Bringing Experiential Elements to Virtual Events
Are you producing a massive conference, excited about how many attendees you’ll have in a digital platform, but struggling for ways to deliver value to your event sponsors or provide opportunities for your attendees to engage with one another outside of a chatbox? Maybe you’re interested in hosting a fun event for your team this holiday season—while socially distanced—and simply don’t know where to start. Bring your party to life with creative experiences! In this video, Kennedy Events Partner Paige Buck and Senior Producer and Creative Director Marianne Jackson had a lot of fun talking about the why and how of what works for meaningful social engagement during virtual events. Yes, it’s possible to thrive even when it’s not live!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Paige Buck: Hi, I’m Paige Buck with Kennedy Events. I’m here with my colleague and we are talking about ways to make the snooze fest virtual event feel actually exciting and memorable. So, I’m so curious to hear some of the stuff that you’ve been learning and what's been working with our clients.
Marianne Jackson: Right off the bat, I want to be like, “I have a list of what not to do.” It’s a lot of relearning. I have this brilliant cadre of vendors that I loved for live events, and so one of the fun things is I’m getting to explore and learn about new vendors and new experiences and also understanding that it’s not completely translatable, right? So everything that worked brilliantly in live events is not going to necessarily work well in a virtual event. And so there’s some things that…also that I probably would not have given a second thought about for a live event, and now I’m bringing it into a virtual event, and I’m so excited about it.
Paige: Okay. So what’s one of those that you would’ve thought was like, I don’t know, weird, not appropriate, not a fit for a live event, but is now super cool?
Marianne: Okay. Initially, I was like, "Oh, I don’t think a band or a DJ will really translate that well, but you know what might be working is an illusionist. I heard about an illusionist.” And so that’s kind of like a mind reader. So I don’t know if we’ve ever…
Paige: Okay. So the type of magician that says like, “There’s somebody in the room who …”
Marianne: Exactly. Yeah. And my knee jerk reaction is this is going to be kind of hokey, but by the end of engaging with this mind reader, illusionist, I was so charmed, and just like, “I want to hire you immediately, because I can tell that you’re going to be so engaging to an audience.” And that’s something that does translate well on a flat screen, right? So when I talked to him, he was actually like, “Imagine how much change you got when you went to 7-11.” And I told him, and then he pulled it out of his pocket, this piece of paper that was just sitting there the whole time.
Paige: No way.
Marianne: It’s like any of those little things that will delight you.
Paige: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like that article you and I were just discussing about how things have to be ten times as engaging, and one of the ways to do that is to bring a surprise element in. Certainly, I feel like the nature of illusionists and magic is for people to be like, “Okay. Show me something I haven’t seen before,” and then be blown away by the experience.
How do we articulate to our clients, and how do we help people understand, why they want this in this moment?
Marianne: That is such a great question. We have so many clients that are coming to us and saying, “We know that we need something like this. We know that we want this.” They have no idea how to wrap their minds around it. So we really are being like their sherpas and guides through this.
Paige: Yeah. I know I don’t want it to be another Zoom, another webinar, but what else is there?
Marianne: Yeah. I think ultimately you have to pause and just think about how everybody’s just thirsty for enriching engagement and that sense of community. I don't know about you, but I miss you and I miss my colleagues.
Paige: I miss you, too. I mean, I see you all the time, but not in the flesh.
Marianne: I know.
Paige: And it’s always, it’s just work, work, work.
Marianne: So it actually is a great value for companies to invest in these internal company events. So thinking about company picnics or retreats, or even holiday parties, or just a way to keep your team connected and engaged with one another. It builds loyalty. It builds positivity for your company and making sure that they’re being recognized for the work that they’re doing is invaluable to the firm. So, and another thing, is like if you have really great talent, make sure that you’re retaining them. Let's talk about return on investment on there. Retain them by showing how valued they are as being part of the team. So…
Paige: Well, we’ve heard in pre-COVID times that one of the big reasons why people do corporate picnics and holiday events is not just to appreciate the colleague and the staffer, but to help their spouse who gives away so much of their spouse’s time to the company.
Marianne: Right, yes.
