Redback Report 2020: Results from our Digital Events Study

hello and welcome to today's red back webinar where we're going to be uncovering the red back report for 2020 we're so excited because as we all know it's been a crazy year for online events and this is our eighth year where we've actually gone and discovered insights and trends into how people run webinars and what people's preferences are when they attend webinars so we know that 2020 has been like no other the impact of covert has changed the world of events forever especially those that are virtual today is all about uncovering the findings that have come up in the report going through them to make sure that you understand them in detail and then also providing you with some tips to make sure that you can run awesome events that really stand out from the rest so we encourage you to participate and ask questions as we'll be going through them throughout the webinar i'd like to welcome michael how are you good sarah thanks for having me great so michael's going to be discussing some of the content with me as we go through today and it's great to have you on michael because we're both very passionate about different types of events that's very true and different applications in events as well before we get started and get into the data i really want to encourage you to submit your questions throughout so to do that please click on the dark blue raise hand icon in the top right corner of your screen we will also be referring obviously to the report and some other accessible material so to access your copy of the report and also additional information you can click on the light blue drop down arrow and of course towards the end of the webinar we'll be asking you to submit your feedback obviously because we like to improve our own webinars absolutely okay so let's get straight into the respondents and the sort of data that we collected so we actually surveyed over a hundred qualitative um respondents so we went out and they completed around a five to ten minute survey and if you are online and you do complete that a huge thank you because the insights were amazing that we captured through there and then we also went back and we actually looked over 1500 events in the past 12 months and we've had such a huge variety of events haven't we oh god they've all been the three standard ones the normal ones the remote studio and customer venue but the applications for how they've used yeah um have been very varied and this data was great because it allowed us to understand how our customers are running events but then the other data that we captured in terms of people's responses allowed us to understand people's preferences so combining the two of those made for some great insights as you'll see by the graph on your screen uh this actually goes through the types of people who completed the survey so one in three are actually from the corporate sector and 42 hailed from the not-for-profit sector and i think a big part of this michael is that we know that associations and membership organizations have been using webinars for so long and when covert did hit they really adapted quite quickly because they already had these in place didn't they they did or they were able to utilize their programs for cpd and other stuff to use other external communications so it was really great to see them pivot quite quickly and i know everyone's heard pivot way too much but we'll say it a couple of times today so i do apologize for that but it was great to see so many people from the third sector it was also nice to see seven percent came from government and i think stakeholder engagement is definitely on the increase when it comes to government organizations um and the applications as we'll see in this report have just blown us out of the water people have been so creative um so why do we attend events and i think it's important for us as webinar organizers and planners to understand this when we're creating content to understand why people attend and the types of events that they want to attend so 30 first of all i'll just give you a stat which i thought was very overwhelming 30 of respondents said that they attend over 10 events per month which is massive which is huge and a further 34 said they attend six to 10 events per month so that's more than two a week absolutely it's more than two a week but you also got to wonder have these increase in events just not just replace the physical trainings and stuff they were doing face to face but are people doing even more because i can't and i think the insight from that as well is when we did this survey last year when we asked people the same question only two percent said that they were attending um about over ten per month and when it came to those who attended between six to ten that was five percent so as you can see there's been a huge increase from two percent to thirty percent and five percent thirty four percent and that just goes to show how people are attending and what they're actually expecting another thing i'll also note is um we conducted another survey during hobart as you know around remote working and people's um experiences and 80 of people who have been working from home said they want to continue when they re-enter the workforce and i think we've seen that shift as a lot of the restrictions have been lifted as well with people adapting this sort of hybrid approach approach where some are still going into the office and i think it's going to be like that for events as well where you're never going to replace that face-to-face component and as face-to-face events and physical events really come back into play you're still going to have that hybrid approach because people want it don't they they do they do and it allows you also to expand that physical event into more touch points as well yeah so a great hybrid approach is definitely on the rise and you know we can see here learning education development is still one of the top reasons um when they're all combined why people actually attend so we know that events are on the rise there's no secret there um but can we just take a look into how much we think they're on the rise and do people that expect to attend more as we move into 2020 and 2021 oh absolutely i think looking at the stats and seeing that they're going to be attending more and it's just because of the ease of the technology now yeah the apprehension of running digital events a couple years ago where people are really scared about the technology they now see it works so people are looking at their programs they're looking at what they're going to be doing uh 51 expect to attend more