Event Webcasting Road Map: Using Online Content to Fuel Face-to-Face Meetings and Community

Hi.

I'm Erica St. Angel and I'm delighted that you've joined

us today for our webinar, The Event Webcasting Roadmap:

Using Online Content To Fuel Face-to-Face

Meetings and Community.

And our presenter is Stephanie Martinez with ProMedia Group

and she's going to talk to us about the EduComm Conference

and how they've built a community around that.

Before I turn it over to her, though, I wanted to take a

little bit of time for some housekeeping to orient you to

the Mediasite player experience.

There are some controls at the bottom and you'll

see a speech bubble.

That's how you can ask questions at any time during

the presentation.

Just click on that.

If we don't have time to get to your presentation during

the live webcast, please provide your email address.

And then that way we or Stephanie can follow up with

you afterwards to answer your question.

And this presentation will also be available on-demand.

You can use the same link that brought you here today.

There's also an envelope button that you can use to

forward this presentation even now if you'd like to share it

with another colleague who you think would find value in it.

So with that I'm going to turn it over to Stephanie.

Thank you, Erica.

I am happy to be here today to talk with you about EduComm.

EduComm is an annual higher education conference and most

recently it as an emerging hybrid higher education

conference.

It happens every year and this year it's in Orlando, Florida,

June 13 through 15.

And I'd like to talk with you first a little bit about the

people behind EduComm.

EduComm is produced by University Business Magazine.

We are the leading publication for higher education

administrators.

Every two to four year college and university pretty much

reads University Business Magazine.

The conference that we produce is, as I said, annual.

And it's a technology and leadership conference.

And it's attended by over 400 colleges and universities

nationwide.

And we are in our eighth year.

And we are very proud to have been a partner with Sonic

Foundry for webcasting since 2007.

In talking a little bit about our event goals for this

coming year, we wanted to educate

through quality content.

We've always done that, but this year, especially, we put

a lot of work into our program.

And for the first time, the number of session submissions

that we've had, more than triple the amount of space

that we have. So we put some tools in place that allowed us

to take in a great deal more session submissions.

And we'll talk a little bit about how we've done that.

Our goal is to facilitate year round engagement between our

attendees and our sponsors and exhibitors.

There's no doubt that our sponsors and our exhibitors

love the live event.

Our attendees love the live event.

However, the actual engagement after the event has always

been something we've struggled with.

We'd like the event to become a year round initiative.

And so, in order to do that, we needed to build an online

community that would support our goals and that's also what

we've done this year.

We want to grow the event.

We want to grow both the live event and the virtual event--

the hybrid piece of our event-- but we don't want to

do one at the expense of the other.

We want to increase the attendee base at our live

event and we want to increase the attendee base at our

virtual event.

But we certainly don't want to lose live attendees to the

virtual side, so we'll talk about some of our strategies

there as well.

The evolution of our hybrid event has been that, in 2007

and 2008, we worked with Sonic Foundry to record the keynote

and sessions and we made them public on our

website post event.

However, we made them public about two

weeks after the event.

We came back from EduComm.

It's a big conference for us.

We're a relatively lean staff and we went on vacation.

We took a breath.

We came back to it again a couple of weeks later and put

the sessions on the website.

We didn't really promote that they were there.

We did it more as a value add for our attendees.

We did a little bit more in 2009 where we also again

recorded the keynotes and sessions and made them

available to just paid attendees.

So we put up a wall or a website login needed to happen

before you could view the sessions.

And we did a little bit more promotion that year.

In 2010, we took our first step into the virtual world

where we did a virtual pass.

We promoted the virtual pass after our early bird

registration closed in late April for a June event.

And that allowed our attendees to have an on-demand access--

our virtual attendees to have on-demand viewing.

However, we also made one session per time block

available live.

And we'll talk a little bit more about how that worked.

But we did promote the event for the first time.

We promoted the virtual event early and we did quite a bit

of promotion.

And we were excited because we sold 44 virtual passes on our

event and with no previous experience doing it.

