During the pandemic, Forrester quickly adapted its event program to be able to deliver its events virtually. This year, the company began hosting hybrid events for the first time and has already executed four hybrid events so far, including its two biggest, B2B Summit and CX North America.
XLIVE caught up with Lisa Riley, Senior Vice President and Head of Events at Forrester, who noted that the company has been seeing strong attendance across both its in-person and digital experiences, and that Forrester plans to continue embracing hybrid moving forward to better serve all of its customers.
Riley shared how her team has been approaching hybrid as well as some of her biggest learnings and tips from her experience so far this year.
XLIVE: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when planning hybrid events this year?
Lisa Riley: Events is one of the three core businesses of Forrester — there's research, consulting, and events — and events is a full profit and loss business. As a business, the first challenge was around budget allocation and prioritization. We had what I would say is a zero-based budget. Most in the events industry were allocated budgets based on 2019 costs, pre-pandemic, and of course in 2019 none of us had a digital component within our budgets. My team and I had to address how we allocate and prioritize a budget where we needed to deliver two experiences. Not only do we have to deliver exceptional experiences in person, but we have to consider how we continue to deliver that digital experience to our audiences in the same ways that we executed over the past two years, which was very successful. Plus, as a full P&L business, I had a margin to meet.
The second challenge is forecasting the onsite versus digital attendance. Again, if we're assessing for every dollar that we have to spend, out of that dollar, what is the makeup between your onsite versus digital investment? Because typically, you're going to want to put more of your dollars towards where the majority of your audience is going to show up. For us at Forrester, we've been very lucky. On average, we've had 80% of our total audiences attend in person, 20% attended digitally.
Finally, it's resource planning. My team didn't double in size because we're now delivering in person and digitally. So how do you utilize the same resources to fundamentally execute exceptional experiences, both in person and digitally? And of course, if it's a hybrid, they're happening at the same time. So it's really about resource allocation. Have I and my team done a really good job of learning and upskilling over the past two years around the digital environment? And how do we draw in our global team to help support some of these events? How do I bring in my European team to potentially help the North America event, etc.? So the three main challenges would be budget allocation, forecasting for onsite and digital attendance, and resource planning.
XL: How did you approach the virtual component of the event? Did you have team members devoted to each experience?
LR: Over the last two years, I think a lot of planners, us included, became subject matter experts in executing digital, which is really important, because I needed to make sure to allocate resources appropriately. There were certain teams that were supporting 100% in the digital environment, because our digital environment was taking place at the same time as our in-person events. I needed to make sure that I had teams dedicated, because again, even though it still it was a minority of overall attendance population, for those attending virtually, that was their unique experience. We drive for perfection and as a company, Forrester places customers at the center of our strategy. What that means is I used our global teams to support all modes of event execution – in person or digitally – to provide valuable experiences.
XL: Expanding on that, how did you approach the content? Did you have sessions that were exclusive to either audience?
LR: Roughly 90% of the content that we offered was available both in person and digital. The reason why our audience comes to Forrester events is first and foremost for the content. They're coming to gain valuable insight from our research, for access to our analysts who are subject matter experts and who more or less execute majority of all the content we offer. And of course, most of that content is available post event in our digital library.
We did actually have exclusive content for the digital audience where we had exclusive interviews and experiences just for the digital environment, because we wanted to make sure that there was a differentiation, that felt unique, and ensure there was value for them spending five hours a day with Forrester. They were able to engage with the analysts and other attendees, and ultimately, we were creating a better customer experience.
For the in person, we did create more facilitated discussions between our attendees, and there were additional networking and special events that we were able to deliver in person. But for the most part, 90% of the content was the same, and we also featured some immersive experiences, including live streaming some of our keynotes and our musical performers.
XL: Were there any learnings you implemented from your virtual event last year? Was there anything in particular that you changed or improved upon?
LR: We really improved the onboarding, because we knew going into the event, our attendees’ overall value and positive rating of the event went back to if they could gain access to the platform seamlessly. So we really continue to focus on onboarding. Some of the exclusive content we offered for our digital attendees is that we had specific content that ran prior to the event. We continue to drive that forward as one of the best practices that we've learned over the last couple of years.
The other piece was that we continued with are the shorter sessions. We didn't go back to 45-minute sessions, which was a 2019 thing. We kept to our 20-30 minute session duration and we mirrored that both in person as well as in the virtual space, which continued to be a good highlight for us. We saw engagement within those sessions close to 90 to 100%. Our viewership metric is incredible because it means we're not only getting our attendees into the platform, where they can do other things, but they're actually going to the sessions and they're staying on. So that was really the biggest thing for us. We also limited the duration of the event for the digital component to about five hours.
And three, we did try those immersive experiences where we did the live streaming. We didn't do that over the past two years, but that was one of the things that we learned from our first event, B2B summit, that there was a real value and real appreciation from our digital audiences to be able to view our keynotes and some of the performers in a live stream. So we were able to do that, and their scores and the client testimonials were really positive.
XL: What are your top 2-3 tips for planners organizing their own hybrid events based on what you’ve learned from this event?
LR: Understanding your participation makeup between your in person and your digital. Most organizers out of the gate are going to go back to their budget because we have a finite amount of dollars that we can invest in the overall experiences. Understanding your participation is going to help identify where you're going to maximize your dollar investment into the in person and/or the virtual space.
The second piece is resourcing. How do you dedicate your staff to support both of those modes of execution, because both of them are equally important, although one might have a bigger percentage of your population, which is the case for in-person for us at Forrester. However, we still want to make sure that those attending virtually have an exceptional experience.
Finally, there's a lot of employee experience (EX) moments happening at events, so we took the opportunity to bring some of our colleagues that we haven't seen in a long time and bring those moments together onsite at the event. And I know a lot of our customers really appreciate that — we have large teams from organizations that come to our events to experience it together. So we're actually seeing it as kind of like a mini offsite that they're having with their teams. Think about using your events as an EX moment not just for the teams that you support internally, but how you can potentially use your event to support those EX moments for your customers.
XL: Do you plan to organize more hybrid events in the future, based on the results of this one?+
LR: 100%. The pandemic provided a huge innovative moment for the events industry that probably lacked innovation for years. We crossed the chasm, and now we don't just run and organize in person events, we run and organize hybrid events. That is always going to be part of my responsibility and my team’s responsibility. Our event portfolio represents hybrid events.
We just ran an event in London, which recently had rail and tube strikes. If it had been pre-pandemic, that would pose a tremendous risk on my business because we would have had no other solution other than running the event and hoping for the best or maybe even canceling. But the digital environment allowed our attendees to quickly decide whether they wanted to attend virtually instead if they didn’t want to brave the traffic or deal with that. We were able to meet our customers where they felt most comfortable. In some ways, the digital part of the hybrid has helped events become recession proof and we certainly did not have that pre-pandemic.
I believe with what's going on in the market, hybrid events will always be part of Forrester’s event business. It allows us not only to reach new customers, but it really provides us the ability to reach our customers where they feel most comfortable, and I feel really good about it. I'm really pleased at how Forrester has progressed over the past three years, used innovation to drive growth and our results demonstrate that.