How do you run an event in the middle of a global pandemic? 

The technical answer is quite simple. Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams — or whatever video conferencing software works best — along with a stable internet connection. However, simply running lectures or Powerpoint presentations doesn’t cut it. With so much of pandemic life shifting online, conference and workshop organizers are finding it tougher to keep attendees transfixed to their screens. 

Seven months after public health restrictions began, Canada’s social impact sector is still trying to figure out the best way to hold an effective digital event. These gatherings not only offer professional guidance to participants, but offer a revenue stream for organizers. Several events have debuted in digital form amid the pandemic, including Buy Social Canada and C2 Montreal. Their organizers have a few simple tips and tricks to share about running effective digital conferences.

When Canada’s public health restrictions began in March, social impact organizations began to rethink how they held their gatherings. Many frantically switched conferences to online webinars. But Paul Nazareth, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners (CAGP), encouraged his fundraising colleagues to hold off. “Nobody understood the medium. Nobody cared for methodology,” he says. Nazareth had some initial recommendations of his own. Launch local webinar events, but don’t charge a cent for access. Don’t treat them like a virtual charity gala. Gather data on what prompts attendees to show up. 

One lesson Nazareth learned was that webinars hosted by CAGP’s 20 Canadian chapters were all competing with one another. In a sense, they were also competing with webinars held by other organizations devoted to improving the social impact sector, such as Imagine Canada and the Ontario Nonprofit Network. The death of distance offered by virtual gatherings is both a blessing and a curse. Attendees can hop on a call from anywhere in the world, but they also have a multitude of gatherings to choose from. Organizations looking to host a digital gathering need to be aware of who else is offering a similar conference. “Everyone really needs to double down and say: What’s our superpower?” Nazareth says. 

Taking the medium into account can be as simple as offering breaks. In April, Buy Social Canada hosted a hastily-assembled webinar conference with over 200 registrants, just weeks after public health restrictions began. Tori Williamson, the organization’s manager of communications and engagement, says the conference offered musical breaks and added a Q&A format on Zoom to keep the audience from passively staring at a computer screen for hours on end — a condition now nicknamed ‘Zoom fatigue.’ “We tried to make it as interactive as possible,” Williamson says. 

Reconsidering the pacing of an event is also key. C2 Montreal’s ongoing annual conference is normally a three-day event where multiple presentations, workshops, and brainstorming sessions all take place simultaneously. Anick Beaulieu, C2’s vice president of growth and partnerships, says organizers decided to arrange this year’s virtual conference in a linear fashion — in other words, holding just one workshop or talk at a time. The decision extends C2 Montreal to 10 days, but allows attendees to answer calls, take lunch, or simply step away from their computers. “We needed to step back and reinvent or re imagine how the format would come to life,” she says. 

Identifying one’s audience is another critical part of any program, event, or gathering. Organizers looking to arrange for a digital conference must especially be mindful of who they are trying to reach, and who they need to consider. Attendees can sign up from anywhere in the world. For Buy Social Canada, this was a bonus. “It enabled us to open up to a much wider audience,” Williamson says. Buy Social Canada’s April conference had attendees from B.C. to Newfoundland, as well as the United States. But digital conference organizers also need to be aware of the accessibility needs of their audience. Attendees with vision or hearing loss need screen readers and transcription to follow along, functions Zoom and Google Hangouts are designed to accommodate. Anyone susceptible to sensory overload, common for autistic attendees, may need a way to follow along without relying on a video feed. (For more on how to keep digital conferences friendly for autistic people, read this Future of Good feature). 

Including marginalized people also requires some serious thought. Tim Richter, president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH), says his organization typically pays for about 100 people with lived experience of homelessness to fly in from all over the country for CAEH’s annual conference. That won’t be possible this year. “The question in my mind is, how do you meaningfully engage people who are or were homeless in the policies and processes and procedures that affect them?” Richter says. “That’s a challenge.” He says the organization hasn’t yet figured out how to include these people for CAEH’s next conference.  

Some suggest entry fees for digital events should be much lower — or even free. Ticket sales for a typical conference or gala pay for a lot: booking a venue, paying for event staff, compensating speakers, or sometimes simply benefitting the host organization. Putting on a conference isn’t cheap. With the shift to virtual, however, most of those costs have evaporated. The entry fee to a conference is now mostly for technical support — ensuring the Zoom or Google Meet call actually works — and compensating speakers themselves. Attendees can dial in from anywhere in the world without needing to leave their home, let alone hit the road. 

Does it make sense to charge the same price for such a gathering? Nazareth argues that it didn’t make sense in the early stages of the pandemic. “First, start holding free conversations — don’t charge,” he says. After CAGP’s various chapter organizations looked into using digital gatherings, they found it made sense to make them as available as possible. Canadian non-profits desperately needed whatever guidance these conferences had to offer and they weren’t in a position to pay for it. Over the spring and summer, thousands of workers in the non-profit sector were laid off. The YMCA shed 75 percent of its staff. The Canadian Cancer Society lost around 40 percent. 

Williamson says Buy Social Canada typically charges around $60 a ticket for entrance to their annual conference. This year, with attendees dialing in virtually, they dropped the price to $10. “I think that brought people to the table,” she says, although she adds Buy Social Canada also had bursaries on offer as well. Offering a low price tag seems to have worked — Buy Social Canada signed up around 200 interested respondents and nearly all showed up to the virtual conference itself. “We were really impressed with the turnout for the event,” she says. 

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