The Skill of Balancing Remote Audience Engagement

There is definitely a skill involved when it comes to planning the programme for remote participants at a hybrid event. A hybrid event for me is “bringing together a face to face and remote audience for a shared participatory experience in real time.” Clearly there is also another skill involved in planning the programme for face to face participants. Creating a programme that combines both audiences to have that unique seamless participatory experience has to be the goal for any effective hybrid event.

In my experience what is happening at the moment for remote participants is a little like the idea of ‘feast and famine’ and there isn’t enough balance. For some of the events, the remote participant has quite clearly been forgotten (and that of course is tough for any remote attendee). The result really is that the attendee will simply switch off from the event and leave (virtually of course).

Here are some common (famine) issues that I have come across. There is the planner/speaker who hasn’t considered how an exercise will translate from physical attendees to remote attendees. For example, it’s quite easy to have a networking exercise amongst face to face attendees, but it needs more thought when planning the networking for the remote participants. 

Then there is the panel debate that forgets there is an on line audience and so only takes questions from the face to face attendees.  A third issue is when questions taken from the physical audience are not spoken into a microphone or repeated back into a microphone by the speaker.

On the counter to the famine we have some other (feast) issues. Whilst, remote participants do not want to feel excluded they do also need a break during the event as well. Some programmes have invited remote participants to be involved over a number of hours but is that realistic? Can you really ask someone to sit at their desk for hours?  If your programme is long then just plug in some breaks for the remote participants.

Sometimes there seems to be an idea that you have to keep pushing content at remote attendees to make sure they are fully engaged (whatever that means). This could translate to separate interviews with speakers, polls, chats and all sorts of other activities whilst the face to face attendee is enjoying his/her break.  All participants need time to reflect so allow time for that with your remote attendees.  

Ensuring the programme is effective for both face to face and remote attendees is truly a balancing act which has challenges. The good news is that in our events industry there is a lot of fast learning going on right now and seamless hybrid events will become the norm in the near future. 

Related Posts and Resources 

Hybrid Event Centre 

Event Planning on Planet Planit