We did charge $195 per virtual pass and we'll talk also about

how we're going to change that up a little bit

this year as well.

So in 2011, we're going full force with 100% live

stream of our event.

We're very excited for this.

There will be on-demand viewing

for all paid attendees.

And we're also doing something very exciting, which is that

one of our larger keynote experiences-- David Pogue

comes to EduComm every year and his keynote will be

streamed live, publicly broadcast to the world right

from our home page of our website.

David Pogue has well over a million followers on Twitter

and so we think that webcasting his session live

will be a huge brand building opportunity for us.

Another thing that we did that we're excited about on our new

event website is that we created an archive of all of

the Mediasite presentations that we've

had for three years.

Actually four years of Mediasite presentations are

now available on our website and the cost is really just a

login, a free registration.

If you sign up and you provide your email address, you're

able to view four years worth of EduComm content for free.

And we're also promoting that and in just four weeks' time,

we've had 130 registrations to view that content.

So the plan for 2011 includes continuing to outsource the

entire event to Sonic Foundry's awesome Event

Services Team.

Again we've worked together for a number of years now and

while we're completely capable of using Mediasite technology,

and we do so for several smaller events that we have

throughout the year, when it comes to EduComm, it's five

session rooms, five concurrent sessions going on.

At the same time, we have our keynotes and we also have this

year two pre-conference tracks, which

are full day events.

And so for us, in our relatively small event staff,

we're not able to manage all of that on our own.

Sonic Foundry provides us with a project manager and with the

technical support to get all the sessions recorded and

posted into their hosting account so that we can then

put them on our website.

It works really well.

So we're moving from the one live webcast per time block to

a fully live webcast for all sessions.

And that's exciting for us because I think in the past

what we did by just having one session available per time

block may not have been the program that every live

attendee wanted.

And so they couldn't watch everything live so I don't

think they stayed on for the event like we had hoped.

So by making the entire conference live, they'll have

plenty of options to choose from and fill their schedule

the way that they would like to.

And again streaming that one keynote live to the public on

our homepage is very exciting for us and we expect a lot of

Twitter activity around that one.

So our plan is to launch the virtual pass at the close of

our early bird registration in late April of this year.

We did that last year.

It worked well for us and we plan to do the same thing.

What we will do, however, now that we're offering a fully

live event is we will raise the price.

And that's something we haven't fully determined yet--

what that final price would be-- but it will be more than

$195 and less than the cost of our conference.

One thing that we're expecting, based on last year

servicing just the 44 live virtual attendees, is the help

desk support, which, from the perspective of the sessions

and Mediasite content, that was not a problem at all.

We had no problem with people accessing the content.

What we did have was a problem with people

remembering their passwords.

And so as simple as it may be, having somebody available live

to answer that question or help them find the where's my

password button would be very helpful.

And we anticipate that we're going to need to ramp that up

when we have a fully live event.

We have to support those live attendees-- I'm sorry, the

virtual attendees.

We need to support the virtual attendees far better than the

ones in the room with us.

And then doing this as we are by putting the sessions behind

a login or making them available to just the paid

attendees, gives us a great promotional opportunity, which

is to open up select sessions after the event to the public.

And we may get requests from people to view certain

sessions and we'll be able to open them up with

a click of a button.

Make them public.

Use them for promotion.

Lock them back down whenever we want to.

That's one of the benefits of the website that we've

developed this year.

Looking at social media, that's part of our

plan for this year.

We are going to be using Twitter more and more.

Twitter is a friend of ours at our events but

it's a foe as well.

And one of the stories that I can share about our event last

year is that we had a panel discussion and it was in a

general session.

And we had about 800 people in the room and we had planned to

take questions on Twitter from our live attendees and from

the virtual attendees.

And those questions on Twitter would fuel the panel

discussion.

Well, about two minutes before the session started, Twitter--

well, we got the "fail whale." And Twitter went down.

And we didn't have a back up plan.

