Events and gatherings are transforming in the era of physical distancing. Here’s what you need to know.

When COVID-19 restrictions halted life across Canada, Tehsin Jaffer and her team were faced with a monumental task. Plan Canada’s senior manager of youth engagement had to shift the organization’s Youth Summit, a gathering of 50 young leaders from across the country in Toronto, to an entirely online event. In two months.

“It was daunting at first,” Jaffer says. “But I think one of the benefits of being in the charitable sector is that we’ve become used to having roadblocks and figuring out ways to work around it.” Instead of holding icebreaker exercises at an Ontario campground, organizers blasted ‘Cha Cha Slide’ at the end of a video call, allowing everyone to dance along in front of their cameras. Virtual workshops replaced in-person gatherings – and hefty airline ticket prices. Better still, Jaffer says the Youth Digital Summit saw its attendance double this year, even in the face of a global pandemic.

Non-profits across Canada (and the world) are heavily dependent on charity galas, conferences, and other in-person gatherings to both deliver programs and raise money. COVID-19 shut them all down. Canadian non-profits and charities are organizing digital events instead – and not just to follow public health guidelines. Mastering the art of a digital gathering could extend the reach of many organizations at a time of threadbare budgets. Few non-profit event organizers are familiar with the intricacies of digital events, but with the pandemic’s uncertainty, they’ll need to learn fast. 

When Canada took notice of the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March, it announced unprecedented restrictions on daily life. The Canada-U.S. border remains closed to all non-essential travel. Mass gatherings were effectively banned. In some provinces, they remain heavily restricted. Imagine Canada’s most recent Sector Monitor report on the charitable sector found 87 percent of survey respondents cancelled group gatherings or meetings. Roughly 70 percent of organizations closed their offices to the public, and 67 percent switched their employees over to remote work.

For charities, non-profits, and other organizations, these changes had a huge impact on their operations. Narcotics Anonymous was forced to hold meetings virtually, eliminating the in-person camaraderie considering so essential for addiction recovery. Heart & Stroke had to shift its June Ride for Heart event online. Instead of taking over Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway, 5,000 runners cyclists and runners hit the road in their own communities. 

Charities who depend on in-person fundraisers are coming up dry. Sector Monitor found event-based revenues had dropped a whopping 72 percent since the pandemic began. According to a spokesperson for Heart & Stroke, the organization is expecting to lose $25 million in revenue due to event cancellations alone. It also laid off 200 staff, many of whom aren’t expected to return. 

These events are critical for social impact organizations of all stripes. In a 2015 examination of Canadian charities, Blumberg Charity Law, a Canadian law firm specializing in charities and non-profits, found around 30,350 charities – around 40 percent of the 84,500 charities they analyzed – collected revenue from some combination of galas, fundraising events, or tournaments. All of these were in-person before the pandemic, of course, and everyone, non-profits included, are still figuring out how to run smooth digital gatherings.

Converting their Youth Summit to a digital gathering required Plan Canada to rethink their event team. Facilitators still ran workshops and group activities, but someone also needed to tackle IT issues. Other staffers had to moderate chat boxes for inappropriate language or child safety issues. Yet another staffer needed to monitor event attendance. “It ended up being an ‘all hands-on deck’ type of event,” Jaffer says.

Jennifer Pate Gilbert, founder of Save The Date – a New York City-based event planning company – says digital gatherings require a fairly diverse mix of skill sets. Her virtual event production teams are a mix of designers (who create slides and other interactive components of a virtual event), tech support personnel (to keep programs running smoothly) and writers (who plan out speeches and transitions). Contrary to popular belief, virtual events require a host of specialized skills beyond the basics of Zoom or Google Hangouts. “We learned that it takes a lot more staff to run virtual programming than it does to run in-person,” Jaffer says.

“We learned that it takes a lot more staff to run virtual programming than it does to run in-person.”

Staffers need to do more than just take attendance and launch into a presentation. Jaffer says they needed to learn the ins and outs of video conferencing platforms – how to create breakout rooms for smaller discussions and show slides. Setting up pre-registrations and passwords was also important to keep meetings secure. 

While it wasn’t easy to pivot an entire summit online in the course of two months, Jaffer says there’s a lot of potential in digital gatherings. “As a non-profit, we’re so used to these pivots and these shifts that when COVID hit, a lot of our team saw it as an opportunity,” she says. Instead of considering digital gatherings as a loss, Jaffer found they provided great benefits to young leaders. Travel costs weren’t an issue. Attendance for the event doubled compared to last year. And participants still found ways to meet one another and set up times to connect offline. 

Digital event organizing jobs aren’t yet flooding the non-profit job market despite the promise of virtual events. There’s a good reason why. “For about two months, nobody was doing any hiring,” says Deborah Legrove, president of Crawford Connect, a non-profit executive search firm. Existing employees were responsible for pivoting a non-profit’s events from in-person to digital. 

COVID-19 public health restrictions not only cancelled in-person gatherings (and the revenue they generated), but also put an end to door-to-door canvassing for donations. Even if that was an option, record-high unemployment and economic uncertainty are taking their toll. By Imagine Canada’s most recent estimate, around 37,000 full-time non-profit jobs have been lost since the pandemic began, along with roughly 40,000 part-time positions.