which is great and it allows people to be a little bit more creative with what they're trying to achieve as well so that's the exciting stuff to see here um i love the fact that two percent nowhere near as many after this and you're always going to have those people in your stats but i reckon we will see a continuation of not just more around the digital events that we see the traditional live ones but a lot more around the on-demand strategy a lot more around the content creation strategy because not everything needs to be live do you think we've hit our peak definitely not no no no no i just think the peak it's i don't think it's going to be a peak because it's going to be a ever evolving landscape of how these virtual events are being done okay the next section i want to go into now is live and on demand and i want to spend some time on this because it's always contentious when we speak to our customers and consult with our customers but it also has seen a massive change over the past 12 months so while we're attending more and more events we're also attending more and more live and michael i think this is interesting because over the past probably five years we've seen a dramatic decrease in the types of people attending events live so your average attendance rate has dropped to around 35 to 40 percent and that's average and that's just because it's the way that we digest content now yes it's on demand it says netflix generation we want to watch stuff when we want to want it we don't necessarily want to watch it live and there's pros and cons for both we understand but it's important to note that this year 83 of respondents are attending at least half of all the digital events they watch live so that's pretty huge that's massive i think um and then you've got people who always register and wait for the on-demand version and for everyone out there looking to create their series one bit of advice is to make sure that you don't get hung up on your live attendance rate and i think that's one of the mistakes that many people make early on in their webinar programs they tend to focus on the live attendance and they use that as a measure of investment so okay how what am i measuring the success of my event on i'm going to see how many people attend live just because those people are live it doesn't mean that they're necessarily more engaged so you really need to consider your on-demand strategy but i think it's really interesting that people are attending more events live it is and i think it's also funny to look at the stats where people still say that they're registering just for the on demand but i wonder how many people that register for the on demand actually then go back and watch it yeah and i think as well like people are just busy they are they are and they want to when people are digesting content and that very much netflix tall it's not the click of a button you don't want to be waiting for something so so what does this all mean how can this help us as event organizers and planners um and when it comes to increasing live viewership i think you mentioned pre-recorded content before and that's on the rise isn't it it is people are wanting more polished professional looking content but it's also removing the burden of again a lot of our presenters aren't used to digital events so that security blanket of being able to know like look i can pre-record it i get to review it maybe edit a bit and then play it back as if it was live so then it could either be some live engagement still or just purely on-demand content but this pre-recorded content is it's again people are aware of the fact that it's not all about the live you can still have the live element but you are trying to create a really professional piece of content as well that's going to live past that live event so pre-record definitely gives you that ability to do that i also think and there has been increase in pre-recorded content and this is also something to consider when it comes to planning your events is because we've seen such an increase in people attending remotely so people presenters are attending statistically the more people you have present remotely the more issues you're going to have as far as i'm concerned so we've got more remote presenters we've got more unreliable internet connections and doing on-demand content just gives you that peace of mind but i still think there is room to mix up your live and pre-recorded content absolutely look and as you talked about remote presenters that's just risk and the more remote presenters that you have is the more failure points that you can potentially have with internet so especially high profile international speakers or anyone that's coming in think about like can i have this pre-recorded and then create a polished piece of content that i can insert into my live event and every time that you do that it removes one failure point for each one of those that you do so it's a great strategy to do it allows you to also put to ease the presenter's apprehension for maybe having to use their own technology because remote presenters they are controlling their slides their computer everything and it can be a little bit daunting so by removing these things you're trying to more focus on making that presenter comfortable and creating the good content and so while we all know that pre-recorded content is great there is obviously still a place for live membership so what are some tips for increasing live viewers because i think at the end of the day the pros of live viewership are there is interaction the ability to ask questions and interact with people and it's also depends on the types of people's personality i always think the people who are going to attend your events live are the ones that are going to attend networking events they're the people who want to participate and engage so we need to cater to all types of people so how do we increase live viewership well there's a couple easy tips and one of them is i think our standard our favorite one is get people to pre-submit questions by getting people to pre-submit questions it does get them invested in the event because i want to want to see if that question was actually answered online so that draws them into the event create some urgency with simulive vets and when we talk about simulated live that can be the pre-recorded content played as if it was live but what it also can allow you to do is instead of having these massive lead times of like two or three weeks of registrations if you have that on-demand content pre-recorded and created you could do a last-minute event so there's a sense of urgency for it so it's like