Failure to Launch: Everything We Learned From Hosting Two Unsuccessful Virtual Events

If you’ve been in the event business long enough, you’ve probably got a couple of painful “fails” on your resume that you’d rather forget.

There are the “epic” fails, like when a demo crashes and burns at a pivotal moment in the multi-million dollar launch event. There are the A/V fails, when the sound or video craps out with a high profile speaker on stage. And then there are the fails that may not be quite as noticeable to attendees, but that haunt your dreams nonetheless (you know the ones).

Virtual event failures are not new to the event landscape. But 2020 has brought new focus to the digital conferences and experiences that were once “add-ons” to the hybrid events of the past decade, but are now the only events of our pandemic era. Indeed, the stakes are higher now than ever before for virtual events, and when some part of a virtual event fails in 2020, often the entire event is a failure as well.

Read More on Virtual Event Pain Points:

• Virtual Events: How Event Marketers are Overcoming Eight Pain Points
• On a Dime: Brands Pivot with Creative Solutions to Industry Pain Points

When the U.S. went into quarantine in March, we at Event Marketer jumped headlong into digital events with a series of panel discussions featuring a wide range of perspectives from all across the industry. These were discussions we knew the community wanted, and we wanted to help make them happen.

On the day of the event, and after a thorough technology rehearsal with my panelists the day before in which everything worked as intended, I clicked the “go live” button on the platform (we used Crowdcast), and then waited for the green light indicating that we were live. Needless to say, despite multiple attempts, getting dropped from the platform and calls to tech support—we never went live. All we could do was watch as more than 4,500 people from all around the world, who were clearly excited to “see” and connect with one another for the first time since the world turned upside down, were confused and disappointed. A few people even compared our virtual event to the Fyre Festival—ouch! (And also, come on.)

Our second virtual event was called the “Virtual Event on… Virtual Events,” and if you think the irony was lost on us that our own virtual event—on virtual events—ultimately failed, you’d be wrong. We got it, and we got it good.

The problems on this one ranged from massive registration issues that prevented more than 1,000 attendees from getting in, to problems with the chat functionality, to our sessions running one on top of another, and more. In this case, we got through the first of seven sessions planned for the day before we decided to call it quits, ultimately offering the entire event on demand afterwards (the platform was 6Connex, and in fairness, we have since held several successful webinars and events on the platform without issue).

While no event marketer can solve for the backend technology issues that ultimately plagued us, and have plagued many of you across the industry these past few months, we do have a few tips that we have employed at subsequent events that can help you reduce the chances of being part of a virtual event that fails to launch—or at least reduce your blood pressure if it does. Here’s our punch list:

REQUEST SERVER UPDATES

Ask your platform provider to send you “server health” updates the day before and the day of your event, by the hour if necessary. These updates can give you a heads-up if they’re experiencing a high volume of traffic or other issues that can impact your virtual experience. One of our providers sends us a red, yellow or green light indicator. If we’re on yellow prior to the event, we’re on the phone with the platform’s team and troubleshooting, and we’re poised and ready to address problems should they arise.

FIND OUT WHO ELSE IS LIVE

Ask your platform provider who else is having an event the same day you are. We found out after the fact that Twitter was also having an event the same day as us for more than 10,000 attendees and that ultimately impacted our provider’s server bandwidth at the moment when our attendees should have been logging in.

CREATE A DECISION TREE

A clearly outlined document explaining what happens if the event is not working properly and who makes the decision to pivot or ultimately cancel the event is critical. Email communication is too slow for virtual events. A Slack channel or group text with all critical team members keeps everyone in the loop in real time.

DRAFT YOUR ‘CANCEL’ COPY

You don’t want to be figuring out what to say to your attendees in the heat of the moment when you have to postpone or cancel the event. Write allllll the copy you might need in the days before for every possible outcome so all you have to do is cut and paste.

CALL IT QUICKLY

The universal law of virtual events is this: If the event doesn’t work in the first 15 minutes, it’s over. (Or, at least, that session is over. You can still try and salvage a day-long or multi-day event.)

CREATE A CONTINGENCY PLAN

It goes without saying that backup plans are critical for any event, but in the virtual space, it can mean having a completely different technology solution lined up. We hosted our Ex Awards virtual gala on 6Connex but were prepared to push the entire thing to YouTube if we had to on a moment’s notice.  All of the testing for that pivot was done in advance and the email for that scenario was pre-written as well.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to use it—this time.

Photo credit: erhui1979

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