Online and hybrid events have taken over the world. Thanks to them, people could meet and educate themselves remotely even during the most difficult pandemic times.
That you don’t yet know how events of these formats work and you are wondering if they would also work for you? Read on carefully – we have everything for you about online and hybrid events in a nutshell.
Hybrid, online, hybrid, online, then hybrid again… it would make your head spin. It’s time to explain once and for all what it means when you organize an online or hybrid event and how they differ from each other.
ONLINE EVENT – GLOBAL AUDIENCE AND VALUABLE DATA.
Contactless and 100% safe. This is how all online events are done, including those we prepare at AV MEDIA EVENTS.
The event organizer (for example, a conference for dozens to hundreds of people) has its own studio or a professional studio prepared and the speakers talk from that studio remotely via the event platform. Hundreds of participants from different parts of the world can connect to the online broadcast on the platform via computers or mobile phones and watch the conference without having to spend hours on the road and worry about their safety. Online events offer, among others, the following great advantages:
- you can also invite participants who would not attend the event in the conventional format
- potential to expand the number of participants multiple times
- you get a lot of valuable data from an online event, such as audience involvement
- 100% safety for everyone involved
- use of professional effects or extended reality (XR)
- involvement of interpreters online
In addition, an online event can be organized anywhere! We saw that, for example, during an event where we prepared a broadcast for our client from a garage.
HYBRID EVENT – SOMEONE DIRECTLY IN THE HALL, SOMEONE ONLINE
Online events are great and today’s business is hard to imagine without them. But conventional offline events have a lot of irreplaceable elements that someone may miss in the online form. The phenomenon of hybrid events has been created precisely to address these cases.
A hybrid event is a combination of a live and online event. Some of the presenters and participants are located at the event venue, while the rest will connect remotely, either from another studio or from the other side of the globe. Hybrid events have gained popularity mainly thanks to the possibility of flexible adaptation to the organizer’s requirements.
It depends on you whether you prepare the event in the form of a one-way lecture, or whether you allow the participants to enter the discussion and actively involve them. Hybrid events bring the following advantages:
- it brings the best of live and online events
- you connect on-site participants with those who have joined online
- you supplement the live event with online participants who would otherwise not be able to join
- you can broadcast for an individual, but also for large groups of participants
- you can set one-way or two-way communication for a hybrid event, as you wish
- you save part of the costs for the event
- you can use professional effects or extended reality
- you have a chance to impress more sponsors with an attractive event format
- you get real-time data from the event and feedback from the participants
The Euroseeds 2021 conference at the Hilton Hotel, which we organized for our client, showed what a hybrid event looks like in practice.
IS AN ONLINE OR A HYBRID EVENT BETTER FOR YOU?
Online event will be the obvious choice if you want to connect speakers and participants who are located in many different countries and few of them can come to the event venue. Choose the online event also if you require maximum safety and want to make sure that no one meets in person. The online form is also ideal for events with a more limited budget.
Host a hybrid event to retain the benefits of a live event. Use it if most of the performers and audience can attend in person and only some people need online broadcast. In addition to conferences or exhibitions, you can easily organize corporate training courses, team meetings and general meetings in the hybrid format.
You cannot go wrong with the hybrid if your business has environmental protection as one of its priorities – no more flying across half the globe, no more carbon footprint.
HOW TO PREPARE FOR ONLINE AND HYBRID EVENTSThorough preparation guarantees success, and this is doubly true for online and hybrid events. We will, of course, be happy to help you plan the event, but it is still useful to know what to prepare. The main thing is high-quality promotion of the event so that as many people as possible learn about it. Spread awareness of your event online and offline. Spend more time promoting the topic of the event and the performers, for example in the form of short introductions. In the next step of preparation, we recommend putting enough effort into creating a registration process and distributing invitations. This stage is sometimes the main pitfall of events. The third stage is no less important – focus on the preparation of a high-quality broadcasting platform, graphics (including the presentation of sponsors) and the script. For the broadcasting platform, call for a stable and secure application. |
EVALUATE, EVALUATE AND EVALUATEEvaluating the success of the event is excellent if you want to improve in the future. How to know if your event was successful? Not to mention other valuable data. For live events, you have fewer metrics available, but for online and hybrid events, there are tons of them. During and after online and hybrid events prepared by AV MEDIA EVENTS, you will find out, for example:
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A variety of technologies will help you collect data during online and hybrid events, from online voting to event recording.
See what such a hybrid event might look like:
Excellent! Now you know what online and hybrid events are, which type is better for your company or project and how to prepare for such an event and evaluate it. In any case, don’t worry about planning the event – at AV MEDIA EVENTS we will be happy to put it together for you.
