This Is How You Create A Captivating Digital Event

When the pandemic hit, everyone I knew who worked in events started panicking. All but one person that is.

While the rest of us fretted about postponed client summits and cancelled keynote gigs and how webinars just aren’t exciting like “the real thing,” my colleague the behavior researcher Jon Levy saw the event series he’s been running for 10 years balloon in every dimension except for cost.

What had been a once-a-month affair in three cities now was being demanded virtually at four, five times a month. The usual crowd of 40-50 accomplished attendees was now regularly in the hundreds. Though the event was scheduled to be 90 minutes, people were sticking around much longer. Three hours into his first virtual event, more than 70 people were still in the Zoom room chatting. More recently, dozens of attendees were still on the line discussing the event’s content at the six hour mark.

And these are not high schoolers with nothing better to do than hang out on webcams. Levy’s group is called The Influencers, and it’s perhaps the most categorically diverse gathering of prestigious human thinkers you’ve seen.

When I had the privilege of speaking at one of Levy’s first virtual events in March, my 10-minute slot was sandwiched between lightning talks by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a former Director of the CDC. After that, we three were demoted to “attendee” status and thrust into breakout rooms; in mine, the legendary beatboxer Rahzel broke down how The Roots run their innovative jam sessions. And after all that , singer-songwriter Rozzi performed from her home for all of us—a group which included several Olympians, dozens of CEOs of major companies, and a crush of Pulitzer and Emmy and Grammy winners, Hollywood producers, and philanthropists. I even spotted the Carol and Howard Baskin (of Tiger King fame) watching politely from one of the Zoom squares.

By the time I had to log off and go to bed, there were still dozens of high-profile people in the Zoom room chatting about what we’d all just participated in.

There is a way to do virtual events better than offline events.

Every business that’s relied on events for engaging and educating customers and employees has had to scramble to adapt to the new reality of doing business during COVID-19. And though many of us have held onto the hope that in-person events would be possible sooner rather than later, this new reality has gone on long enough that we’ve basically been forced to carry on virtually instead of postponing things further.

And after participating in so many different virtual events over the past six months, I’ve seen patterns that give me hope for virtual as an event format even when we can safely convene in crowds again. There are some things that only in-person events can deliver. But there are also several things that virtual events can do better.

Unfortunately the majority of virtual events that I’ve seen have been drab—the boring webinar thing that so many event planners have nightmares about.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we’ve been watching high quality, live “virtual” events since The Tonight Show —and well before. If you think that piping in live content to remote audiences through a rectangular screen is inherently less engaging, I have a few rebuttals for you:

• Talk shows
• Game shows
• News shows
• Variety shows

The pattern I’ve observed with successful virtual events like Levy’s during this pandemic is twofold:

1. Whether they realize it or not, the most successful virtual events take the smartest lessons in audience engagement from the above list of proven “virtual” content we’ve been watching on television for the last half-century. They treat their events like a performance that’s needs to stay continuously captivating; and
2. Successful virtual speakers and event organizers take advantage of the unique things that digital event technology can do. They don’t just tone their old stage performances into a webcam-sized talking head feed.

Whether you’re biding your time with virtual until IRL events can start again, or whether you’re hoping to capture the silver lining of virtual events and run with them beyond 2020, I’d like to share a few principles that I’m convinced make the difference:

Virtual Event Principle No. 1:

Create Curiosity Gaps

“When we invite people, we don't tell them what's going to happen. We tease the surprise and we create a mystery,” Levy explains of his virtual “Miror Salons” that he puts on for The Influencers. “This is, from a scientific standpoint, called information gap theory.”

Neuroscience experiments have found that people are the most curious about something that they know a little bit about, but not too much. If you have a hint but are uncertain about the answer to something, your curiosity is piqued. According to the pioneering research of George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the 1990s, if we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know,” we get curious.

The effect is like a mental “itch.” And it’s far more effective for motivating an audience to show up or stick around than telling them everything about what’s coming.

Watch any promo for, say, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and you’ll see information gap theory in action. Tonight our special guest Idris Elba is going to give us a sneak preview of what’s in his new movie. What’s Idris going to tell us?! And musical guest Lizzo will be performing. What song is she going to do?!

News anchors do this every morning and night. They tease what’s coming up next, but don’t tell you exactly. The curiosity gap keeps you from changing the channel.