hey guys this week on thursday you release this on monday tune in live we're gonna have this person yeah it's an easy way of knocking out quick events if you have that content pre-done and definitely that urgency will drive numbers up because you're not competing against other things in the calendar use the blended approach play recorded files at the end um have one of your speakers and moderators appear live to answer the question so that's combining the cmu live with create the content before and then at the end of it still being in your presenters that you use to do the live q a so you don't lose out on those elements there was one more that i was gonna say but it's just completely lost my mind so move on to it so we also uh mentioned virtual conferences and applications and things that we've seen come out of um the pandemic and the way that people are being more creative with the types of events they're running so what types of events are people attending these days or have they been attending over the past six months or so i i love looking at the stats that we have right now because i think a lot of these things people are classifying as in a digital event as a very broad spectrum it's very broad it's very broad and there are the two different platforms that you look at like right now we're doing a live webinar it's broadcast only a lot of the stuff that we see that came back from the report are generally collaborative meetings so like briefings workshops those are the two-way communications but we can see webinars are still number one yeah 26 percent of people have come in for that um the customer meetings at 11 some briefings like i like the fact that we're seeing an incline of these but what's really stood out this year and forced people to do it as the virtual conferences yeah yeah people have done the hybrid approach for years of streaming a couple of the keynotes or maybe streaming the whole thing but having the physical audience there people were forced now to take a fully digital approach to it and it's pushed our boundaries of what we were doing beforehand and how we're going to change the technology but it forced a lot of event organizers to be really creative not just for delivering the virtual events but also how they're going to benefit the sponsors and everything and what they were doing for them as well yeah and i think you know to the point here there's going to be different types of speakers and topics and different types of audience and that should dictate the format of your event um we've also got a comment here from one of our audience members that pre-recorded content looks more polished and cleaner from an audience points of view not limited by the constraints of a live delivery platform which i think is you know so valid yeah definitely it does allow you especially with look feel branding um especially for like really important presenters and everything you get a more controlled environment doing that so yeah definitely props almost the statement there yeah great thank you for that um henrietta so tips for taking your physical conference nice little segment i know this is so this is what you're talking about i'm smiling because you are so passionate when it comes to physical conferences and i know that you've consulted with so many customers over the past few months and the biggest thing that um i think you've taught me is that just because you do you're you're going to have your agenda and you're going to run your event this way live and in a physical environment you need to change the online environment because people as you can see are attending more events they're getting shorter attention spans so what are some other tips for taking your physical conference online the number one is reworking your agenda what you were doing for a face-to-face event isn't going to translate well for a participant experience especially for asking them to commit to eight hours behind their desk at home when they've got kids at home yeah they've got kids at home and they've also got so many different applications for their working environment right now because they're not able to physically take themselves away from their work situation and go to a conference they'll still have teams open they'll still have chat open they'll still have messages popping up and oh something urgents come up so you've got to be quite clever about how you actually take your agenda and my recommendations for customers one extend it like you have an opportunity to extend your event now beyond that one day or two days it could be a week it could be two weeks so we're talking about having maybe three or four different sessions on a day and then giving people the rest of their day back to catch up on work and then just extending that so your content lives on for longer lives on for longer it also allows your participants to know they're only committing for a small portion of time so maybe look at your format like you would of a physical conference have your keynotes first thing in the morning get them really excited but then at the end of the day do maybe a panel session or a fireside chat yeah the other thing is not everything needs to be live for a virtual conference you want to commit to your your big budget ones so your your keynotes the really high i'm losing my words but the really important speakers you want them to be live because they're your draw cards anyone else on the agenda that you were using for different streams or different concurrent sessions have those as pre-recorded have them already pre-hosted on the site or each day release new content yeah so that in between the two live sessions you send an email to us everyone's saying hey guys we've just now released three new sessions on our page go and have a look and then participate in interactive chat there's some really fun ways of doing this and i guess that gives you more touch points with people so if you just have like the one day conference and you have everything online and people are watching it back to back you've had one touch point with the people so that's not necessarily great for you and your members or the people you're communicating with but also for your sponsors whereas you could potentially have every a single day um or half a day or certain sessions with sponsors can't you yeah you can use pre-recorded content for sponsor pre-rolls and post roles for sessions other things like if you are doing back-to-back sessions and you've got a break in the middle why not actually have the sponsor come on live and talk about why they're sponsoring the event yeah using those simple things of dead air where you were having those catering