Mary Barroll, vice-president of media affairs and general counsel for Charity Village, says non-profits acknowledge the seismic changes happening in the world of gatherings and fundraisers, but many don’t feel they’re digitally literate. The non-profit job-posting website is refreshing its online courses to include virtual volunteering and events, along with digital transformation more generally. “We’ve actually been working all summer on updating all of our online e-learning courses to provide some of that training,” she says. 

Peter Blakely, director of Charity Careers Canada, says the non-profit world had already been starting to embrace digital technologies wholesale before the pandemic, particularly around online fundraising. A spokesperson for Plan Canada says the organization began a large-scale digital transformation back in 2017. But Blakely isn’t seeing a drastic pivot in the wake of the pandemic. “I have not seen any increase in organizations looking for more digital resources or support,” he says. Meanwhile, Barroll says there aren’t a whole lot of digital event-focused jobs popping up on Charity Village. Her researchers have found a couple of listings, such as online event coordinator, but it’s early days yet.

 Canadian non-profits, especially smaller or medium-sized organizations, can find it especially tough to make a rapid digital shift. Staff at these organizations typically wear multiple hats – an executive director might also be the head of HR and a programming director. Long-standing donor priorities are also standing in the way. “Unfortunately, the sector has historically been encouraged by donors and funders to minimize administrative and operating costs – which can include technology,” Emily Jensen, network engagement coordinator for Imagine Canada, wrote in a post. “This chronic under-investment in the sector’s core operations makes the transition to remote work quite difficult for many.

She pointed to Camrose Open Door, a youth social services organization, who didn’t have enough computers and phones for their staff to work from home. During the pandemic, the organization was forced to secure more funding to buy office supplies as they saw a 75 percent drop in donations.

Plus, Barroll points out, donors and community members typically enjoy the camaraderie of an in-person gathering, and therefore, non-profits didn’t see the urgency of a digital transformation. “I can see why the sector was reluctant to embrace it full-on when they didn’t have to,” she says.

Digital gatherings will likely become more normal. Public health officials have spent the summer easing restrictions across Canada, but epidemiological experts are all suggesting a second wave of COVID-19 will break across the country. Even if this doesn’t happen, the sector isn’t going to abandon all in-person events for good. “People enjoy each other,” Gilbert says. While her company’s non-profit clients are arranging digital galas to stay in touch with their donors, memories of physical gatherings are becoming increasingly nostalgic. “I do think there’s something special about being in-person that you don’t get in a digital atmosphere,” Jaffer says. 

There’s also the question of accessibility: specifically, the digital divide. Not all Canadians have the high-speed internet access necessary to maintain a solid Zoom connection. Plan Canada is aware of that and doesn’t expect to go all-digital.  “I think we’d be looking more at hybrid approaches and ensuring that even folks who aren’t able to access technology are able to access programming,” Jaffer says. 

Also, Legrove says, charities have been trying to get out of organizing large-scale golf tournaments and fundraising dinners for years. “Events cost far too much money,” she explains. “The return on investment on doing a special event is just too low. Whereas if you have a major gift fundraising program or a digital initiative where you’re securing gifts online, it’s just a far greater return on investment.”

Online events often don’t earn as much money, Legrove says, but they cost a lot less to throw – and can raise awareness in unexpected ways. She points to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a social media phenomenon that raised the profile of a fatal, yet poorly understood disorder. While attention for the cause dropped sharply after the challenge ended, Legrove says digital events such as this can raise awareness for a palpable price tag. “Social media will help them, big time,” she says.

Organizers of the CIBC Run for the Cure, an annual event held by the Canadian Cancer Society to fight breast cancer, aren’t cancelling this year. The CCS has taken a beating, having laid off 40 percent of its staff. But Tanya Henry, the society’s vice president of signature programs, says Run for the Cure’s October run won’t be an online-only gathering. “I don’t see events necessarily transitioning to be a completely digitally focused run team,” she says.

Henry says CCS’s marketing, communications, corporate sponsorship, and events teams all work hand-in-hand on major events – this coming October will be no different. “We already have some of that support in-house,” she says. And to make matters easier, CCS won’t have to reinvent the wheel if they decide to run a similar digital-in-person hybrid event going forward. The digital assets for 2020’s Run can be repurposed year after year after year.

Organizing committees in each of the Run’s 56 locations are scouting scenic route options, rather than counting on a closed street, so runners won’t have to worry about physically distancing during event day. In the months leading up to the opening gun, runners will be able to create online avatars to use – and can unlock different appearances by hitting fundraising targets. There will be a run-day playlist assembled by Run for the Cure teams.

The Run’s opening ceremonies will be live-streamed, but participants will then gather in small groups to complete the 1 km or 5 km run. Digital elements will compliment the Run’s limited gatherings, building up hype – and community – before the one-day run. “We figured out a way to structure the program in a way that still allows people to engage with us in the way that they want to,” Henry says.

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error