How this principle helps virtual event organizers:

• To get registrants to sign up—and to get them to show up—create a curiosity gap in the description of your event so that people are more driven to attend than if you give away the whole thing up front.

How this principle helps virtual speakers:

• To keep the attention of an audience, create curiosity gaps throughout your presentations. Tease what’s coming up; tell stories that end on cliffhangers; see your job as not just delivering a message, but keeping an audience chomping to know what happens next.

Virtual Event Principle No. 2:

Have A Run-Of-Show That Keeps Things Moving

In a typical offline event, the audience is captive. There are barriers to getting up and leaving in the middle of someone’s talk. Standing up and heading out can be disruptive or rude to the point that a speaker or emcee can get away with being a little boring or long-winded and not suffer many consequences.

But in a virtual event, the audience is the opposite of captive. They can “get up and leave” as easily as they can change the channel on the TV—without any social consequences.

With virtual, your event must be captivating , or else the audience will disengage.

So how do you win the constant battle for an audience’s attention when smartphones and the Internet are right there competing against you?

Once again, live TV has already thought about this problem for decades.

Television hosts are masterful at keeping a show moving. They do that in two basic ways:

1. They are fundamentally interesting performers. (Telling engaging stories, delivering their lines with energy, and so on.)
2. They constantly switch things up with different segments, shots, and gear-shifts.

When was the last time you saw anybody on live television monologue straight to the camera for more than a couple of minutes at a time? You haven’t. If they don’t switch things up, the audience switches off.

Watch carefully, and you’ll see the best “virtual” presenters do the same: they change segments, change cadence, change graphics, and change camera angles—and more frequently than you’d guess.

In both TV and digital events, the most successful presenters prepare a “run-of-show” ahead of time. After I say X, we’re going to switch to this camera view. After I say Y, I’m going to pipe in this video clip. After the video, we’re going to talk to this guest. ..

With his Influencers and Miror Salons, Levy takes this even further. Whereas any of his guest speakers is deserving of an hour to present, he says, “We limit them to 10 minutes.” This forces his guests to zero in on their absolute best material (similar to how a talk show host will only give Johnny Depp five minutes-worth of interview time, even though Johnny could certainly entertain us for longer).

That’s one way to keep an event moving. But even if a speaker does have an hour to work with, they can keep things moving by having their own run-of-show that keeps things popping. In my own virtual speaking prep, I now segment out my presentations into bite sizes where I deliberately know how I’m going to keep things moving—whether through peppering in audience interactions or multimedia, changing “segments” like a television host would, or simply switching up the camera view to make longer segments more interesting. (And in most cases, I’m doing all of this.)

“Watching some [virtual] keynote is usually completely uninteresting for an hour,” Levy points out. “To not get distracted by my email, it’s got to be more like a variety show than a presentation.”

In his salons, Levy adds polls and games and other interactive elements, which in turn purvey more curiosity gaps. “There's this element that they don't know what to expect next,” he says.

How this principle helps virtual event organizers:

• Plan out a more detailed run-of-show than the list of people who will speak and how much time they have. Have each speaker/presenter break down their own outline into a run-of-show that switches things up frequently enough that the audience won’t risk getting bored.

How this principle helps virtual speakers:

• Outline your content in two to five minute segments. If you need more than that amount of time to deliver a single point, figure out a way to switch things up so that people stay engaged.

Virtual Event Principle No. 3 :

Pull People Out Of The Usual

“When people are spending hours and hours with their teams, it's really great to be pulled out of context into an environment where there's no expectations on you,” Levy says. Once you do that, he says, “make sure that each experience is novel,” and you’ll have your audience raving.

A virtual event should be a break from the usual pressures that we face. It should be a chance to be entertained (even if the topic is serious), breathe a sigh of relief, learn something fascinating, and not have to feel the anxiety that comes with the social pressures (and business pressures) of our usual work context.

And it should deliver something that the audience can’t just find on Youtube.

Virtual events can help us do all of that in a few straightforward ways.

As an attendee of a Zoom or Microsoft Teams or some other virtual event platform, we immediately become part of a flat hierarchy. Besides the speakers and organizers, everyone is on the same level—that is, if the organizers don’t try to implement some sort of hierarchy. When we vote in virtual polls or weigh in in comments, our job titles aren’t on display, and that’s a good thing. (Although, organizers ought to be mindful about setting ground expectations for how people will behave in the comments, or those in particular can go awry if people try to throw their weight around.)

