The Art of Intentional Hybrid

Excerpt from Intentional Event Design, Our Professional Opportunity (Endean, 2017)

For the most part, if you are reading this, you play a role in planning meetings and events both face-to-face and hybrid, and provide opportunities for meaningful dialogue. Why is this important?  It is dialogue between human beings, sharing ideas, debating opinions, hearing other perspectives, analyzing our own responses to new ideas, and using these exchanges to understand and develop healthy approaches to diversity, collaboration and innovation that will continue to allow us to build communities – traditional by location, or global by association. With the stoppage of live events during the global pandemic, understanding how to host digital/virtual events became an imperative and as we reopen globally the desire to connect live and virtual audiences has led to a need for a new skill set, the planner / producer who understands how to connect these dots.

Hybrid events combine a live and remote audience and ideally find ways to connect the two.  There are several ways to make this happen.

• Live event host who is comfortable to recognize and interact with a virtual audience, often in partnership with the virtual host.
• A virtual host focuses on moderation of group online chats and questions and integrates the virtual audience with the live host and audience.
• Virtual pod(s) that are linked directly to your event. These can be their own event, often in a different time zone which joins together for a set time-period to discuss a similar issue or challenge. This can be also done in a multi-hub format.
• Single virtual participants who join via a link on desktop, tablet or mobile and may or may not interact with the host.
• Virtual ‘lounge’ where the single participants or pods can come together for conversation; either text only or with video interactions.
• Exhibitors may host a virtual event space from their own location, connecting with participants from anywhere in the world on a virtual platform, or invite remote participants into a live exhibition space for demonstrations or education being shared with a live audience as we reopen.

It sounds simple, connect an audience on a virtual platform with an audience live in a fixed meeting space. This is not a new idea, it has been around for more than a decade and there are many case studies of how this format could be used to create FOMO – a fear of missing out – and drive virtual audiences to desire and plan to attend the live event the following year, growing audience size. In the midst of a pandemic as travel between states and countries is restricted at various levels, hybrid becomes something we just may need to do.

What many planners we talk to are now finding is a wide mix for their clients. Some are hanging on to virtual for now and like the extra audience reach, hard data on participation and savings on travel are all pluses right now. We know even with good virtual networking it is not the same as a face to face experience so others are only going with live events and getting people back together where this is viable. Others are implementing hybrid solutions and even more are exploring hybrid but are finding that the added costs of essentially hosting two programs for two audiences is not appealing to the final decision makers. It does require additional resources, there is simply no way around that.

See the following Hybrid Checklist, and yes, always, start with asking WHY and understanding the objectives for hosting the event – that should guide your decision makers to the right option for this current time and into the future.