The Hybrid Event Formula
In between the waves of the pandemic, I worked on a hybrid event at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas where we live-streamed several CLE session rooms to an education platform for those who could not attend in person. While we were successful in providing this content to a remote audience, we also learned a lot about what it takes to make an event successfully hybrid. Truly inspiring people takes more than a live stream.
The project management triangle provides for three variables; money, time, and quality, understanding that you can only achieve two of the three at any one time. If we apply this model to hybrid events, I would make the variables budget, complexity, and audience experience.
As far as budget, the cost in equipment and labor to properly live-stream a session is currently pretty high and many organizations are finding themselves either spending too much or forgoing hybrid altogether. Going forward, ROI is going to dictate the resources an organization deems palatable for taking a particular project hybrid. Analytics will come in from the early-adopters and data-driven decisions will create some standard assumptions and best practices here.
Complexity is an important consideration because we must now interact with two audiences at the same time. Once you start going down the hybrid road, a lot of possibilities open up. How do we handle Q&A? Who participates in the Chat? How do we handle remote presenters? Most people don’t understand the technology or workflow to accommodate these requests. How we include a remote audience in a live event setting must be well thought out, easy to teach, and easy to integrate in the live setting. The live streaming part is easy. It’s the interactivity that gets complex and that’s where we are seeing the most innovation on the platforms.
Finally, how each audience experiences the event will determine success. We must ensure that our hybrid strategy embraces both. Intrusive technology and processes will frustrate your live audience and poor quality source material will alienate your remote audience. The amount of interaction between the live and virtual audiences can become very complex, but we can at least ensure that both audiences feel a connection with the talent.
In this moment, we have the opportunity to decide what successful hybrid events are going to look like and how they are going to be produced. This is going to take creativity, innovation, and attention to detail. I’m excited to help usher in this new era.