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More meeting and event professionals are actively booking or sourcing new events now than any time since 2020. According to the Encore Summer Planner Pulse 2022 report, that number represents 71 percent of 461 survey respondents, who represent a diverse swath of corporate, association, administrative, marketing, third-party, independent and special event producers and organizers.
More than half of the meeting and event professionals surveyed say they are booking new events. And only five percent are currently rescheduling or re-booking events — the lowest number since the pandemic began.
Despite rising costs, in-person events are expected to increase in the second half of 2022.
Key survey findings:
- 80 percent of events will have an in-person audience
- 20 percent of events will be hybrid, with both in-person and remote audiences
The demands of keeping these dual hybrid event audiences engaged and planning two parallel events are a major stressor, the report finds. Perhaps that’s why the participant experience is becoming a greater factor in event design, with professionals layering technology over the in-person experience to create events that feel like they are in-person+ — with or without hybrid participants.
When asked how future in-person events will compare to pre-pandemic in-person events:
- 45 percent of respondents said better attendee engagement
- 38 percent of respondents said more networking
- 37 percent of respondents said more attendee personalization
This trend drove Encore to create a free guide to help meeting and event professionals meet shifting audience expectations: Boundless Possibilities for Engagement. The Encore team also offers free consultations on how to enhance the in-person and remote attendee experience.
Other challenges meeting and event professionals say they face include lead times, specifically for large events. Event professionals report that a third of their events for more than 250 people (34 percent) must be organized within a three-to-six month window. Only half of these sized events are planned more than six months out. Most small meetings with one to 50 participants (43 percent) are being organized within one to two months out. Most mid-sized events with 51 to 250 participants (43 percent) are being organized three to six months out.
Want to read the full report? Download it here.
Learn how to practice
radical inclusion
Attendees’ feelings of belonging and inclusion at events are critical for positive recommendations and repeat attendance. When was the last time you evaluated your event ecosystem to recognize and remove barriers to enjoyment? Do your events connect with people in ways they are comfortable being involved in?
This guide will help teach you to be radically inclusive. By mindfully evaluating your event ecosystem you can ensure your attendees feel engaged, wanted and included in your event experience.
Download our free guide, Practicing Radical Inclusion, and learn the strategy and benefits of bringing your attendees together in a positive way.
Learn how to create healthy
event ecosystems
Events comprise multiple components or ecosystems, where different people come together to interact in-person or on digital platforms. How do you know if you have a healthy ecosystem? Do your events promote interaction in a positive way?
This guide will help identify whether your event ecosystem is unhealthy, audit your events, and build ecosystems that are healthy.
Download our free guide, Creating Healthy Event Ecosystems, and learn the strategy and benefits of bringing your attendees together in a positive way.
Learn how to map the attendee journey
Do you know the 5 key steps in mapping your attendee journey?
Learn how to map the customer journey for your event participants and key stakeholders so your event design achieves your desired outcomes. Download our free guide, Mapping the Attendee Journey, and learn the strategy and benefits of attendee journey mapping.
Download the free guide: Mapping the Attendee Journey
Discover what’s in store for the
events industry
The industry and in-person are bouncing back in a big way. Although we are sure to experience ups and downs as we get back to normal, keeping up with changing event trends can help all industry professionals stay ahead of the game. In the Summer Encore Planner Pulse report, we take a deep dive into what to expect from in-person, hybrid, and virtual events in 2022.
- Industry optimism has increased since summer 2021
- Most planners predict full industry recovery by 2023
- Outlook indicates 75 percent of 2022 events to be in-person
or hybrid - And much more!
Get your complimentary digital copy of the Summer 2022 Encore Planner Pulse today.
The basic tools, technologies and best practices you need to engage dual remote and in-room audiences.
What are your event essentials?
Basic event technology requirements
Camera and audio: For small, hybrid meetings, most cameras offer integrated audio and speaker solutions. For larger events, you may want an external camera or a broadcast-quality setup. The three main considerations that will help you select the right camera and audio for your event are:
- Connectivity: Will the camera/audio be integrated into a laptop, plugged in via USB, or will it be a broadcast solution connected via SDI or HDMI?
- Field of view (FOV): Do you need a camera that swivels 360 degrees? Or is a static shot with fixed angle of 125 degrees or less sufficient?