breaks so yeah i was gonna say recent lunch but i meant morning um you can use that time to your advantage and actually give more value back to your speakers the other things is when you're looking at the type of technology you're using for virtual conferences it could be a mix of a couple different things it could be studio like we're doing right now and remote presenters so the real thing is making sure you test and test and test making sure that you're absolutely confident with anyone going live if there is anything potentially going to go wrong then you want to look at on-demand um creating recorded content that you can play as if live but i think the absolute number one tip that we have is hire a virtual emcee yes we do this for our physical events we do this for physical conferences you need to do it for a digital one because you need someone that's carrying the whole excitement and getting everyone um kind of geed up for your event and they can be hosting it from a studio like we're doing right now they can do it remotely as well but that's the person that's guiding your participants through every session and everything and they should really bookend them and so many mcs are now experienced in the virtual world i know we've had conversations with so many of them and if you need advice on um people to contact feel free to get in touch but these are people who have really there i say pivoted in a time like this and really you know they've really stepped up their game to do things virtually and i think it's really hard for someone who is used to presenting face-to-face to actually learn to present behind a camera and so i think it's important that you find an mc that's familiar with the online environment as well to make that work but some great advice there and i think it's great that we've now uncovered the types of people who responded to the event also the types of applications that what we're actually seeing on the rise so virtual conferences like we said definitely on the rise i also predict in the next what's happening now but the next time we do this report virtual agm's are going to skyrocket um because people are now with the guidelines provided by asic and whatnot um and the extension of that people are now actually attending and holding more virtual agm's and they're seeing record numbers so definitely one to watch out for i think award shows will also be up there oh yes award shows we're doing a few of those as well okay let's get into the exciting part which everyone loves um and i just want to preface this part of the presentation by saying these are obviously um this is obviously um responses from the people who complete the survey and when we go through the preferred days and times and durations it's important not to get hung up and think okay this is the most popular date and time here's when i should hold my event it's about looking beyond the data and seeing the different trends and saying okay if these are the most common days why and what does my audience want and i think as we go through this as well start to think about how you can figure out what's going to be more engaging for your audience so i think it's also good to point out as well that with the response you had over a third of it was for professional development exactly so a lot of these times the day of the week and everything that we're talking about right now is majority for professional development so if you're looking at any other event type it's probably not going to work for that time so you need to be just putting that in and i think it's important to understand when other people are holding their events and to remember that you know there is this thing of webinar fatigue which people have been talking about for years and it hasn't happened yet and if we keep running um awesome events and i don't think it will happen but you don't necessarily want to be holding your events in peak times as well you want to be different the application as well so we can see tuesday and wednesday came through as the most common times and days of the week that's usually the case and it has been for the past few years but we've seen a drop on thursdays as well as we head to the end of the week um and but as we can see the red back customers over the data that we analyzed 25 percent of people prefer thursdays as well so it's really about mixing up your content and finding out your audience i definitely think if you've been running webinars for a while um or if you're new to webinars you should be going to your audience and you should be asking them when would you like to attend webinars because it definitely makes um not only you're getting the right responses and you're then adapting whatever you're doing but it also means that you're asking for this feedback and that's only a good thing i also think mondays and fridays i love monday and friday yeah you know maybe some people depends on the types of audiences in terms of mondays and how hectic some mondays are for people but friday afternoons definitely mixing up making it a little bit more casual your fireside chat your panel discussions those sorts of ones and then we go into preferred times and this is probably just a continuation of what we were talking about because mid morning has always been so huge however i personally think that lunch and learns and we can see here aren't as popular popular as they once were yeah no i love lunch and learns i yes we'd all like to have that work life separation sorry um but it's also a nice time for if you are going to unwind and you want to do something it is that time that you can actually take it and a lot of people like you look at our customers 29 of them love the lunch times yeah yeah which is great to see afternoons i still think yeah depending on the time of day when you're choosing to do it yeah again to sarah's point and i absolutely agree is that by going out to your community or your members or your customers or anything and getting them involved early will also help you achieve greater numbers in the beginning because people are invested in the communications exactly and you need to understand and most of you would probably know this already without even asking your audience what do you what is your community doing in the morning in the at lunchtime and in the afternoon are they physically behind a computer are they more the types of people who actually just want to watch on-demand content and therefore it doesn't matter when you want to hold your events so all this needs to be considered in the early stages of your events and evenings as we can see are still they've always been quite low but we still have a