Your Attention Please: The Dos & Don’ts of Agenda Building for Virtual Events

Plan Better EventsSmart Event TipsVirtual Events

May 18

We’ve talked previously about building virtual event agendas that feel like shots of espresso and the importance of focusing on key elements. With your audience at home, there’s a myriad of potential distractions—from kids to pets to spotty wifi connections (just to name a few)—competing for their attention. Studies show that if you don’t keep your audience engaged, you’ll lose the average adult viewer in less than 10 minutes. Want to guarantee an experience that can make you proud and also do service to your brand? You’ll need to construct an agenda that works specifically for the virtual world. Here, we’ll continue to unpack the dos and don’ts of agenda building for online events.

Spread Things Out Over Several Shorter Days

Was your pre-Covid conference a one-day affair? Are you fretting over how much you’ll have to trim to make it digestible? While you need to make the content “snackable,” that doesn’t mean that a single-day pre-Covid event is automatically less than one day in a virtual world.

Kennedy Events is here to tell you that you can have your cake and eat it too! When planning the dates and times for your event, you’ll need to address a few details:

Consider spreading one full day of content over three days; aim for 2-3 hours each day.
Find a sweet spot between the time zones where your attendees live so you can offer your event to the most people. For example, three days that run from 12-3 p.m. EDT will allow you to reach attendees on both coasts in the U.S. If your event runs from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EDT, that’s 1:30-4:30 p.m. for Londoners, which will have your event ending by 5:30 p.m. for much of the EU.
If you have a really broad audience across larger swaths of the globe, market pre-recorded content to attendees outside your sweet spot or hold repeater Q&A sessions with the presenters for different time zones.
Brag about where everyone hails from, but acknowledge their reality time-wise. Think carefully about where breaks fall and whether you’re hitting mid-morning snack time or afternoon hangry time!
Communicate clearly about time listings. Nothing is more confusing than trying to decide to attend something and not being able to subtract or add the hours right. Make it simple for your audience to add things to their calendars with .ICS attachments or “Add to GCal” links on your agenda.

Diversify Content Formats

This advice is parallel to what we would give for live events, but it bears repeating that listening to one lecture after another gets old fast. More commonly, we see both live and virtual event organizers wring every last bit of breathing room out of their content by having panel after panel after panel.

Here are a few suggestions to keep things interesting during your virtual event:

Mix keynotes with discussions
Combine fireside chats with roundtables
Shift formats frequently
Demonstrate on your agenda page what attendees can expect

Zoom fatigue is a definite reality so you’ll want to keep things interesting, keep the program moving, and don’t bore your audience before they’ve even shown up for your event. The frequent changes will help engage your audience and attendees will thank you for giving their brains something fresh. With seemingly endless choices of platforms for hosting virtual events, many now include features that can enhance the goal of your agenda.

Don’t Leave Them Guessing

We feel like we’ve seen it all, but every experience is new territory for most of us. Be sure to provide a guide to what your attendees can expect when they show up. Be incredibly specific. Some things to consider outlining for participants:

Do they need to download something ahead of time?
Do they need to log in ahead of time or have credentials at the ready?
Is the meeting platform, website, or video player going to be new to them or something they’ve seen before?
What is the actual time commitment?
Are they sitting down to participate for one block of time or experiencing things in a choose-your-own-adventure model?
What’s the dress code? Even though I’m stuck at home, should I dress for a business function or a dress-up social hour or come as I am (but with pants)?
If there’s more than one thing to experience at a time (like a virtual expo hall, small group breakouts around a topic, or one-on-one coaching sessions), what do they click on? Where do they “go”? How do they get the most out of their experience?
If there’s a profile to create with preferred name, title, pronouns, photo, how do they set it up and when?
If they get stuck, lost, or locked out, how do they get help?

Need a Little Help Building a Winning Agenda?

The team at Kennedy Events knows how to create agendas that pack a punch in the virtual world. We’ll work with you to develop content that grabs your audience’s attention and doesn't let go. Schedule some time with us to learn how we can bring our expertise to your next event and keep your attendees in their seats.

PAIGE BUCK

Paige has been herding cats, err, masterminding details for more than 20 years, and been partner at KE since 2011. As a natural in front of and behind the scenes, she discovered her talent for coordinating large productions during her undergrad theatre days. Paige is an East-coast native, but made her mark on the Bay Area nonprofit and tech scene with her mad logistical and fundraising skills. Paige goes sailing on the SF bay every chance she gets, and especially loves when she can bring her pibble pup (the best word around for Pitbull mix). Kennedy Events is lucky to have Paige and her caffeinated smarts on the team!

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.