Wired internet: Pre-pandemic, wireless internet was the standard, but for broadcast events, you need a wired internet connection.
- Simple wired internet (3 MB) is ideal for 1:1 videoconferencing but not great for webinars.
- Superior wired internet (5 MB) is ideal for webinars, but not great for hybrid conferences.
- Dedicated bandwidth (varies depending on need) is ideal for hybrid conferences and broadcast events but is overkill for 1:1 videoconferences and most webinars.
Additional displays: If your event is a one-way broadcast, then you don’t need to worry about additional in-room displays. But they are phenomenal at increasing engagement between remote and in-room audiences. They help these dual audiences see and talk with each other.
- Traditional tripod screen kits are ideal for educational meetings, standard presentations and large conference rooms. They’re not great for rooms with limited space or interactive sessions.
- Large format monitors are idea for board meetings, rooms with limited space, collaborative sessions and large conference rooms. They are not great for single-focus meetings.
Enterprise videoconferencing tool: When you’re broadcasting content, you need a reliable videoconferencing tool to stream content. Encore offers an enterprise videoconferencing tool through Zoom that guarantees the highest quality stream available. Encore also provides platform solutions and onsite support for technologies such as Chime Go℠, Chime Live℠ and Notified Virtual Event Platform®. We can also help support other platforms purchased directly by our customers such as Cvent Attendee Hub®, please ask your Encore representative.
Laptop rental: If you want to be able to show up and start your meeting, or if you need to check email and work during breaks, then invest in a rental laptop. For a relatively small investment, it provides huge peace of mind and frees up presenters and planners onsite. Having a dedicated laptop for your event guarantees:
- Properly configured software and broadcast settings
- Full integration with technology services
- Required processing power needed to display rich media content without glitches
Event technology provider: Producing a hybrid event means you’re designing two simultaneous experiences. With one of them being face-to-face and the other existing in digital spaces, this creates additional layers of complexity and potential errors. Partnering with a trusted event technology partner, like Encore, can eliminate human error, turnaround professional-quality events in an abbreviated period, and help you exceed expectations. Contact Encore for a free consultation.
Want to read more about hybrid essential technology? See this content and more in guidebook form by clicking the link below:
Boundless Possibilities for Engagement
It’s exciting to watch in-person meetings and events return. According to Blackstone Securities, group meetings and convention gatherings will return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year. However, in this post-lockdown environment, attendee expectations have changed. Event technology has advanced. Your audience will also look very different than it did pre-pandemic.
How can you adapt your strategy to accommodate these different audience needs? How do you know what technologies or platforms will offer the best engagement and return on investment?
One of the best ways to create a seamless experience is to focus on engaging both the in-person and remote viewing audiences. Not sure where to start? Download our free Boundless Possibilities for Engagement Handbook.
Let this document be a guide to help you navigate the process of innovating your event and content design processes so you can access the boundless opportunities for engagement in-person, hybrid and digital events offer.
What’s in this guide
The purpose of this guide is to help you navigate these new opportunities by focusing your attention on seven key areas:
- Developing an innovation process for event design — How to generate, select, and evaluate ideas as well as how to catalogue and store ideas for future use.
- Leveraging event technology for engagement — The basic tools, technologies and best practices you need to engage dual remote and in-room audiences.
- Mapping the attendee journey — How to map the customer journey for your event participants and key stakeholders so that your event design achieves your desired outcomes.
- Creating healthy event ecosystems — Events comprise multiple components, or ecosystems. This section will help you test the health of each one and fix unhealthy ecosystems.
- Practicing radical inclusion — How to avoid common problems that leave attendees feeling disengaged, unwanted and excluded from your event experience.
- Designing engaging educational experiences — How to help event participants engage with content before, during and after your event in ways that will help them learn, remember and value your conference content.
- Maximizing return on education, return on objective and return on investment (ROE, ROO and ROI) — How to analyze event data, report results and use them to improve the event experience, revenues and ROI.
