looking at. So how much is this digital event actually going to cost you if you're going to physically be streaming out a physical event and you're bringing in an technician, an encoder, the streaming site, all that stuff, all these costs, like where are we going to find this revenue? I like to break this down by using a cost calculator. So let's look at this. Let's have a look at this. It's something you prepared earlier and just as well, this is also available as an Excel spreadsheet from the resource folder which is a light blue icon. And this is great because people can just input details in here and then come up and understand what their entire cost and profits going to be. So can you just walk us through this just to high level to see exactly how we can use this? Absolutely. So what we're looking at here is a nice way just to break it down. So we're going to be looking at the cost per individual online attendee. And how we've done this is that the very first line we've got $5,000. That's the cost of the streaming element for this session. So let's look at how much we charge a physical attendee. So for this event and these are just fake numbers, we're charging an attendee $900 to come for that one day conference. Now that $900 includes everything from social engagements, the drinks, the lunch, the coffee cart, all that stuff is in there. We don't want to put that into the digital event cost because we're removing all those things. So what we're looking at is the cost of $900. The total sessions run that day was nine and the cost of social engagements were $75. So let's remove the $75 from the $900. It's $825. Now if we divide that $825 by the nine sessions, that's a cost per session per attendee of $91.67. Now for this example, I've said that we're only doing a half-day streaming because we don't need to do everything live so this might be just the plenary sessions and it's from 9 a.m. from the opening address up to lunch. So we'll say $4.5 sessions. The total charge per online delegate if we take that $91 and $0.67 times that by the $4.5 is $412.50. Now that's less than half the price of what that event was going to be which is great. How many attendees we need to actually get online to make a profit? In here we can see that I've only put $15 in there which gives us the total amount for the online delegates of $6,187.50 which is the profit of $1,187. Now that's only $15 attendees and Sarah's mentioned this before as well. When looking to do a digital event we're now marketing it back out internationally, this is everyone that does not need to travel now that was going to travel before. So people who have said no now all of a sudden have an opportunity to come and at a cheaper rate as well. So you can use this as a revenue generating model to actually get those people so you really this is the best place to find new money. I agree and I think if we we just need to flip how we're thinking about this at the moment and think about it as a revenue generating model because we do still want to make profit and I think when anything like this happens we go into crisis mode and many of us just think okay what are my expenses but we need to flip this around and think about how can we shift that and make it actually better for us in terms of making a profit and revenue. So I just want to talk about the platform now because we can do as much as we want to when it comes to all of this and the planning stages but if the platform isn't right for us it's not going to work and there's so many different ones out there. Before I go into this because this is quite relevant I actually have a question from Paula online so she's asked what about what about time differences locally and internationally I want to preface speak around the platform by saying that not everything has to be delivered live which we briefly mentioned so if you are streaming just say you're streaming a full half day event which starts at 9am and goes to 1 in the afternoon but you may have people who are joining from Western Australia so they can't actually start at 9am the content that you actually stream live will then automatically be hosted online after that event is done so whenever anyone comes to your conference page where you have the login details and your brand and a click here to play if you if you essentially think of it as a web page and you may have all your sessions listed and people click on a session you can capture data if you like so we recommend capturing data such as first name last name email address the basics and then you can actually either watch that live or watch that on demand as well and a great way to engage on demand attendees is to ask them to submit questions beforehand so you may be going out to promote your event next week for something that might happen in April ask people like we did in today's webinar about what they if they have a question for the presenter or what they want to hear more about because then even if people do attend on demand and they can't actually ask questions in the live environment they can still be engaged in the on demand session as well so hopefully they answered your question Paula but really start to think about the content and if you do have these international attendees and how you can cater to them as well it really needs to be broken down yeah so back on platform and there's ties into sponsors as well think about the interactive tools you have available to you on today's event we've just got the chats sorry the open questions so people ask the questions directly to us but you can actually have chat where people can actually talk interactive and you can actually respond to the audience videos are a great way to actually showcase content which we're going to do in a few moments as well and this accessible resources tab I absolutely love because I can then give people something of value and I can direct them to different sides and all these different touch points so you're almost creating this online experience for people aren't you you are and it does come down to delivering a meaningful and exponential experiences and that was a quote from someone and during the registration form because you're looking at you're designing something brand new with this and the platform that we have today is that great platform for keynotes and everything where it is that one to many communication doesn't have to be the sole platform that you use again you touched on this earlier on if you are looking for collaboration sessions you might want to set up little web conferences where you have people facilitating conversations you can replicate a bunch of these things and tie them all together onto one page really fun things to do when you're doing digital events especially large-scale ones is use interactive polling to find out where your attendees are coming from so then if you have a great facilitator they can start breaking down the technology wall and say oh okay we've got 25% from New South Wales we've got 15 from actually that's just a good point which I haven't really spoken around and that's the facilitation of this so if you have an emcee at your physical conference you want to have a virtual emcee as well and you want to have someone who actually runs this for you so if you are doing something like we're doing now or if you are hosting a panel discussion from a studio you want to have someone who is actually facilitating that discussion you may want to do a video recording of them that and they open every single event before you play it hi everyone welcome to redbags conference the next session we're going to talk about is x and these videos are pre-recorded so you can play them before your event so with your presenters