Make sure your schedule is designed with a virtual audience in mind, keep your sessions concise, make sure you offer unique or niche content, and don’t forget to find ways to get your audience involved, advises Swapcard’s Annahita Mirsalari.
- Design schedules that are adapted to online events
People don’t have time. They want a hyper-focused, niche schedule that answers their very specific needs and learning goals. So break-up your topics and ideas. Make sure under each topic or idea, you include targeted content to keep your audience focused. It’s incredibly easy to walk away or log-off from a session when it wasn’t what you expected. So give your audience exactly what they’re looking for and they won’t be going anywhere.
2. Short, focused offerings for rapid learning
Make sure to create short, focused offerings in your schedule. These will be aimed at engaging smaller groups of people for rapid learning. For example, 30-minute webinars every week or month on a specific sub-topic of your industry’s current challenges.
The idea is to do more with less. Identify what’s trending or, if you have a mailing list, survey your potential audience to ask them what they’d like to hear about. From there, take the highest ranking topics and begin organising a schedule with sessions and speakers that will address these points quickly and effectively.
3. Get niche experts to talk and give masterclasses
Niche experts provide insight and information that isn’t readily available. By providing your audience a unique experience with information that can’t easily be found at other events, you’ve almost guaranteed they’ll be fully engaged. A masterclass is a great draw for individuals who would like to learn directly from someone that is a “master” in their field and who is ready to share their knowledge with an eager audience. The more opportunities attendees have to engage directly with the expert speaker and draw on their niche knowledge, the better.
4. Provide concise content in half-day intervals
Plan half a day of solid content, followed by another half-day of networking and discussion only. Leave space for people to do both if they choose, but don’t design a schedule that requires a full day out of your audience’s week.
It’s not realistic to expect your audience to be able to put that much time aside and dedicate it to your event. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be (maybe they never were that high in the first place) and many probably want to do more with their day than just sit around and watch sessions all day. By giving your audience a choice, you’re respecting their time and making sure they can enjoy your content as they like.
5. 20-minute sessions will keep your audience’s attention
There’s been a lot of trial and error when it comes to figuring out the best session length to maximise audience engagement and keep them interested. Original research conducted in September by Swapcard’s data squad looked at over 400 virtual events in order to gauge what the ideal session length would be to keep audiences interested and engaged. They found that audiences stayed for the duration of the session when it was between 20 – 23 minutes. Ultimately, the data is showing us that sessions should be kept short and sweet. Any longer, and you risk losing your audience’s attention.
6. Give your audience a voice
Audience engagement is a major challenge at virtual or hybrid events, so put in the effort to draw your audience into the session and help them get involved. Make sure you set time in the session schedule for Q&As and polls to stimulate discussion. Roundtable sessions are also a great option to provide your audience with the opportunity to connect with the speaker and ask their questions directly. Whatever you choose, be sure that your audience has a chance to have their voices heard and they know that their contributions are not only wanted, but valued.