Download the Boundless Possibilities for Engagement Handbook
It’s exciting to watch in-person meetings and events return. According to Blackstone Securities, group meetings and convention gatherings will return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year. However, in this post-lockdown environment, attendee expectations have changed. Event technology has advanced. Your audience will also look very different than it did pre-pandemic. Consider these February 2022 findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics:
- 3 percent of people over the age of 55 have left the workforce
- 9 percent of the entire American workforce (47.4 million people) quit their jobs in 2021
The pandemic reshaped how we work in America. Even as offices reopen, roughly 6 in 10 US workers (59%) who say their jobs can be done from home are working from home all or most of the time, up from just 23% who worked remotely before the COVID-19. (Pew Research Center, Feb. 16 2022)
According to the Q1 2022 U.S. Travel Association Business Tracker, business travelers say developing relationships is the most important aspect of their business trips. Education and networking traditionally are the No. 1 and 2 most-important reasons to attend events. But the way education and networking components engage participants needs to change. No one is coming out of this pandemic with the same set of values or expectations they had going in. And that creates significant barriers to enjoyment if you intend to plan your events the same way.
All this means event designers must adapt to meet evolving audience expectations.
As an event designer, you have the opportunity tonew event strategies and help discarding their outdated ones. There’s never been a better opportunity to position yourself as a strategic team leader. The rules have changed. It’s time to step up your game. This guide will help you adapt, transform and outperform expectations. Are you ready to play? Game on!
Think ‘in-person+’
Consider the following:
- The number of in-person events are increasing as fully-virtual events decrease, yet nearly a quarter of all meetings will remain hybrid through 2022. Source: Encore Planner Pulse Spring 2022 Report
- Association professionals report more than 50 percent of their second and third quarter 2022 events will be hybrid and 35 percent will be digital/online only. Source: PCMA Convene Covid-19 Recovery Survey
This data signals a need for meeting and event professionals to shift their mindsets. If between 25 percent and 50 percent of an organization’s events will be hybrid, it might be useful for organizers to think of hybrid events as being ‘in-person+’ rather than just added work or a passing fad.
What do we mean by in-person+?
We mean that technology developed for virtual event platforms can be adapted to enrich the in-room event experience and allow in-person attendees to switch between real-time and on-demand engagement, as needed. For example, if a participant gets an important call during a session and has to leave the room, they could use the event platform Chime Live to consume the content virtually and toggle back to the in-room experience once the call is over.
Virtual attendees are valuable members of any meeting community. Research by MPI and PCMA have proven that virtual events don’t cannibalize in-person attendance. In fact, people are more likely to attend an in-person event after experiencing it as a remote participant. Offering that virtual option allows people who can’t attend the in-person gathering to still experience your event’s content and community. It broadens your reach and helps you engage new audiences. It also amplifies your event return on investment (ROI) by increasing potential participant engagement, transactions and revenue from sponsors and exhibitors.
One of the best ways to create a seamless experience is to focus on engaging both the in-person and remote viewing audiences. Let this document be a guide to help you navigate the process of innovating your event and content design processes so you can access the boundless opportunities for engagement in-person, hybrid and digital events offer.
What’s in this guide
The purpose of this guide is to help you navigate these new opportunities by focusing your attention on seven key areas:
- Developing an innovation process for event design — How to generate, select, and evaluate ideas as well as how to catalogue and store ideas for future use.
- Leveraging event technology for engagement — The basic tools, technologies and best practices you need to engage dual remote and in-room audiences.
- Mapping the attendee journey — How to map the customer journey for your event participants and key stakeholders so that your event design achieves your desired outcomes.
- Creating healthy event ecosystems — Events comprise multiple components, or ecosystems. This section will help you test the health of each one and fix unhealthy ecosystems.
- Practicing radical inclusion — How to avoid common problems that leave attendees feeling disengaged, unwanted and excluded from your event experience.
- Designing engaging educational experiences — How to help event participants engage with content before, during and after your event in ways that will help them learn, remember and value your conference content.
- Maximizing return on education, return on objective and return on investment (ROE, ROO and ROI) — How to analyze event data, report results and use them to improve the event experience, revenues and ROI.
Developing an Innovation Process for Event Design
How to generate, select, and evaluate ideas as well as how to catalogue and store ideas for future use.
Step 1: Identify what needs to change
Sun Tzu wrote, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
If you begin the innovation process without knowing what needs to change, you’re prioritizing tactics over strategy. That’s why it’s important to look at data and feedback from past events or marketplace research before you design your next event.