facilitation is also key absolutely and don't forget to put your sponsor stuff on those pre-roll videos session sponsored by x yes without going overboard by all press coffee and the other thing I also want to talk about on this and this sort of segues into the next section is thinking about how we can actually make the most out of this content because it is going to cost you additional money to actually make this happen but we want to try and get the most out of this as possible so one of the things I always like to think about is if we go and we record this content and we host it on demand what else can we do with this so one of the great things that has come up recently and everyone knows podcast and we do a redback report every single year and it came to that the majority of people who completed this report access podcast on a weekly basis so not everything has to have a video component so if you are maybe streaming online a video session of people talking and you're streaming that to the online audience live you can export the audio from that and you can then use that as a podcast as well so just from the actual stream that you've done in your live event you can actually create another podcast and you could even create additional revenue or even just for value for people or create it as a promotional material to use a free podcast to entice people to say hey listen to this free session to prompt them to go to the on-demand site and look at the rest of the content Exactly so I think it's really about understanding how you can extend the experience for everyone involved what's your marketing team doing as well because you really want to work with them to tie this in and then create something that lives on not just for three days but maybe something that lives on for three to six months depending on the content do you think repurposing content is important in these types of smells and it is it comes really down to again that marketing strategy where you're nurturing your database trying to get people to register you have to look at this you're now nurturing people to try to watch this content you're trying to expose them to different content mediums you're trying to get them to click on different call to actions so everything that you're doing the first task of this is we've broken it down before but it's what are you going to actually the content you're going to capture and what's the method of capturing it then the promotion of it so what are we using for live what are we using for on-demand when are we releasing some of the pieces of content when are we tying it back together it is a whole big track and it's a lot of fun to actually map it up a lot of this stuff for people out there right now it is exponential learning you guys haven't had to think about this before and we have thrown a ton of information on you in 22 minutes so I do know that there will be a lot of questions I'm overwhelmed and we've missed a bunch of dot points because we're trying to cram as much in as possible do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions or anything we're here to help educate our community that's what we do and I think one of the and people have access to the resources and people have access to this content as well but get inside a room and get a whiteboard or get a piece of watcher's paper and sometimes just map out what you want to achieve and then come and speak to a professional because they can actually point you in the right direction of what work or what will work or what won't work so you do need to get socially involved you do need to get your delegates involved but you really need to make sure that you know what you want to achieve and then work backwards if you just go out there and say hey we want to stream our conference and you just go and then you just put it online for people to attend it is a little bit it's going to get you what you want but you may not be able to extend or get the most or make the most return investment as what you're hoping for so that sort of takes us into the next steps which is around action plans so what we recommend as soon as you get out of this session today is these steps here which is pretty much what we went through but do you want to just go through these seven steps to make sure that we've got everything covered off yeah absolutely we want to look at the first and foremost as your contract with your conference so what does your policy say so knowing everything that you have in writing first and foremost is you need to understand your current landscape and then hold a conference called with your presenters so what are their thoughts on traveling so it is checking in with each individual person that did commit to coming to your conference right now and seeing where they're at because once you can start to see that you might then start formulating the plan of saying look five of the presenters can't travel what are the options that's step one contact your sponsors again so this is changing the landscape of what the physical event was going to look like but it opens up opportunities so you want to have that positive note on there seven one really sorry I've jumped to the other way so we'll go down to number four I knew you'd do that I was just testing you I should have had arrows there you want to look at your options so that's coming to a provider like bread back or any on and else and just saying hey guys what are my contingency plans what are the three top scenarios that I need to be looking at and just rough pricing once you know that it starts to settle some of the fears that you might be having right now communication plans they're absolutely vital so a lot of conference sites right now first thing they're putting is just a notice board up on their main site saying hey look we're monitoring the situation very closely our events still going ahead so that's very important and can I just say on that I actually received an email this week from a conference that we're attending at the end of March and it was just to say that it was still going ahead and it had a link to the PCMA conference guide which is the professional conference management association and you can actually access that link in the resource folder as well and that just puts people's minds at ease so never assume that people aren't sort of in the dark thinking about what's happening so whether you're going ahead whether you're putting a plan together or whether you decide to do something online you I think now's the time that you need to communicate with delegates and you can even get their feedback at this stage so you might send an email saying hey we're thinking about doing this and taking it online if we were to do it online what would be your interest in this or what would be your experience something like that get people involved from now and get them engaged so you don't entirely lose them it's also a great way to ask your audience as well saying hey guys we're looking to do this digitally which sessions do you want to see live yeah so then you get them to vote for it so then you know how to break down your content looking at your budget so I know everyone tracks their budgets with a fine tooth comb they look through every actual detail see what you have available what you don't have available that really needs to happen right now and number seven it's really easy to panic a lot of information is being thrown out a lot of stuff on the news and everything at the end of the day you want to be partnering with someone that's going to work to your best interest that's going to make sure that your event goes ahead whether it be a physical one or an online one but right now your events should be going ahead that's come