huge amount of customers that run their events in the evenings we do and i think that's but that's a lot of their community professional development professional development having to do it outside of hours yeah the only thing that i would be talking to a lot of people about nowadays is just with everyone working from home and not having to like that transition time from like leaving the office to go home afterwards and people are trying to do events over five o'clock or six o'clock at night is that's peak congestion on internet networks at the moment because people are streaming yeah so it's again knowing about what's happening in the environment when you're trying to do your events as well and i think this takes us to the next part which is really what's driving the shift and i think the biggest thing that i would say when it comes to your times and your um times your the days of the week that you want to hold your events is think about what's happening in the world and how our working habits are changing and this is actually for me this quote so i used to love mid-morning webinars but working from home my my days have changed my working hours have changed i don't have to necessarily spend time traveling into the office when i work from home so i'm working from 7am i get to i have breakfast i get to probably just after lunch 1 32 o'clock and i'm thinking oh my god i haven't had lunch yet because you're constantly on and you're constantly working you're not going for those coffee runs with people in your office you're not standing by the water cooler and having conversations with people and taking those breaks you are always on so having that 3 30 afternoon you know that's sort of like the new snack time for me you know okay can i grab a cup of tea sit down and watch half an hour 45 minutes worth of content think about people's working habits and how they're changing um but then also you know at that time of the day is your audience going picking up the kids from school because they're now working from home and they have the ability to do that so it really really depends on your audience and like i said you're never going to get 100 live attendance rate or if you are it's very well done and i don't know what you're presenting but really start to consider this and consider people's changing habits and the fact that they're going to continue to shift as well nice i think that when you're looking at the the shift and everything i always go back to the data and everything and especially like you just said we're not looking for 100 attendance for the live event but you are wanting to make sure you're tracking the on demand so that strategy around actually getting your attendance numbers afterwards and the proof back to the business about the success of it it isn't the live stats it's how many touch points like how many people have actually seen the content and that's when you'll see in the first three months after a live event if you've done a great job of marketing getting touch points going back to it that's when you'll see that drive yeah and this is also duration as well so our events are getting longer they are which i find really funny considering the previous year um we were seeing so many events come up where during working hours of trying to go underneath that one hour into the 45 minute mark but yeah 46 percent of people coming in 60 minute duration back to the one hour which was our early days was always one hour for everything and then yeah massive dropped down to 33 for 45 minutes i still really like the 45 minutes i'm not committing to an hour but again it depends on content this report again had a massive contributors of professional development which would need that minimum of one hour for cpd so that does play into it but we can definitely see that still 33 is a large number for seeing different types of events coming in 16 30 minutes they have their place depending on what it is then 19 minutes so i find really funny being 35. i think there definitely was this trend that we thought was coming around in the past 12 months or 12 months ago where people wanted a shorter snackable content and it was these 30 minutes i think that definitely has a place for on-demand content so my attention span for on-demand content is going to be different than what it is live so if you are running these hour events depending on the type of content when you do host it on demand consider breaking that up into different chunks so you may split it into two and have part one and part two so people don't have to actually invest in an entire hour or even to four minute segments yeah if you've got a facilitator that can really guide your content and you can have clean breaks when you edit that's also another way to sort of mix it up as well but when we look at the data of um over 1500 of our events in the past 12 months here's the average duration of the events as well which is um also quite large it's really large and i think this does come into play when we look at the virtual conferences we've been doing because they are just to be transparent with other events that we run an event duration is off the single one so if we did a full day conference that's just one event so and we've done so many of these so especially for the remote webinars pushing that up to 73 minutes massive yeah and then we look at our studio jobs as well where we had someone facilitating from a day also done at our customer venue ones before we had to stop going to customer venues those are generally your hybrid events so those were those longer um keynotes and plenary sessions and everything that we were doing so that's why our minutes are so high um but it is it's because people are utilizing using the event types differently yeah absolutely and so once again interest in data not something that you're going to treat as gospel but just really interesting to see how others are running their events and how you can adapt that to the way you're running events so we're two thirds of the way in we've got 15 minutes left so please ask any questions that come through we're going to go into the last section now and this is a fun section i think it's all fun guys so really let's talk about preferred format because this is something that um i'm very very happy to see in the report and there's a few things where i was like yes i could have written it myself um but i think format is definitely overlooked when it comes to events we spend obviously a lot of time on content and presenters and technology and so we should but the format is also something that should be played around with and something if you're running a webinar program it's good