Without planning and proper execution of defined strategies, you will lack in making your virtual events popular among the public or the potential attendees. Do you want to know about the virtual event planning checklist for a successful virtual event?
Here we have researched and organized an event planning checklist that you have to keep an eye on during your planning phase.
Choose And Review Methodologies And Technologies For Your Virtual Event
Speaking about virtual events, planning, and evaluation of your defined strategies play a vital role in the success of events. As far as the virtual event planning is concerned, the major thing to keep under observation is the use of such technologies and methodologies which your participants can easily adapt to.
For this reason, you must work together with the facilitators, presenters, and the rest of the event management team to define objectives and plan the program in time with defined methods. This level of virtual event planning will enable the execution of an individualized and interactive virtual experience, with relevant content that captures attendees attention. Here are some helpful questions as a starting point of Event Planning Checklist:
- How much time does the public have to participate?
- What is the purpose behind conducting this virtual event?
- Are they aware of the new technologies?
- By which device or devices do members of your audience usually connect?
- What the public is interested in: learning/practicing/improving?
- Do they need to interact with each other, or can they work individually?
This initial diagnosis will permit you to determine the dynamics of the event and identify whether it will be done so synchronously (interacting in real-time over the video, audio, and chat).
Event Planning Checklist Key Points
These are 5 points to consider when planning a virtual event:
1. Identify the platform that best suits your goals
Choosing a suitable platform for your virtual event is crucial to run it smoothly. Here we recommend an efficient event management plugin like WP Event Manager to manage your virtual events. It has several premium extensions that can take your virtual events to the next level. Some of these extensions are specifically designed to handle virtual events and that include Zoom, Expo Networking, and Speaker and schedule. In addition to that there are addons like Registration and Sell Tickets that take care of your event registration and ticket sales.
2. Marketing Options
The next point on the event planning checklist is to search out for the marketing options that are feasible and economical too. While opting for marketing platforms, keep the main objective in mind, which is to get more attendees. There are a variety of addons available, which can help you send email notifications, sync extensive data, and more to manage the marketing of your events. For this, WP Event Manager provides support through its 8 different add-ons, each having unique features and functions. These addons are:
- Emails
- HubSpot CRM.
- Mailchimp.
- Salesforce CRM.
- Sendinblue.
- Zoho CRM.
- Active Campaign.
- Constant Contact.
There must be numerous digital platforms on your event planning agenda to review and choose which one is the most convenient for your particular event promotion. You can have a look at some of the paid and unpaid options to mentioned below for event marketing:
- Facebook event promotion.
- Promoting event through guest posts.
- Digital banners on different websites.
- Paid ads on social media.
3.Registrations and Tickets
Here comes one of the most important things to consider while doing a virtual event planning checklist. Registrations are very important because they provide many insights, including:
- Estimating the number of attendees you are going to have for your event.
- Allowing you to estimate the revenue generated.
- Helping you in event planning agenda related to infrastructure requirements.
There are multiple ways you can integrate registration into your events.
However, the simplest and most effective one is WP Event Manager Plugin’s Registration Add-on as it allows easy integration and simplifies the registration process through a customizable form. Using this addon, organizers can get the following benefits:
- Manage the registration status of your attendees easily.
- Manage the attendees list by filtering registration time and status.
- Get a well-organized frontend and backend dashboard.
- Freedom to customize your event’s form.
- Send registration confirmation emails to your attendees.
- Easily transfer the registered user data into an excel sheet.
Along with the registrations, you must have to put “Selling Tickets” on your virtual event planning checklist. For that, you do not need to develop any module to be integrated with your website for the desired purpose. There are plenty of addons available out there to handle such event management related tasks, and we recommend using our addons because of their ease of use and extraordinary features.
4. Financial Planning
Finance and technology are considered as the backbone for organizing virtual events. So, you have to pay special attention to them during your virtual event planning, and execution. You have to call guest speakers, make arrangements, hire staff with you for troubleshooting during sessions and arrangements, and for all these things, you have to pay money. Now, the whole planning is executed around the goal to meet the financial requirements.
You get time for all these financial planning when you get technical support of highly advanced event manager WordPress plugins. Considering various factors, we concluded that WP Event Manager Plugin offers the best and most affordable pricing structure for its addons which can be purchased by businesses of all sizes.
5. Feedback Options
Last but not the least, you must have this point on your event planning checklist. To be able to attract more attendees to your virtual events, you have to incorporate the suggestions and the feedback from your audience. By doing this, you can evolve and improve your virtual event planning and be able to organize events in a way that your target audiences like it to be.
There are plenty of options available, including the best one that allows the attendees to fill up a quick survey at the end of the session, which ultimately gets you a lot of responses.
Event Planning Checklist Division
The event planning checklist can be divided into 3 major sections:
- Before the event.
- During the event.
- After the event.
In each section, you will cover different categories of things. For example, in the first section, we cover “how to choose software/hardware platforms,” “how to communicate with the participants,” “what to consider in the registration form,” and more.
In the second section, categories like “during the session streaming” and “how to advocate your sponsors and exhibitors.” and others are included. In the final section, you will know “how to follow up with participants” and other considerations for after the event ends.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll see within the virtual event planning checklist:
1. Before the event day
Event format planning is done before the conducting any event, for this, you may consider the following things:
- Choose to Live stream, pre-record videos, or a use a hybrid of the two according to the event’s needs (this is important in deciding which software platform to use).
- Decide if the event should be extended a few more days.
- Decide the content distribution strategy: whether to form all content public or restrict to registrants only.
- If attendees span over an outsized geographical area, consider recording sessions and permit on-demand replay.
Choose platforms:
- Streaming platform like Zoom when conducting: webinar, official and non-official conferences, summits, virtual concerts, exhibitions, educational fair and more.
- Attendee interaction tool. Depending on your needs, you’ll choose a comprehensive platform, for example, WP Event Manager’s Expo Networking addon enables the attendees to directly interact with the speakers, among themselves through various interactive sessions and more.
2. During the event
During session streaming consider these points:
- Start every session 15 minutes earlier to check the device and network.
- Prepare for and react to any disruption (e.g. violation of code of conduct, streaming cut off due to technical issues).
- Mute/unmute and disable/enable video of participants accordingly.
- Collect and moderate online Q&A.
- Start and organize fun activities.
- Coordinate online gamification such as a photo contest.
- Start virtual meet-ups.
- Consider adding networking sessions, interactive booths, interaction with speakers or experts, and more.
3. After the Event
- Look for a storage service to store the archived videos.
- Follow up with the participants.
- Send attendee surveys to collect their feedback for the virtual experience.
- Check with speakers, volunteers, and moderators and express your gratitude for their efforts in this special event.
- Follow up with sponsors and exhibitors to thank them for their support during the tough time, and see if they reached their goal.
Conclusion
If you haven’t kept these things on your event planning checklist for the last events, then try them out for your upcoming virtual events and observe the success rate and the customer’s feedback. There are a lot of other things to be incorporated during virtual event planning; however, we have made it very short and tried to include all the information, so that readers can easily follow it and increase the chances of making their virtual events successful.
Lastly, all these points on the event planning checklist can become easier to follow if you are using WP Event Manager Plugin for your virtual events.
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