Читать книгу Event Success - Alon Alroy - Страница 18

We at Bizzabo got a first-hand look at both the opportunities and the challenges associated with virtual events at a relatively early stage in the pandemic, and our experience was not unlike others in the events space.

Prior to the pandemic we had hosted a few events of our own—including our IN-PERSON Collective flagship event that took place in New York in December 2019—but the majority of our understanding of events was informed by conversations with our customers and partners in the industry.

As we pivoted toward becoming a virtual events platform in early 2020, we decided to put our new virtual event platform to the test by hosting our own virtual event, which we called (Almost) IN-PERSON.

We sent out invitations to members of the industry in hopes of attracting 500 attendees. Within 24 hours, we had 1,500 registrants. After 72 hours, we reached 5,000. In the end, we had more than 6,000 participants across 70 countries, including representatives from companies like Twitter, Salesforce, and Amazon—the types of brands whose business we had been chasing for years (unsuccessfully, up to that point).

We also received responses from current and prospective investors and most of our biggest clients. We had to figure out a lot for the first time in a very condensed time frame, such as whether virtual events also needed an app (they do) and whether the event should be broadcast live or should rely on prerecorded videos (we did both and learned that attendees definitely appreciate knowing whether or not a session is actually happening live). We experienced a wide array of technical glitches in the days and weeks leading up to the event, as we scrambled to cobble together a viable virtual events platform, but when the moment came, everything went off without a hitch.

It was an incredibly powerful moment for us as individuals, as a company, but above all, as an industry. In the previous few weeks we had all experienced layoffs, budget cuts, uncertainty about the future—nobody in the industry was immune. We had no choice but to build our way out of it, and from that effort we had the opportunity to show everyone that there really was a viable complement to in-person events, that events still had relevance during COVID-19, and that we all still had a future in this industry.

We wanted to bring the industry together not just to commiserate on how unfortunate we all were to be in the middle of this storm, but to shift the narrative and demonstrate how this was actually an opportunity to implement some much-needed change. We had gone from being one of the hardest-hit industries in one of the hardest periods of human history to flipping the script and seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move events toward a better future.

(Almost) IN-PERSON proved to be a turning point for our company, and dare we say the industry at large. Up until that point we felt like we were stuck playing defense, but after just a few short weeks we were now on the offensive. By the end of the year, we had gone from cutting our staff by a quarter to nearly doubling its original size. In December, we closed a $138 million financing round, our largest to date.