Your Event Content Checklist

It’s the height of summer, so fall conferences are right around the corner. What’s on your checklist?

Often logistics come first—where and when. (See Bonus Logistics Tips at the end of this article.) Followed by a list of must-have speakers. And whether your audience will be in-person, remote, or hybrid. 

What is often discussed too late is the Story of the conference. What Themes do you want attendees to take away? What Actions do you want them to take after it’s over? And what does that mean for your audio visual content planning?

Ideally, you want consider content in three buckets: 1. Content for advance marketing, 2. Content for a seamless attendee experience, and 3. Post-event content.

To cover those bases, here’s a checklist of questions that can help surface what will help drive your successful conference story.

1.     Getting Started: Conference Themes and Branding

As you get started, you’ll want to establish and plan to communicate broad themes and a vision for the event.

a)     What is our conference purpose, title and tag line?

b)     What are the top 3 key themes of our event? What about hashtags?

c)     A one page branding guide should include: fonts, color guide, logo variations

d)     Speakers/topics that relate to our key themes

e)     Accessibility factors (ESL signers, translations)

f) What short visuals/videos do we need for branded pre-event promos (montage past event photos, speaker clips, audience being engaged, in different formats for social/web/email.)

2.     Video/Image  Content – In Person

Visual content for live events generally falls into 3 categories:

a)    Videos/visuals to establish the theme, such as the opening of a plenary

b)    Videos to set up a speaker or topic, and set the table for the audience to understand how they fit into the overall event theme

c)  Transitional or explanatory content – such as walk-in visuals, logo builds, “how to use our app” graphics, or short interstitials to cover a staging transition. You can't have enough of these on hand, as you never know when something will happen, like a speaker is stuck in traffic.

3.     Video Content – Hybrid and Remote

If you are planning a hybrid or remote event, then you’ll need a lot more audiovisual content than for an only-live event. That’s because you are effectively planning a broadcast.

a)     Will the remote audience get all the content that is on stages or in breakouts?

b)     If so, how will you stream it? On what platform? What is the behind-the-scenes workflow so that this content gets managed in real time?

c)     What about captioning? Simultaneous translations?

d)     If the remote audience isn’t seeing or participating in all the content, such as workshops, what will they see instead?

e)     Perhaps you have some Q&A interviews or other live content that gets streamed to the remote audience? Who will host that content?

f)      Or perhaps you have some videos that they will see instead? What is the workflow to be sure that content is ready by the time the event happens?

g)     Is there exclusive content for the remote audience? If so, what is it and how is it produced?

h)     Most importantly, how have we allocated budget and human resources for our remote audience experience?

These are just some of the questions we address when building out the “story” of an event. It’s an exciting, creative process. And if you ask and answer the right questions early in your process, then you’ll be in great shape for your next event.

Want to amp up your next event? Join me on August 22nd at Noon EDT for Exploring Two-Way Interactive Hybrid Events.

Here are some Bonus Logistics Tips from my colleague Derek Jenks at Event Planning Concepts:

> Do you homework on Audio Visual services. Equipment fees are higher than ever, with service levels lower. It’s worthwhile to attain quotes from outside AV vendors as many in-house companies cannot compete. You can also negotiate what in house charges for fees in the hotel contract.

 > Food and Beverage is more complicated than it has been in the past. Dietary restrictions not only effect the time you spend on developing menus but on your bottom line also. You can ask the hotel to deconstruct many of their menu options so that you can accommodate everyone.

 > Get your room diagrams early! Fire Marshalls are becoming more strict, charging more for diagrams and revisions, and are some are even requiring diagrams for any room that will have more than 100 attendees in it. Save yourself time and money by getting these out of the way early.