5 things we learnt running an online conference
As an organisation — and as a comms and engagement team — our biggest event of the year is usually our 2-day annual conference. This is a time when people from Citizens Advice across England and Wales come together to work towards our strategic ambitions, share knowledge and of course, network, socialise and celebrate our achievements.
2020 saw record-breaking demand for our service. The incredible dedication of all our staff and volunteers, had enabled us to quickly transform our services and be there for people when they needed us most.
That’s why it was more important than ever to hold an event that would bring people together and recognise the commitment, passion and creativity of everyone at Citizens Advice.
The challenge
So how would we move a 2-day face to face event online and ensure that it was accessible and inclusive? How would we help people to feel connected and proud, as well as provide strategic information and insights? How would we provide a virtual space that enabled people to share examples of best practice and offer support to their peers?
Perhaps more important than ever in current times, how would we fulfil the need to focus on wellbeing, as well as offer opportunities to socialise with our peers?
As Einstein said, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity” and this was our opportunity to reach more people in our service than ever before.
So we set about planning how we would deliver our first online annual conference. We decided to hold the event across a week. Ultimately this meant we delivered 23 sessions across 5 days with over 7000 registrations and 2000 participants registered. In the same week we also held our AGM, awards ceremony and social events including a quiz and interactive magic show (we’re all still trying to work out how the magician read our minds).
Here are 5 things we learnt from delivering our first online annual conference.
- Plan early and involve your team in gathering ideas.
We planned and delivered the whole event in the space of 2 months, but we could definitely have done with more time. Starting out by gathering ideas on the objectives and event theme from the team using tools like ‘Google Jamboard’ worked well. It’s so important to have a firm foundation and clarity from the start about what you’re aiming for.
2. Be realistic
It’s better to deliver something simple and high quality, than try to do too much. Have a clear idea of what’s reasonable from the start and stick with it. Remember, online events are tiring — for participants, presenters and those behind the scenes — so don’t try to cram too much in. We set the timetable early, with each session being 1 hour long, a minimum of 30 minutes between sessions, an hour lunch break, fewer sessions towards the end of the week, and a half day on Friday.
3. Balance the content
It’s important to talk about serious issues and give opportunity for strategic content, but it’s also important to give people a break from their day to day. We included informal audience specific networking (using breakout rooms), optional activities like a quiz and entertainer, and celebratory events like our awards ceremony. This helped us to create something special and — most importantly — helped make people smile.
There should also be a mix of broadcast and more interactive sessions — but we found that replicating the interactivity of a face to face event is hard. We used Workplace — the platform we use to connect, communicate and collaborate across Citizens Advice — to encourage informal posts and conversations, but increasing interactivity is something we’re going to look at more this year.
4. Make sure you have people to support sessions behind the scenes
Find time to allow them to practise using the features of the platform you’re using. It’s important to share the load. We had 3 dedicated support people allocated to each session on a rota basis and encouraged them to try out the features in advance. In hindsight this worked well, but we should have allowed more time for testing and for people to become comfortable with what they needed to do.
5. Think about accessibility early
We did a full equality impact assessment to help us identify the actions we should take to make the event as inclusive and accessible as possible.
We published Zoom joining instructions in advance. We also had a template ‘housekeeping’ slide in every session which highlighted the Zoom features we’d be using, whether the sessions were being recorded and how to use closed captions if needed. On that, organise captioning early. We had live captionists in every session, which worked well, but we could have improved things by making sure everyone in the supporting team was familiar with how it was set up behind the scenes, and how to resolve any issues.
After the event we posted captioned recordings on Workplace. This meant they were accessible to everyone, even if they couldn’t join live sessions.
We’ve lots more to learn, but initial feedback has been really encouraging and has given us lots to build on for the year ahead. 83% said it helped them to understand our strategic direction as a service, and 94% rated our conference useful or very useful. We were also able to reach 85% of our local services — more than ever before.
People told us that running sessions across the week enabled them to attend alongside their day jobs and other responsibilities, such as caring responsibilities. We’ve heard how people took part who might not have been able, or comfortable, to join a face to face conference, and that people enjoyed a feeling of togetherness despite being dispersed across England and Wales.
This gives us a great foundation to build on as we look ahead and start to plan our events for this year.
Like everyone, we’re looking forward to a time when we can see people in person again. But we also now know that we can meaningfully bring people together online on a large scale, and that can help us grow and deliver more for the people we help.
What are your top tips for online events? We’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us at events.team@citizensadvice.org.uk to share your experiences or if you want to find out more about ours.
