Another Random Online Conference
Key-learnings from organizing an international online conference within 10 days. Templates and operating procedures curated for you!
Michael and Leander, frequent conference participants, were socially deprived of Corona lockdown. Out of a Zoom call, we recognized the importance of social interactions and the power of peer-to-peer learning. We took matters into our own hands and created Another Random Online Conference (AROC). Within 10-days and zero budget, we acquired fantastic workshop instructors and 120+ registrations. After receiving great feedback, we want curious and ambitious people to continue this legacy. Thereby, we synthesized our learnings and put resources into this document. It’s now up to YOU to organize the next AROC!
Top 3 learnings
#1 No-show rate is high
The rate of participants showing up is low. There are three main factors:
- Application vs. simple registration. We simply required the name, email, choice of workshops. Everybody was welcome. Of course, the lower the initial effort, the lower the actual show-rate. If people have to put in some effort by answering a few questions or if you indulge a sense of exclusivity,
- Free vs. paid. People think twice to register when there is an upfront cost involved. It could make sense to utilize a small symbolic fee to filter out those people who would not show up anyways and build additional commitment among the ones who do. For simplicity, we did it for free (and would do it again).
- Online vs. offline. It is much easier to participate in online events, so people simply sign-up without a second thought. Spontaneity and optionality are great but lead to higher volatility compared to offline events.
Other factors could be the weather, time of the day, experience with earlier workshops, etc.
In our combination (registration, free, online) a maximum of 50% registered participants showed up to their session, sometimes even as low as 15%. Do not take it personally, people are busy, have something else on their mind, or simply forgot. Focus on the ones who engage and give them the best possible experience!
#2 Make people happy
If you are still reading this, we assume that you are a curious person and that you have probably met incredible people over your lifetime. Despite WhatsApp and alike, it’s hard to keep up with your tribe in a meaningful way. You live in different cities and time is limited to call everybody once in a while.
Creating a platform where you can meet your folks at the same time and even connect them with each other is super cool. Two people joined the online conference independently but already met each other four years ago in California. It makes us happy to see that they found each other again!
#3 It’s less work than you think
To be fair, we already gained experience in organizing offline events. Still, they set up a website in under 4h, the trailer took probably 3h, and the overall organization (getting instructors, promoting the event, communicating), sums up to maybe 18h.
The majority of work occurs when you do things the first time. So we decided to provide you with our Airtable and Email templates, promotion tools (video trailer, social media pages), as well as operating procedures.
Tools and Preparation
We reduced the number of tools we use to the bare minimum and used only free tools.
Organization: Airtable
Airtable is a free and extremely powerful tool to structure data. It has many functionalities which we need not go into, but here are the basics that we used for the conference.
- Table: A table is similar to a spreadsheet and is a simple collection of all facts such as emails, names, session preferences, and so on.
- Relational: Like any other database, Airtable allows linking records from different tables, e.g., registered participants (Table ‘Participants’) ) show up aggregated in the respective workshop (Table ‘Schedule’)
- Form: A form is similar to Google forms and direct links to your table. Any information which is filled out on the forms (via the registration for example) then is already sorted in your tables.
- Gallery: This is a form to display the information from the table. In our case, we used a display to create a calendar version and a detailed session display. Since they are linked to the table you only need to change things at one point in a table and they are immediately updated on the website, this is the power of Airtable and good APIs.
There are premium features that can be very helpful, like the Calendar function. To stay true to the ethos of zero budget, you can simply invite friends and use the rewarded credits to upgrade for a month.
Website: Carrd
For the website, we needed something quick and free so we choose Carrd.co. This platform lets you build your “one-page” website for free and with loads of integrations and fast setup. Apart from choosing some images and writing texts about the conference, there is not much to do here :)
Trailer: Typito
Most video making programs are very expensive or keep large watermarks on the videos unless you pay for them. While typito’s full version isn’t free either, you can make a limited amount of edits to the video with the free version. Making a trailer is a lot of fun, so you might as well make one ;)
Stock images: Unsplash
There is a simple and easy way to get professional images without fretting about copyrights and co. On Unsplash you will find your backgrounds and fancy images for website and trailer.
Feedback: Menti
Feedback is incredibly valuable for the workshop instructors and organizers to learn and further improve. At the end of each session, we used Menti.com to collect insights from the participants. Although helpful, Menti is optimized for real-time information gathering and lacks usability for our use-case. For the future, we simply recommend creating another form in Airtable and distribute the link at the end of the session. This reduces the workload for us (reference existing data like the workshop title) and easier to complete for participants.
Communication
Between spamming emails and using services that not many use (like twitter), there are many ways to get communication wrong. We decided to go the classic way of a website and a quick Gmail account. This forced us to write concise emails with all the content and kept the workload low. One could also use a service (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) which allows for more interactive and frequent updates but this will most probably also result in more time spent on communicating.
Promotion
Reaching out to as many people as possible is arguably the most important aspect of a conference. Leander and I focused on Facebook and LinkedIn and tried to gain traction in some large groups with engaged people as well as our personal networks. Over 120 registered participants and a fair amount of internationals showed us that this strategy was sufficient. However, there is a lot of room for improvement with these ideas on top of the list:
- Get people to subscribe to the FB / LinkedIn page so that updates, reminders, and sharable content can get to those already interested.
- Reach out to close friends and multipliers and convince them to share your posts which largely increases your chance of being determined “interesting” by the social media algorithms.
- Gather person and/or session descriptions from the instructors to create content which the instructors themselves can share content.
Running the conference
First and foremost a platform has to be decided on. There are are so many options out there but we choose Zoom for some simple reasons: Breakout rooms, common usage, and access to pro accounts. We used Zoom Premium (essential to have calls longer than 40 min) but used accounts from friends to stay to our zero budget philosophy.
Furthermore, it is important to try and push participants to do those things which make the conference more enjoyable for everyone like muting yourself, turning on the video, use the chat for questions, and so on. Fortunately, Corona is giving everyone loads of experience in this so it shouldn’t be a big problem.
Starting and ending sessions on time is a problem in offline conferences as well but seems to be a bigger issue since one doesn’t have to awkwardly enter the room and look for a chair. So communicating punctuality and leaving enough space between sessions is key. In our case, we had 45min slots with 15 mins breaks before the next session. A 60 min session slot with 30 min breaks would also be possible.
Entertaining
For those who haven’t noticed yet, it’s possible to have fun interactions online with the right topics or games. While it is hard to replicate going to a pub and chatting with people over a beer, it is very much possible to find other evening entertainment such as icebreaker questions in a short 1on1 session, Powerpoint Karaoke, skribble.io, Cards Against Humanity and so on.
During some reflection on the day, a few participants said something which we personally valued the most at the end of the day: It is possible to get to know people online and enjoy it and maybe have a friendship develop out of it. It won’t happen in an hour and it will likely not happen if you only talk business and no fun, but the same goes for the offline world.
Feel free to shoot us a message to another.roc@gmail.com so we can share with you all the resources.
It’s now up to YOU to organize Another Random Online Conference!