to mix things up a bit and keep it fresh and i am so glad that we see moderators take in front seat um the fact that we have two people discussions as something that's rated higher but then we've got panel discussions as well so we're talking what 49 almost half of people prefer more than one presenter his music to my ears because it just makes it so much more engaging it makes it more engaging and it's easier for the presenters as well if sarah and i were just sitting here right now by ourselves trying to do this report it could get a little monotoned you would lose the excitement but we feed off each other yeah we bounce different ideas so having a format where you have the two people sarah also does all the moderation for me so i can't touch the slide clicker i'm not trusted i don't trust him because there's a difference but it means that she gets to steer the conversation so she knows her talking points i have my ones as well and it makes it so much more enjoyable and you get to actually have fun with it now it's not gospel there will be event types where you need to have that single presenter and you can't always have a moderator for it but to you exactly to your point it's breaking up your content knowing how things are going to go i personally love the panel discussions and fire slide chats more casual approach to them because slides are needed for a lot of things but that's not the be all and end all if you can carry an event by conversation it's much more enjoyable and there are certain events where there's definitely the need for a moderator so obviously virtual conferences we discussed virtual agm's are crucial you need to have a chairperson at those events and also just consider your presenters and as i said not everyone's going to be natural presenting behind the camera and we'll go into presenters in a moment but you'll see how crucial it is that your presenters actually convey their passion and enthusiasm and sometimes the best way to do that is to have a moderator or facilitator and these can be hired through managed providers but use someone in your organization that could be right next to you what i have seen michael over the past few months is a rise in the amount of ceos taking um front and center when it comes to their events and especially when everything sort of hit us in sort of march april and people started to change all their events and go online there was an abundance of ceos becoming the moderator as soon as the webinar started hi everyone thank you for joining there was this empathetic caring speech around why they've chosen to go online and thank you for helping us on this journey most people renamed their series as well so it had this really nice feel to it and i think it's really important to consider the goal of your program and the branding of your program as well um every single time you run a webinar it is a reflection of your brand absolutely you know your brand is much more than just your logos on the slides it's about the person presenting and how the moderator is controlling that and half the time if you're presenting and it's just a single presenter then you probably aren't going to remember call to actions or time or technology so you need a moderator to actually manage that and they're really underrated and definitely don't sort of pinch your pennies when it comes to moderation and just on that here's some tips for moderation as well um and we've got so much more content on tips for moderators so feel free to get in touch if you want some more but they need to understand the content and presentation ahead of time it's not a matter of your presenter and your moderator just turn up on the day hi how are you they need to understand the tone and the energy and the types of events that they want to convey and the emotions don't they absolutely like you don't want someone to be cold and disconnected from the content that's what i mean yeah scripts are not recommended however it's his fine line i think with moderation in rehearsing and you don't want to be too rehearsed where you're reading from a script um if it is more formal maybe an autocue might be necessary but you want to have this organic flow and this connection between your moderator and facilitator because it will definitely break through the technology barrier as well and also tips on how to guide them back to the topic if they start to waffle like i generally do yeah yeah exactly um and the other thing is avoiding the long bios and getting to the point yeah well look people already know who the speakers are that generally should be on your marketing anyway links off to linkedin and you don't want to disconnect people from the content because at the beginning you've either started doing a company spew or you started being too salesy around the content or anything that's really jarring to it it should just start straight away and go into it the only thing that you might want to do at the beginning is just remind people how to engage with the platform but even that you guys saw it today we had a housekeeping video at the beginning so we don't even have to do that yeah exactly um keep it simple i say and focus on that um well here we go this is interesting isn't it oh look like we look at the most important things at the participant level and what they're doing when they're coming into an event and year on year this comes in and no matter how much time we tell our customers it is the truth it's crystal clear audio quality is the number one yep like people are gonna forgive um a poor video camera from someone's laptop if they've got good audio yeah but if they got bad audio people are not going to stay online that's the main that's just the rule it's so much easier to walk away from an event i know we talk about that a bit but that's the thing like you don't want anything that's going to discourage people from actually staying online so number one crystal clear audio number two is being able to see the presenters on a webcam which is great but not always needed and that also does come into play that if your presenters aren't really comfortable in front of camera do not force them to have it because your audience don't need it as much as that audio so you are trying to play the strengths the ability to download resources and additional stuff from the actual page is great to see that it's still in there yeah um i find it really funny that zero for being able to ask a private question i think people are getting more into the actual public chats and everything um and then the ability to connect with other attendees via open chat yeah that was at zero as well so just actually don't listen to me i think