15 Hours Online: It Will Never Work

When I had this wild idea to do a 12 hour or ‘all nite’ event to bring together our entire SITE global community, raise funds for the SITE Foundation and give each of our chapters an opportunity to share their Extraordinary People, Places and Stories it was met with – as you can imagine – varying degrees of enthusiasm. Having spent 1 year traveling the world with SITE and the SITE Foundation events, followed by another year of producing digital events, and most recently a live event in Aspen, we built on the trust earned and just tried it. Let’s be clear, this is not something we will do again, it was, like every unique digital event we have produced this year, a response to a specific moment in time.

What we recognized was that we would in April 2021 still be facing down a pandemic and while some parts of the world are beginning to open up others are suffering in greater degrees than at any time during this pandemic. For our SITE members, a passionate community, this means that our business is still required to be resilient, and recovery is still on the horizon. What are we really good at? Supporting each other. I could not be more proud of the ways each chapter chose to showcase their members and locations, and to see the fun they had in doing this was inspiring.

The sponsors who used this medium for their messaging allowed us to offer it on a complimentary basis, and 892 people took advantage of this. My success metric was to have 100 people on throughout and we had a revolving contingent of plus 175 on from the moment we started until nearly the very end, when we drew the winners of 19 incredible raffle prizes, all leading to fundraising success for the Foundation. What does this mean? It means we could continue with initiatives like the Corporate inSITEs research with US corporate meeting planners surveyed 2 weeks prior to this event sharing what they are seeing right now about when and how we return to incentive travel again.

So – 15 hours. What started as a loose idea of 12 hours or ‘all nite’ which would in fact in the Americas be ‘all day’ grew because the brave and relevant content created in 5 to 15 minute segments grew and sometimes the long form content was so worthwhile it was impossible to cut. Then there was the live networking with Twine, the wellness moments, the great hosts linking the content and the participants and ultimately the committee after much discussion opted to leave it to run longer. We always knew nobody was going to stay for the duration, that was not the expectation. The plan was to have great content and community available in any time zone so we could see our colleagues from all six continents – and for this, it worked. Now, on to planning a live event, and I can’t wait!