Look for:
- Data-point outliers: In which areas did your event score the worst? Where did it score highest? Build upon your successes. Look for areas of opportunity. If something isn’t working, either tweak it or stop doing it.
- Strong anecdotal feedback: Survey results don’t tell the full story. What kind of feedback did you, event team or staff gather from hallway conversations or complaints? Note: People will be more forthcoming and honest with an independent third-party auditor.
- Customer or industry pain points: What keeps your customers up at night? What arethe industry’s biggest pet peeves? These are friction points that your event might be able to solve.
- Big fails: Was there anywhere else you feel your last event (or other events by your competitive set) fellshort?
All will present opportunities for change. Identify three to five items that would make the biggest impact on your event or audience. These are the areas on which you want to focus your idea generation efforts.
Step 2: Invite the right people to generate ideas with you
If everyone in the room looks the same, has the same background or works in the same department, chances are that they’ll generate similar ideas. You don’t want an echo chamber. To generate ideas, you need diversity of perspectives, backgrounds and opinions.
To achieve this, invite a cross-section of key stakeholders and internal team members, including people who may not be directly connected to your event team. Make sure they all feel welcome, included and have an opportunity to share their voice.
Step 3: Lay down some basic rules
If you don’t lay down a few basic rules for idea generation, you’ll end up with a brainstorming session dominated by a few people. Avoid this by:
- Making space for introverted contributors: Before group conversations or any sharing begins, let people have five to seven minutes to write down their ideas on a set topic or question. This allows people to generate ideas without fear of being shut down.
- Create a clear activity schedule: Idea generation should be a time of pure brainstorming. Help participants resist the urge to start shooting ideas down or discussing them by creating different time-bound segments of the idea generation process. For example:
- Make it clear that idea generation time is solely for generating ideas without discussing or debating them. If you allow people to start judging ideas now, you’ll shut everyone down. If anyone offers an opinion, remind them there will be time to discuss the ideas later.
- Follow idea generation time with an activity that allows groups to add bullet points or creative strategies to ideas that speak to them. For example, if you’ve got five areas to innovate, divide the participants into five groups so there is one working on challenges and solutions for each area.
- After these ideas have been fleshed out and contextualized, give groups time to present on the challenges and solutions they worked on. Now is the time to discuss, debate, tweak and improve.
- Develop a parking lot: When people get off-track, gently steer them back on course. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take items that they want to discuss and place them in a “parking lot” that you can come back to later, if time allows.
- Decide on winning ideas and innovations: Ideally, the group in the room can also make the go-ahead decisions. But if that’s not possible, enlist their help in creating the presentations, videos or pitches required for the senior leadership team or event decision makers during the idea generation session. Remember: You don’t need to change everything. Trying one to three new things may be all you can handle.
- Determine how you will measure success: This is an important item to discuss while you’re debating and discussing the ideas. Once you know how success will be measured, then identify who will be responsible for implementing, tracking and reporting those measurements so you can evaluate the success of the experiment post-event.
Step 4: Capture the ideas and innovations generated
- Document the process: Film the presentations, assign dedicated note-takers for each group, or capture what is discussed in some way that makes it easy to archive.
- Create a knowledge database: Sometimes you’ll discover a great idea or innovative process that won’t work for the current event, but which you’d like to try at some point. Don’t lose these ideas. Instead, create a knowledge database.
- Keep records of your experiments: The knowledge database is also a phenomenal place to keep track of what happened when you applied your grandiose ideas and innovations to your event.
Step 5: Analyze results and iterate on your success (or failure)
- Analyze the results: What did you learn implementing this idea or innovation? Why did it work or not work?
- Present your findings: Who is invested in the success or failure of your event? What is the best way to communicate this information to them?
- Iterate and build on your success: Innovation is an iterative process, not a one-and-done thing. That’s why it’s important to examine and improve on your innovations, even if they were successful. If it worked, is there a way to build on that success? If it didn’t work, is there a something you can tweak that might help it work next time?
People are returning to in-person events. But the audience doesn’t look the same. One reason might be because the majority of Americans care more about their mental health, physical health and family than they did before the pandemic (Source: The Harris Poll, “The Great Awakening”), by 67 percent, 71 percent and 72 percent, respectively.