it just reinforces the fact that you really want um audio to be a priority event and i think um having backup plans is really important when it comes to audio and testing and training um and we could do a whole session more on the sort of technical stuff when it comes to your webinars um but definitely some room for room for expansion on that topic isn't there but passion is everything yes it is so um this is something there's so many things that have changed um in the report over the past eight years however this is something and i'm you can go back and read every report it's been the same every single year and this is when we ask people what is the most important thing to you when it comes to um preferences and presenters and your events um presenters are enthusiastic and engaging um so this is huge because in an event an online event people can just close down your browser and leave they don't have that embarrassment of getting up and walking away so it's really important to understand what's going to keep them online and what's going to keep them engaged and an engaging presenter online obviously trumps everything else and it's important that you have these things you want easy technology but you don't need to you can't control that well you can but your provider who you work with can assist with that the content needs to be delivered as promised but you need to work with your presenters to create content and make sure what you're marketing is the same as what's been spoken about but passion and enthusiasm is so important and as we can see almost half of the people actually said that um and also we also asked people around attendees personal preferences if they could improve online events what would they actually want um so 51 want access to presenters after a webinar and we've seen this rise in online forums after events as well so people redirecting either to discussion groups or creating their own online communities and there's platforms out there that do that now 22 want to submit questions verbally so there's sort of two ways to do this um and that's opening up the lines for people on the actual event through voip which isn't really recommended because you don't know what you're going to get on the other end but there is another way where you can actually have people dial into a teleconference and you can have a managed solution you can have people dial in and ask questions that way or video chat as well and i guaran i don't i can't guarantee anything um but i think that um in the next 12 months we're going to see an increase in this so if anyone's watched q a on the abc you will actually see a lot of people pre-submit video questions beforehand so getting your audience to pre-submit those questions beforehand and we do that in the registration like written but getting them to do that via video and then playing those videos in the event i think is a great it's a good opportunity for you when you've done the the text based yeah pre-submission of questions and you're reviewing them leading up to the event you're like you know what that would actually be a really good video one reach out to the person who's admitted you've got their email address and say hey would you mind using your iphone yourself doing it yeah i'll put it up the other thing is like and this is what i was going to talk about for increasing live attendance i finally came around to it is with that 51 of people who want to actually have access to the presenters after the webinar this is really good to have that secondary event that happens straight afterwards but limited seating so first hundred people that register will get invited or first 100 people who attend the event will receive the invitation afterwards to join our linkedin discussion group so then that way it drives more people into it because they have another touch point afterwards yeah absolutely um and this is just another thing as well and this also talks to why do people drop off their events so 86 admit to dropping off events and that's a reality it's also 20 up from last year as well so we've got high expectations here are some things that you need to make sure you have so the content like i said make sure that it's shared with your presenter so you're marketing and talking about the same thing if you're running lead generation events call to actions need to be really subtle i think and it's more about nurturing people after your webinar which is once again a whole different topic you need to make sure your event runs to time and i'm a stickler for this and i understand that we've only got seven more minutes so i'm going to be really really um just speed it up yeah i'm going to make sure that i get there in the end but if you do run over time that's okay just let people know that that's going to be the case and respect people's time but i definitely think if i register for something and i hop online and someone starts talking about themselves for about 10 minutes then talking about their product or service i'm done yeah no well it's also with looking at the um the increase in volume of webinars as well if you haven't grabbed their attention at the beginning yeah staying online there's another one happening yeah exactly and i think yeah i just want to spend a few moments just talking about the future of digital events before we get to a few questions that have come through um so you know 79 say virtual is as good or better um but what do you think we need to make sure that digital events are here to stay and completely compelling oh look there's i keep looking at the strategies that we're working with some customers and it's not the one size but it's all or even the fact that you're looking at replacing all your physical events it is really having that defined strategy about how virtual is going to work with physical and how live is going to play in and where on demand is going to play in and how you keep getting people back to your content those are the kind of the main things you're looking at like virtual is definitely so a lot of people saying it's better and i think that's just because it's easier access to different speakers present it's present it's it's right now we have it's right at our fingertips so afterwards people are going to be expecting the same international speakers are going to expect the same events and so there's going to have to be that really cool strategy but i think yeah the definitely not at the peak like we talked about before but that peak is going to constantly evolve and i think it is this unified strategy around what's live what's tied in with the physical event can my content be yeah on demand only so there's a lot