across from the different associations and everything but just keeping people informed about what their options are and letting them know that no matter what happens there is a plan yeah absolutely so we've got some questions coming through and we're going to get to those but we just want to play a short video just to give you some inspirational tips on how to present online so Warwick Merry is a CSP and an event host and he's spent a lot of time presenting online as well as hosting many conferences and I've been to so many of them so I see his face pop up everywhere he's got a great sense of energy and he knows how to make an online session actually work so Warwick is going to give us his five top tips for dealing with this crisis so let's play this video now and hopefully we get some tips out of it see you in a moment thanks to Redback Connect for having me on today I've been working with organizations to help them get more digital get more online and have powerful presentations online I think we've all sat there and someone's just gone slide to slide to slide and read it to us and all that's done is put it to sleep we talk about how millennials won't engage they're all the time on their phone yet they'll happily go to a two and a half hour Avengers movie and be with it every step of the way so I think they will engage but it's up to us to learn some new habits to engage better so what I've got is five different tips for you to help you be a more powerful presenter online first one is you are on before you are on so let people know about it get a bit excited about the presentation so they know what's going to happen they know what's coming and then when the event happens get online five or ten minutes beforehand so when people do come online start taking questions from them start talking to them start making it more about them what you may find is some questions come up that you can on the fly add into your presentation so it's more relevant for them so make sure you know that you are on before you're on second thing is don't do it alone so whether you get the great crew at Redback who are helping you maybe you've got someone in your office who's sitting next to you they can take on board all the questions or some of the comments or they can operate the technology so you're free to just do your presentation having someone else there really makes a big difference they can make everything go super smoothly and the third thing is no dead air on radio and I spend a bit of time on radio the killer was dead air when there's just nothing going on it's different to a pause a pause can be powerful but no dead air and I've seen too many presenters go oh we're just going to wait and it's dead and it kills you on the inside no dead air the fourth thing is talk with them and not to them too often we've seen presentations where we're just delivering data it's a data dump you can do that via email you can send them a document a white paper even a pre-recorded video with information for the presentation what you want to do is include them in it so have some interactive sessions get them to be asking questions get them to do a survey or a post as it's going sorry a poll as it's going on so they can interact with you make it about them even if you are delivering information you can make it about them in a certain way by asking the right questions powerful questions make all the difference and the fifth thing I would suggest to you is start now get started we live in Australia which is so geographically spread using this medium is brilliant for doing some short sharp meetings so whether it's using red back and for some of your smaller and more intimate little conversations you could use something like Skype for just small things for something as larger I'm all about red back they do some great work but start now get started even if it's just a simple FaceTime video call with one of your colleagues to if you're giving some briefing information and just see the difference of performing online I've got a whole lot of other resources I'm going to put a link at the bottom of the screen here that you're welcome to have access to in a couple of weeks I have an online half hour power session on some of the skills you need to present powerfully online I'd love it if you'd be there if you can't make the time just register I'll send you the recording Warwick Mary here thank you to Red Back Connect for having me as part of this session today and I wish you all the very best as you present powerfully online there you have it guys we hope that you gained some tips from that video there from Warwick and thank you so much for putting that together if you want to find out more information or you want to attend Warwick's webinar you can also access that from the drop down so we're now going to get to some questions and we've got a few minutes to do that first of all we have a question around venues so do I need to hire a specific venue to livestream or can we use our existing boardroom facilities great question it is and absolutely if your boardroom facilities have the functionality where you have a video camera that's either patched to a network or can be live that can be used for just video conferencing that can be patched into almost any platform so that's a great use of existing technology to make sure you're minimizing your costs definitely and I think it's just important to make sure like I said you can't do this alone so when you're doing the planning stages you need marketing involved but when you're doing this you need your IT team involved you need to go out to a provider like we said in the beginning stages that can actually support you so you're not doing it all on your own because you need to focus on your online attendees and you need to make sure you've got the tech covered so you can focus on the more important things as well so you've got another question that came through before during the registration process yeah so I have a conference plan for August and I want to go I want it to go ahead but will people attend so this is a great opportunity to actually go out to your delegates now who have registered the audience that you have and making sure that you're openly communicating with them saying hey guys our conference is still going ahead but we want to test the waters how is everyone feeling about traveling to this event if you can start to see a trend of people saying actually no I don't want to attend or put an option there saying would you like to would you prefer to attend online or would you can still go ahead with a physical event if you have a majority of people wanting to attend face-to-face but then you can also physically stream that content out from that physical event so you can get those other people at the end of the day the conference contact can still reach everyone but yeah you really need to start communicating with your delegates to see how they're feeling about the situation excellent well that brings us to the end and like Michael said earlier a lot of information to digest today it's very important that you are informed of the decisions that you need to make but it's also important that you're armed with the right information so please head over to the conference contingency micro site we've put together which is available in the drop-down we will send you a follow-up email today with a recording of this event the PowerPoint slides presented and additional information that can help you on your event journey thank you Michael it's been great having you online everyone else online please feel free to get in touch if you have any additional questions we're both here to help you enjoy the rest of your day bye for now thank you