Due to the pandemic’s strict health and safety measures, organizers have no choice but to hold regular events via virtual platforms. We can’t deny that virtual events are convenient: they save a lot of time and money, and they allow international participants to participate in any region they want. Everything has flaws, including virtual events, which are inevitably plagued by network outages, inactive audiences, and low audience attendance.
Read on, this article will introduce you to what are the common problems faced in virtual events!
Technological Barriers
While virtual events provide society with non-traditional networking opportunities, they also present a slew of technical challenges. The most concerning issue for event planners is the internet’s instability. Because they cannot be predicted, network outages are regarded as the most serious threat to virtual activity. Event planners can only prepare the best preparedness plans, such as hotspot support, at all times.
Furthermore, technical issues can take up a significant amount of time, as online events require participants to have some basic technical knowledge. If the participants are unfamiliar with the virtual event, the lead person must take the time to assist them. Otherwise, the event will not run smoothly. Simply put, it is best to keep things simple in order to ensure a smooth virtual event.
Active Audience Participation
It appeared impossible to have participants sit in front of the laptop and maintain a high level of attention from start to finish of the virtual events. Keeping the audience interested is thus a challenge for event planners. Shaking hands, applauding, and other simple actions that can elicit a response from the audience are restricted by the virtual form. The most difficult problem is that the audience cannot sit in front of a laptop screen for two hours without causing fatigue. Finally, it results in a low level of audience engagement.
Unsatisfactory Audience Attendance
We may discover that, in addition to the difficulty of maintaining active audience engagement, attendance at virtual events may be low. It could be due to the fact that our participants were exhausted by virtual events, as they might be spending far more time staring at a screen than we anticipated during the pandemic. As a result, the event planner’s prediction should include an only 50% attendance rate, actual attendance may only account for half of the registration number, which is also a normal occurrence.
How can event planners confront these two issues?
The key is to hold more interactive sessions with your audiences. As a professional event planner, you must create vivid and entertaining event plans. Interactive sessions such as Q&A, polls, breakout rooms, and so on have been proved to be effective. Furthermore, if the virtual events last up to 2 hours, a 10- to 15-minute break can provide participants with some respite.
Most importantly, the single most effective solution to the problems encountered by the preceding virtual events is for event planners to come up with a creative event idea that keeps up with the times. With the transparent agenda, the audiences are more eager to participate and pay attention in order to discover the actual value of the virtual event.
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