of different touch points you get to do so but also just be creative you guys are only limited to your creative creativity when it comes to digital events so be bold try something new and i think the other thing is people's attitudes are changing and they have changed to events so therefore you've got huge potential when it comes to creating your events and you can have so much fun with these now i also think the fact that four out of 10 people have attended for online entertainment i think there's going to be a huge increase in that just to further engage people and resonate with your employees especially if a lot of businesses continue to work from home so like you mentioned earlier we're doing a lot of virtual awards now there's charity fundraisers there's meet um comedy events as well so i think you're right it's definitely endless in terms of what you can achieve um but i i just want to get to some questions now um it is a bit of a meaty report so definitely download and take a look at some of those results and feel free to get in touch if you have any um questions yeah feel free to connect on linkedin yeah i just um we've got a question from belinda around the findings of the report so are we going to change up the way that we run digital events so this is very interesting um so belinda we have actually done a few things um and i've sort of taken i've sort of extracted a few things out of this and there's two parts it's what we're consulting yes to our customers on how to run their events but also for our own internal events so we are experimenting a lot more with on-demand content as well so one of the things that we've done is training presenters is huge for us and the report telling us or reinforcing that presenters are very crucial when it comes to your events we've actually created an online presenter hub full of on-demand content which we're launching next week um and that's on our webinars.com website which is getting refreshed so i think for us hearing what people are wanting and the fact that presenters are so important it forced us to look at our content because all of our content was for our customers whereas we had to create content for our presenters to help them run better events so that's the first thing the other thing we've done is we've realized that on-demand content is important but i also think it needs to be more accessible and i think in the past for all of our on-demand content people would go watch it afterwards but they'd have to enter their email address to join what we've done is we've changed it up a bit now and we're giving it access to everyone so all of our webinars are on our website we export the video file and we actually caption it so we've got burnt on captions so anyone can actually read it and it's completely compliant and accessible for anyone and then we actually export a transcript of our content and then we create a blog on that as well for marketing purposes so we're starting to reuse our content in a variety of ways and just get more creative with it yeah we're definitely doing things differently with our customers from the report as well and i think it's some customers are really open to trying new things others are clear of it until they're forced to do it and everything but i do think it's actually a good challenge for us to look at a couple of these things and maybe create an example of saying hey from the report findings yeah this is what video questions look like this is and actually create a dummy we'll do it instead of a live one maybe it's an on-demand piece of content but that'd be a fun thing for us to work on yeah and the whole virtual agm side for us has just opened up a huge room across possibilities a whole new product line we're working with a lot of peak bodies as well to make sure that people are running um successful virtual agm's and um one of the things we started to experiment with but we didn't really continue but i want to continue is the whole concept of short snappy webinars on a friday afternoon and running events at different times i still want to do webinars and wine yeah i know he's been begging me to do that for a while but we'll see um okay we've got another question so what are your predictions for live events making a comeback so um you just briefly alluded to this yeah i did and i think they're absolutely going to be coming back but there's going to be now i think every live event will have some form of virtual element tied to it whether it's a pre-event or a post event so you're extending the touch points of the event or actually streaming that event out to people that couldn't travel um yeah i think event like physical events are definitely coming back there's always gonna be a need for them but they're gonna completely there will always i feel have a virtual element somehow i can't wait for physical events to come back i can't wait to choose that glass of champagne with someone and have a conversation with them that's different but i think the thing to remember is in that for the past 10 years especially in the physical events occur with a hybrid element so people don't run physical events or any sort of um virtual any sort of conferences especially when it comes to membership-based conferences unless they have that hybrid event because it does work and there's so much success so i feel like this everything that's happened in the past few months has forced us into that and i feel like it's just going to open up so many possibilities not only for you as organizers and your attendees but also for your sponsors as well the other big change that we've looked at this year and i never write on time but we stream to all platforms yeah that's the other main thing like we're not limited by this sort of stuff so when we look at especially the virtual conferences there are amazing platforms out there that we are working with customers now to their platform of choice and helping them with the streaming stuff so yeah possibilities yeah and we recognize now there's different platforms for different things and sometimes our streaming platform isn't always relevant sometimes we will actually use another platform that a customer has so i think it's about us all working together to develop great content and compelling content um to deliver your message when it matters most and that brings us to 11 45 and i promised you guys i'll stay the time so thank you everyone for joining it's been great having you online download the report contact us for information um but thank you michael it's great always having fun thank you sarah i loved it hostess with the mostess that's me all right thanks guys enjoy the rest of your day bye