What is Virtual Event Management?
This is a question that I hear often after telling people what I do for a living. Virtual Event Management- What is it? Well, let’s break it down into 2 main roles and the skills/ tasks that are included in these roles.
Planning and Organization
A successful virtual event requires plenty of prior planning. Most coaches or speakers planning their own virtual events already have a clear idea about what they want the event to include and how it will run. Nevertheless, there are so many small, moving parts that go into preparing for an online event.
Some useful tasks included in virtual event planning and organization are:
- Event scheduling, canceling, and rescheduling.
- Communication coordination with the event’s speakers and helping them with their needs.
- Planning a timeline for tasks that need to get done before the event.
- Creating the event agenda.
- Creating/ updating promotional graphics and email sequences.
- Monitoring registrations and waitlists.
- Management of the technology used for this event.
- Setting up/ ordering any additional services such as closed captioning or transcription of the event presentations.
- Running rehearsal events to test the technologies and work out any concerns that pop up.
- Post-event follow-up with speakers and event participants
Management and Moderation
Trying to run a virtual event yourself can be like trying to be in two places at once. Especially since the moving parts are moving in real-time. When moderating a virtual event, professionalism, a calm attitude, problem-solving abilities, and decisiveness are all necessary traits.
Here are the many hats that someone wears when moderating a virtual event:
- Testing the audio and visual elements with presenters during the trial run.
- Queuing presentation materials such as slides and videos.
- Starting the broadcast/ webinar/ letting participants into the Zoom meeting.
- Keeping the event’s schedule on track.
- Chatting with participants in the comments, adding links, answering questions, etc…
- Facilitating Q&A discussions between presenters and the audience.
- Technical problem-solving and assistance for event participants.
- Monitoring the content in the chat to ensure maximum peace, friendliness, and safety for all participants.
- Managing the recordings
- Announcing lunch or break periods.
- Virtual event recording, including the uploading of said recording to the client’s cloud.
- Wrapping up the virtual event.
Did this give you a good idea about what virtual event management is? Let me know!
If you have a virtual event coming up in the near future and could use a helping hand on both the organization and moderation sides of managing your event, click here to learn about how our virtual event support services can help your next event run smoothly and professionally.