This is also where virtual events can help people to feel special in ways that live events can’t. Sure, schlepping to Cleveland to see a Malcolm Gladwell-shaped speck do a keynote in front of a 10,000-person audience may sound kind of fun , but when Malcolm can pipe into your computer screen for a virtual keynote, he has the chance to create a feeling of intimacy that we don’t normally get at work events.

By setting the right expectations, event organizers like Levy get speakers and attendees to speak to each other and their audiences conversationally and as equals. The virtual format already lends itself to this kind of egalitarian setting, but the event organizer can foster an inclusive environment. As attendees pop in, for example, Levy greets them by name. Throughout the event he shouts out compliments to random people. And he usually sends attendees to small breakout rooms for at least a few minutes—with a discussion prompt designed for inclusion.

I like to refer to these tactics as “micro-inclusions”—and they add up to create a context where people can participate without the usual pressures or fears.

How this principle helps virtual event organizers:

• Make sure your virtual event platform is as free of hierarchy as possible and set ground expectations for how people will treat each other as equals.
• Practice micro-inclusions to reinforce that everyone belongs, no matter who they are.
• Make the content novel and intimate—something the audience can’t get elsewhere.

How this principle helps virtual speakers:

• Remember that you’re piping into people’s personal computers and homes. Talk to the audience as if they’re across the desk from you; and
• Give your virtual audiences content that they can’t find elsewhere.

Virtual Event Principle No. 4:

Use Technology For What It Does Best

The biggest mistake that virtual event organizers and speakers do is what Levy calls the “lift and shift.”

“Don't just take regular programming and put it online,” he says. “That would be on par with taking a radio play and just putting it on television and having people talk at each other reading scripts. It's not what the technology was designed for.”

It’s a given, but worth emphasizing, that what works great in person doesn’t necessarily work at all when piped through a 13-inch laptop screen. At this point, most of us in the speaking world have seen phenomenal live speakers turn a webinar into a snooze-fest by just trying to port their old stuff into a webcam performance. If you’re adhering to the above three principles for virtual events, you won’t do this.

On the other hand, virtual performance technology gives us opportunities to do things that we never could on a regular stage.

We can host game shows—a surprisingly effective format for corporate events that take a ton of production on a live stage, but hardly any when done virtually.

We can weave music and video and picture-in-picture graphics seamlessly into our presentations to augment them in ways that just can’t be integrated in a normal stage performance without millions of dollars of equipment.

We can even pre-produce music-video style presentations ahead of time and broadcast them “simu-live”—one of my favorite speakers Sekou Andrews is a prime example of doing this well.

And event organizers can use all of these types of techniques and tools to make their runs-of-show more captivating.

“What people need to look at is how do we use the technology as it's capable of being used, rather than what is it that we're used to doing,” Levy explains.

Besides, he adds, “if something is the same thing that everybody always does, then it's not going to register as interesting. And so our brain won't be drawn to it.”

How this principle helps virtual event organizers:

• Think of your platform as more than an opportunity to broadcast a webcam, and design your run-of-show to include interactions, music, and multimedia—creating a novel experience that sets itself apart from a normal series of stage speakers.

How this principle helps virtual speakers:

• Use each tool in your arsenal for what it’s best for:
• Webcams are great for talking to an audience in a more intimate way, and telling compelling stories—while having a B-camera for a wider shot is great for delivering a more animated performance.
• Slides and graphics are great for punching up those stories, not for reading.
• Music and video are great for keeping your run-of-show moving.
• Reaction buttons and polls and chat features are great for keeping your audience leaning in and creating a shared experience for them.
• Your attendees’ smartphones are great for participating in mini games like Kahoot.
• Breakout rooms (with good prompts) are great for creating connection and removing hierarchy.
• Pre-recorded clips of yourself to air “simu-live” are great for when you need ultra-high production value (and, potentially a break to catch your breath!).

No matter how serious our subject matter, if we want to keep an audience engaged enough to teach them something valuable, we need to make our virtual events entertaining. They don’t have to be jokey or gameshow-y or even light-hearted to be entertaining. But they do need to stimulate curiosity and deliver novelty.

The good news is we have enough technology and history of live virtual events to draw from to pull that off. As usual when it comes to innovation, we just have to be willing to adapt to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us.

Shane Snow is an author, speaker , and creator of Snow Academy .

By Shane Snow, Contributor