The covid-19 pandemic has stirred the whole workflow and has compelled event organisers to shift from live events and conferences to virtual ones. Also, due to emerging threats of virus outbreaks and travel restrictions, it has become imperative to think about a different type of event – hybrid events. There will be certain situations that may require an in-person event where it is the most effective means of collecting leads and engaging with the audience. Hybrid events combine both in-person and virtual elements, allowing organisers to reach a broader audience and churn the best of both worlds. Here comes the role of Airmeet, a breakthrough platform for your virtual and hybrid events, which is designed to deliver real engagement and best-in-class interactions.
If you are thinking to plan a hybrid event, here are a few important things to consider:
Since virtual events have become the new normal, your content is now even more important than during an onsite event. It is quite troublesome to keep virtual attendees engaged in front of a computer screen from start to finish of the event. Also, you can’t deliver the same content the same way for both in-person and virtual attendees. To keep content engaging, incorporate relevant polls, Q&A and make sure that the sessions are of digestible duration. Airmeet has been designed keeping in mind the need of coordinating a large event online with 1 lakh of concurrent attendees. It facilitates Q&A with speakers and networking with other attendees using live and direct chat.
Virtual events can be really exhausting, and most attendees don’t prefer attending online meetings for more than a few hours. You have to strike a balance in your session lengths and keep your content relevant with high-quality engagement throughout, which is deemed to leave a lasting impact on your audience. The current meeting solutions can only host smaller events like webinars and meetups but cannot scale to accommodate the scope of larger events like multiple parallel sessions that attendees participate at their will, booths and workshops running parallelly, breakout sessions to interact and network with people, and more. Airmeet is a platform for both small and big events.
A hybrid event will have some onsite participants who gather at locations, ideally located near to where the majority of them are based. Participants who can’t physically attend, due to covid restrictions, join the event virtually through an online platform. This format of hosting meetings helps to reduce travel costs to a certain amount, prepare fewer meals, and less transportation of rental chairs and tables.
However, event planners not only need to factor in the expenses of the live elements like the catering, venue, and audio-visual necessity but also the digital elements such as the multiple cameras, an online platform, and microphones needed to stream the event to the online attendees remotely.
Airmeet supports broadcasting with multiple cameras using third party broadcasting software, live Streaming to Facebook and Youtube, and allows feeding external audio/video input into the Airmeet stage to deliver an extraordinary experience.
Recently, we interviewed Madhu Nair, Director, Product Marketing at Airmeet. Here’s what he said about how they tackled some surges due to the pandemic: “March 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing, our free plan offered all meet-up features up to 300 attendees/events. Airmeet was the virtual office base for hundreds of companies. We tried to support small and growing businesses to collaborate and interact without being limited by the pandemic.”