It’s clear that if you want to expand your in-person event’s reach, adding a hybrid element is the way to go. According to the Spring 2022 Encore Planner Pulse report, 25 percent of events will continue to have a hybrid component through the end of the year. For associations, that number may be as high as 50 percent, if recent PCMA research is any indication. True, 70 percent of people surveyed prefer attending events in-person, but do you really want to shut out 30 percent of your potential audience?
That’s why event organizers should start to think about hybrid as being ‘in-person+’: A way to enhance the in-room experience and make sure that everyone who wants to can attend your event.
Maximizing virtual event management
There are three things every hybrid event needs:
- Camera
- Audio
- Event Platform
We’ve covered how to select the best camera and why audio matters for your hybrid events. Let’s talk about the boundless possibilities for engagement that hybrid event platforms offer by examining one of the platforms the Encore team recommends: Chime Go℠.
Chime Go
Chime Go is a fully supported, quick start event site that the Encore team can configure in multiple ways. Setting up a Chime Go microsite is an easy way to add hybrid functionality to your in-person meetings. Think of Chime Go as a dedicated website that we create just for your event that brings the essential elements together in one location that your in-person and online participants can access from their own device —mobile, laptop, desktop, tablet, etc.
Features include:
- Branding and theming
- Self-registration
- Pre-event and onsite access
- Agenda with meeting map
- Note-taking
- Q&A with audience upvoting
- Forum
- Platform analytics
- Web accessible for screen readers
- Support for more than 10,000+ users
Add-on options:
- Sponsor banners
- Fundraising links
- Chat & sentiment stream
- Closed captioning
- Creative services
- Broadcast or on-demand video
- and more.
Being able to engage participants prior to the event and after maximizes the ways you can connect with your audience to build excitement, leverage word of mouth marketing and keep them buzzing long after they return home. The functionality keep audiences tuned in and gives everyone a chance to have a voice, express their opinions and connect with the content and each other. And being able to self-register and build personal agendas gives event participants the tools they need to maximize the value they get out of the event. The data you gain from the event dashboard will tell you what worked, what didn’t and help you improve the experience for everyone next time.
Want to learn more about the boundless possibilities for in-person+ engagement? Contact the Encore team to schedule a free consultation.
With a conference, content is king, and context provides value. That’s why agendas play such a pivotal role in convincing people to attend an event. Once they’re there, you want to reduce any barriers to enjoyment and make it easy for them to navigate the experience and extract value from it.
Think about it: If someone is going to spend money on travel, or ask their company to do so, they need to know the event will be worth their investment. If you’re asking them to leave work and family obligations behind, you need to let them know what they will experience. And you need to reinforce that value onsite with seamless interactions with your event technology.
That’s why you should consider using an event site for your in-person meeting with robust agenda and audience engagement features that attendees can conveniently access with a mobile or other device, so they can check what’s ahead and where they need to be next. If you have at least three weeks to organize your event, Encore recommends the mobile-friendly event technology platform Chime Go℠ to take your in-person event to the next level.
Ideal event types
Chime Go is an ideal solution for in-person conferences with added touches that show participants you appreciate their attendance and want them to have a wonderful experience. This platform is a full-service option, which means that you don’t have to set it up by yourself. The Encore team can configure Chime Go in multiple way to support events.
Boundless possibilities for in-person events
Chime Go helps attendees navigate and participate in the event in a convenient, handheld format. Features can include:
- Event branding
- Agendas with the ability for participants to bookmark sessions of interest
- Venue maps can be added to help attendees get where they need to be
- Self-registration
- Q&A submission with audience upvoting
- Notetaking
Add-on options include sponsor banners, fundraising links, hybrid video stream, chat, and sentiment capability, closed captioning, on-demand content, and more. Chime Go can also be configured for remote attendees, if you plan on sharing broadcast or pre-recorded content. You can also include links to video conferencing for breakouts or collaborative sessions
Chime Go is an easy and affordable way to generate pre-show excitement around the content you’re offering, keep everyone at the show on track, and help participants find what they need to gain value from your event. Want to learn more about the boundless possibilities Chime Go offers? Contact the Encore team to schedule a free consultation.