Paige: If the spouse loves the brand and loves the colleagues and loves the work, then they are much more appreciative, and that person’s likely to stay with the company longer. And this is another time and place where we have to find a way to translate that into something meaningful digitally.
Marianne: Absolutely. And we’re also looking in how are we... You’re home with your kids, so how are we bringing in engaging activities for kids, too? We just did an event where we had a guy who showed off his pythons and lizards. So it’s like we’re incorporating activities for children as well, which I think is a really fun thing to do. It’s like you can have your cocktail and see your mind reader, and then your kid has an activity that they can engage in.
Paige: Set up in another room on another laptop. We give the instructions for that, and you can have your kid engaged and have a kid-friendly snack box shipped to your house as part of this whole experience.
Marianne: Absolutely.
Paige: Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about my favorite thing: liquor. I want to talk about mixology. I want to talk about having a virtual happy hour that doesn’t feel like another Zoom happy hour with your friends.
Marianne: Yeah. We have an incredible vendor that we’ve been partnering with, and they have got it figured out. It’s like all of us had to hustle to figure out how are we going to change events? And this vendor has really hit the nail on the head in seeing the need, right?
Paige: Yes.
Marianne: And delivering these incredible cocktail tips where they’ve got a brilliant, talented, and dynamic mixologist who’s leading all of the attendees in these breakout rooms where you're mixing your cocktail together. Imagine it like a Zoom call and you get unmuted, right? Paige, you've attended one of these. How fun was it?
Paige: So shockingly fun, because… I don’t know, again, kind of bringing that jaded “If-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all” to events, but then I’m watching how engaged all of my fellow attendees are, and we are watching how our clients hear the responses from their…whether it’s an internal gathering and it’s how happy everybody was afterward, or as you’ve brought up, this is an awesome thing for sponsors.
Marianne: Exactly.
Paige: And so at the higher end package, we can ship the liquor and all of the ingredients that go along with a really beautiful cocktail experience. You get the lesson and then they get this gorgeous branded cocktail shaker with your sponsor's brand. And we can have the backdrop or elements behind the mixologist. While they are taking you through this craft cocktail experience, the sponsor has their brand behind it. So it’s a double win.
Marianne: One of my favorites is to incorporate that for fundraising events and for the VIPs, even. Maybe you don’t want to ship cocktails to your 500 attendees, but maybe you’ve got your 50 top donors and you want to do something really high touch and special for them. Let’s get them liquored up before we bring in that auctioneer, right?
Paige: The last thing that’s on my mind is games and what a corporate team game experience feels like.
Marianne: This is another one of those things that I was a little bit wary of and that I really had to do a little bit of research and digging. And I have been just completely delighted at what are these gaming opportunities out there. There’s a firm that we started working with that has these really like, kind of witty and charming MCs who act as the facilitators, and you get broken into different groups. And so it’s like teams competing against each other, but you can see each other, so you have your little icon of your face. And it’s a quiz show style, so it's not just one. It could be a trivia [question] and then it could be a riddle. There’s corporate gifts…
Paige: It’s “Family Feud”-style or…
Marianne: Exactly. And the other thing that I really love about this is the ability to customize it. Right?
Paige: So customizing the questions? Customizing the quiz questions?
Marianne: Customizing the questions, but also, maybe we want to poke fun at the CEO, and so we’re going to have a question about the CEO in there or something like that. So I think, again, it goes back to bringing that sense of comradery to groups. And the games also work really brilliantly for sponsors and sponsorship packages.
Paige: Well, because these can be graphic-rich, right? You can have a brand on a leaderboard. People can see some motion happening, who’s winning, who's falling behind.
Marianne: Yes. I love the leaderboards. I’m glad you brought that up.
Paige: Very cool.
Marianne: Big fan of that. Yeah.
Paige: Yeah. There are so many different ways that we can spice things up.
Marianne: Yeah. We’ve cherry-picked who is going to be the best for these curated virtual event experiences, and I'm really, really excited about all of the vendors and talent that we have queued up.
Paige: Truly, in this moment, where everything’s gone virtual, the thing that makes me so happy is seeing in the chat at in emails post-event, everybody saying, “Wow. Oh, my God, that blew me away,” or, “That was delicious. That was amazing.” And you know you’re making a big impact when someone takes the time to say that right now.
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