Earlier this month, Notified hosted its fourth annual event, A Festival for Communicators, aimed at event planners, marketers, public relations, and investor relations professionals. The event was held in a fully virtual format for the second time and included a keynote with Ted Lasso co-creator, writer, actor, and producer Brendan Hunt.
XLIVE spoke with Notified President Ben Chodor and Chief Product Officer Allie Magyar about how they brought an engaging festival environment to their virtual conference and best practices for creating events and year-round communities that deliver value.
XLIVE: How did you go about selecting your theme this year, A Festival for Communicators, and how do you think it contributed to the excitement around the event?
Ben Chodor: If you look at our overall business — in streaming and virtual events, PR, and investor relations — it’s all about communicating. As we were brainstorming the idea for this year's program, we said, since we all can't get together in person, let's make it a festival. Let's make it fun and treat it as closely as possible as a virtual festival for communicators, on topics communicators would want to participate in. It was one of those lightbulb moments when we all came up with it. We sent all of our speakers backstage passes, tattoos, etc. For all of our attendees, we wanted to make sure there was a DJ like at a festival and that there was a lot of content in between sessions as well, so it's not just a flat experience, but a very interactive experience.
Allie Magar: So much of people's perceptions of virtual over the years has been one way. It's content consumption, not experience. As part of this festival, we wanted people to be able to connect. We wanted it to be an experience. Theme is a part of that, but so is how we design the entire agenda. Part of it was content, which is always a piece of events, but it was also about, how do we make it fun? How do we make it engaging? How can we actually bring content to life and provide two-way engagement and learning?
XL: What are some of the specific strategies that you that you implemented to achieve that goal? Were there any learnings from your 2020 virtual event that informed changes or improvements for this year’s?
AM: I view events as moments of surprise and delight, but we also have to think about how we continue to engage with our community throughout the entire year. For example, our site now says, “A Community for Communicators,” so we're looking at continuing on this journey with our customers and with this experience, where we're activating different things throughout the year in addition to our annual event.
I think the team did a really great job of curating different panels and different perspectives and really bringing in the engagement component with content. A big piece of that was also thinking about networking —to me, engagement equals participation. Our networking components ended up being extremely popular. For example, we had a Brainstorm component where attendees co-created content with us. They could come in and suggest a title and an abstract, and then they could get together in small groups of peers and talk about specific topics that interest them.
There was also a lot of activity with our expert meetings, where people could come in and meet with an expert on a specific topic. So again, we wanted to help people create value for their specific use case. These are examples of engagement in terms of helping people to be able to create content they're interested in, be able to find solutions to problems that that they're experiencing, and connecting people from a community standpoint. I think there's so much power in how we learn from each other.
BC: To me, the biggest difference from 2020’s event is that we didn't make it purely a marketing event. In ’20, and even in ’19, a lot of the sessions were about our products and how to use them. That's not a festival, and that's not for communicators. That's a pure marketing event. We wanted to create something that our audiences would want to engage with. So we had three separate tracks: IR, Events, and PR. We also mixed up sessions, so they weren't all panel sessions, they weren’t all 50-minute lectures. We mixed up fireside chats, groups, panels, etc. and made them very interactive.
We also didn't use a lot of customers telling their story. We brought industry people in to really help you get educated — like a festival, as if you were coming in to see the greatest rock stars in the space, we were trying to do the same thing. We wanted you to leave the event knowing more and be able to have the journey you want. One of the other things that we learned from previous years that we added this year is not only doing subtitles, but also doing translation in multiple languages, so you can actually listen to the audio in multiple languages.
XL: Were the experts you had available during the event from the Notified team?
AM: We had just Notified folks this time around. A lot of this is about, how do we engage with our community year-round? What does their content journey look like? How do we help them to do their jobs better with Notified? So this site has morphed into our community platform. We're also migrating our marketplace there with all of our partners so in the future, they'll all be experts.
The intention behind this is to help our attendees, regardless of what event they're attending throughout the year, be able to find people that help them to solve their problems. And that's not just the Notified team — that's our partners, that's our ecosystem. So the intent is to really help people to connect to topics that matter and help them solve problems.
XL: How has your on-demand content contributed to your overall strategy? Have you continued to get good engagement?
BC: Why do it if you're not going to have the content on demand? The power of live is that I get to interact and ask questions and have real time answers. The power of on demand is that I get to engage with the content when I want to. I can still ask a question and it'll be answered offline. But I think you need to do both, and anyone who doesn't is really missing an incredible opportunity.
Also, it allows you to take this content and reuse it throughout the rest of the year. During the event, we had a team behind the scenes, pulling clips from sessions while they were happening, and sharing them on social platforms. And what our team has done since then is take little clips from the sessions, post them, and use them drive people back into the festival.
AM: I believe our jobs as meeting planners is to provide environments for our customers to succeed, and equitable access to information is a huge component of any strategy when we're working with our customer base. And that means that some people prefer the live environment, but there’s others who may want to consume the content on demand because that's how they learn. There is no one right answer when it comes to delivering content, so I'm going to provide a variety of options.
What I’ll say in regards to on demand is that something’s not important until it's important. If I'm a customer of Notified, and all of a sudden I'm challenged with a problem several months down the line, those on-demand resources become very important. You may look at that from a data perspective and think it's not of value, but that's actually of incredible value, because I have content at my fingertips when I want it.
I don't think we should measure the value of on demand content by the metric of “are there thousands of people looking at it all the time every day after an event?” It's, are we providing our customers access to education and the way they want to learn, when they want to learn it? I think this is how we need to evolve inside of the meetings industry. We need to think about an event as a surprise and delight moment in time, and we need to build off of that momentum to keep the connection and the brand loyalty with our customers. The real value is that we can continue to embrace our customers and create smaller and unique experiences all throughout the year.
XL: What would be your top piece of advice or recommendation for planning virtual and hybrid events going into the rest of this year?
AM: We have to keep the attendee persona and journey always top of mind. The really hard part about our industry right now is that our world is changing on a daily basis. As we think about how our communities want and need to be engaged with, we really need to think about how we show up, whether it's in person, whether it's digital. As meeting planners, we love to be in person and we gain energy from the buzz. And I think sometimes that blinds us in terms of remembering that there's people not like us, that are equally as important to our events.
As excited as we are to get back to in person, we also have to keep diversity, equity and inclusion in mind. Oftentimes, hybrid is left out of the conversation because we only focus on going back in person, and my fear is that we're not providing that inclusive environment for everyone around us and giving them the choice. That’s my number one thing that I really think needs to be reiterated over and over.
BC: As a planner, I think you want to create an event without limits. That's what we're trying to do with everything, because it's not one size fits all anymore. There's two different audiences, and if you're thinking about the world of hybrid, you can't produce an event for the physical audience and expect that the virtual audience is going to engage the same way. You really have to think about it as, how am I going to make the best for both audiences? Start creating events without any limits. That's what's really exciting for us.