Hybrid Events: Live + Virtual

Traditional thinking has said that some events lend themselves better to a live format, while other communications are a better fit for delivery over the web. So what’s right for your communication needs? Live or virtual?

Savvy marketers and event professionals are increasingly answering "both", and understanding the power of hybrid events.

If that sounds kind of complicated, it’s really not. Hybrid events help you get out one unified message to all the people you’re trying to reach—whether in-person or across the globe. Hybrid events help you leverage the investment that you’ve made in a live event by making the same experience available to your target audience who can’t attend in-person.

What are common hybrid event applications?

Amplifying the impact and ROI of conferences
The highest-growth application of hybrid events currently is in traditional hotel or convention center-based conferences, particularly educational, medical, association and trade conferences. Broadcasting the content of these live conferences over the web amplifies the impact of the conference with a relatively small additional cost. Conference planners find they can increase attendance by 2x or more by including a virtual audience, with normally only a 3%-10% increase in their total event cost.

On-demand access to live presentations
Increasingly, the value of all meetings and events is being scrutinized. One of the biggest problems is that the information communicated in meetings and events is perishable. A great presentation is only great to the attendees who experienced it, and even they will forget most of what they heard. Corporate training managers, marketers and others understand that capturing the magic of these presentations, meetings and events and making it available on-demand over the web multiplies the return on their meeting investments.

Communicating to remote offices and employees
If you’re like us, you’ve got employees and other important partners spread out all over the country, working from home and field offices. When our CEO has something important to present to the company (it’s always important!) we can’t allow our remote folks to ever feel like second-class citizens. We want everyone to get the same message, with the same impact as the team watching live at headquarters. By seamlessly integrating the live presentation into a webcast to remote offices and employees we keep everyone up-to-date (and happy).

Hybrid event challenges

Creating great hybrid events requires delivering a great experience for both your live and virtual audience. It requires the intersection of great AV production ability, and the technical knowledge to translate the live production elements into a flawless web event.

The problem is those skill sets and abilities rarely exist in the same provider. When planning a hybrid event, our clients often start with the in-house hotel provider before learning--after a couple of painful conversations--that they don’t know the ins and outs of creating a successful webcast. Other clients start with their in-house IT department, until the IT department turns to us—creating broadcast quality production isn’t their strength. Still other clients have tried to combine the two approaches—hiring an AV production company and a “webcasting specialist.” This approach inevitably fails too, as having two separate vendors accountable to the success of a hybrid event means no one is ultimately accountable, and the reconciling of their different approaches and skillsets often degrades to finger pointing when problems arise.

Hybrid events made easy

Now for the pitch: We get hybrid events. We know what it takes to make live events great—and we know how to capture that live experience for a virtual audience, and we're really good at it.

In fact, we don’t believe there’s anyone out there who does it better, because of our team’s experience, skillset, know-how and dedication to the success of your events.

You can view more details about our live event audio visual productions or webcasting services. Or give us a call at 1-877-633-8866 and let us know what you’re trying to do, and we’ll help figure out if our hybrid event services are a good fit.