Tips For Success

If you or your organization already offer a face-to-face conference, hosting a virtual conference can be be a natural way to reach even more people. If you don’t currently offer any sort of conference, launching a virtual conference can be a great way to expand your portfolio of offerings, attract new customers, and generate new revenue.

In an earlier post, I talked about some of the reasons I think virtual conferences are a business model all edupreneurs should consider. In this post, I offer tips for a successful virtual conference based off of my experience over the past two years as well as experience working with a range of clients that host virtual conferences.

1. Add strong context to your content

It’s relatively easy to round up a bunch of different presenters, schedule them for Webinars over a couple of days, and call that a virtual conference. The problem with this approach is that the sessions are usually only loosely related, attendees tend to cherry pick, and in the end, very little real learning happens.

If you want to deliver real value and impact – and, as a result, prime your attendees to return for your next offerings – you need to put effort into “curating” the experience in way that helps bring out the value of the content in much the same way that a well-curated exhibit in a museum greatly enhances the value of the objects on display.

For Learning • Technology • Design™ (LTD), this meant have an overarching theme or “big idea” that drove the event – in our case, that learning is a business, and that excelling as a learning business professional requires a commitment to continuous growth in the areas we have identified in our Learning Business Maturity Model.

To introduce and sustain this theme – and to highlight connections among the sessions and the theme – we hosted an opening “priming” session and a closing “synthesis” session on each day of the conference

The priming sessions – which were 30 minutes in length – were used to highlight one of the major themes or ideas of the conference, tee up the sessions for the day, and comment on some of the ways the sessions interrelated with the each other and with the major theme or idea we presented. In the synthesis sessions – also 30 minutes each – we challenged attendees to review the day, reflect on what they had experienced, and share some ways in which they were going to take action.