"I really love bringing people together. It’s what brought me into events almost a decade ago (eek!) and what has kept me in the field. I love watching people make connections that last, and I love having a hand in making it happen. This is why the cancellation of in-person events was so heartbreaking, and why jumping head first into virtual experiences is so important.
I think sustaining these human connections is important now more than ever, and while virtual experiences certainly present more challenges, they can be used to provide that community.Â
When designing these experiences, these are the main things I try to consider:
How can I make this interactive? I know personally I tend to tune out when watching webinars pretty quickly. Now that everyone is jumping into the virtual game, how do we keep the experience fresh and active for the audience?
How can we stand out? I spent a lot of time and effort personalizing our in-person events to be specific to our brand. When people came to a Stella Connect dinner, they knew what quality to expect. How can we stand out in a digital space in the same way? We’ve been experimenting with different formats to set us apart from the crowd - lightly moderated virtual roundtable discussions, YouTube live streams, fully designed the produced sessions for virtual summits. I’ve been attending every virtual event I can find to try to get inspiration from other leaders in our field. This is an ongoing process, but it sure is fun.
How can we make the content actionable? We are living in an insane world with so many unprecedented problems - what questions is the community asking that we can bring experts in to answer? How can we position our brand as a thought leader with our virtual content?
How can we incentivize attendance? Ah, the never-ending problem. How do we beat attrition? Free coffee? Lunch on us? A donation for every live attendee? I wish I had the answer for everyone, but this is a constant game of trial and error.Â
I’m learning on my feet here, as I think we all are. My main goal is to continue to cultivate the community we’ve built over the last year at our in-person events. We recently launched our first Slack community for the leaders in our space, a project I am really really proud of, and I’ve been floored at the immediate reception. We all want to connect, and I am happy to keep exploring to find new avenues to provide connection while we’re all technically apart."