And so in the tech booth in the back there was a little

bit of craziness.

And we were scrambling for a solution and we quickly

adjusted one of our slides and put my email address up so

that questions could come in through my email.

And Twitter went back up intermittently throughout the

one hour panel and so then we were monitoring two sources of

questions throughout.

And so it was an unexpected event.

We handled it fairly well but just to be aware and have a

back up plan is a really good idea.

And we took those questions through our hash tag.

We are a little bit cautious about LinkedIn and Facebook.

We're concerned about diluting the effort.

When you have a limited staff and you can only be in so many

places at once, you have to wonder if it's better to put

all of your effort into one very quick and easy social

network, which is Twitter, versus possibly a deeper and

more of a deeper commitment to LinkedIn and Facebook.

So you're now building community in several different

places and I think that you have to worry about diluting

your effort.

Now there are tools that you can use so that you can have

the same post to Twitter also post to Facebook also post to

LinkedIn and vice versa.

But I think you have to generally have a plan for each

one of these social networks and if you don't have a plan

for the social network then don't bother doing it.

We also have something else we're launching this year,

which is very exciting, which is an opt-in text campaign for

on-site engagement and for promotions.

So right now, if you text the keyword EduComm to short code

99000, you'll get a coupon for $100 off a conference

registration.

So we can use that now.

And then when people are onsite, moving

people around the venue.

When we have an exhibit hall in one building and session

rooms in another building, we can use text messaging, which

pushes our message out to the attendees.

And tell them that there's a special gift in the exhibit

hall for the first 50 people that come through the door or

different promotions that can really help our sponsors and

exhibitors get the traffic that they need

in our exhibit hall.

But I am the most excited about the tools that we've put

in place from our web team this year and

there's a number of them.

And some of them talk to each other and some don't.

But we have a number of tools in place to help build

community and to make the event easier for us to manage.

They include Drupal, Mediasite, of course, Wufoo,

SCHED*, and Cvent.

And together they make up the technology backbone of our

entire event.

We'll start with the Drupal website.

Drupal allowed us to build a community website with minimal

IT support.

And so a front end web designer and business strategy

people are able to build a website in a

short period of time.

It's what's called a web content management system or a

content framework.

And it's open source which means that you can

download it for free.

But that doesn't mean that the website is free.

There's a lot of people resources that goes into

building it.

Although again, it's not developer and IT as much as it

is business strategy configuration and a little bit

of web design.

What Drupal allows us to do is to deploy new features on the

website very rapidly.

So if we want to add a section for comments or we want to add

a forum, we could do that in a half hour.

And the best part of Drupal is that it empowers the content

owners-- so the marketing people, the

editors from our magazine.

It gives them the ability to put content on the web having

absolutely no web design background.

We're big fans of Drupal.

This is a an example of what our website

looks like this year.

Again, we purchased the theme to our website, which is kind

of the general design.

We purchased it for $50.

And the website again, open source software.

Free to download.

This is all.

What you're seeing is really just people.

It's time spent by our own internal team.

Of course, we had Mediasite.

And Mediasite is critical to the content of our website.

And, again, the Event Services Team allows us to outsource

project management and recording for this

large event for us.

It hosts all the content and the best part is it can

deliver it to all of those concurrent users.

So how ever many people we have watching that David Pogue

keynote, we know that will be all set.

The sessions are actually embedded in our web pages with

commenting below each session so it's a

great engagement tool.

Our sessions can be watched from our own website.

The attendees visit the website.

They log in and they're able to watch the sessions as

they're happening right from within our own website.

And there's some great stuff in Mediasite that we have not

taken advantage of yet, which we intend to, which is the

interactivity within the player itself.

It is better than Twitter.

Twitter is wonderful for a general session.

But Twitter is not great for the break out sessions where

you may have five different sessions going on for your

event at the same time.

If people are tweeting to a hash tag of EduComm, it's very

difficult for the moderator in that particular break out

session to know which questions are relative to the

session that they're in.

So in this case, by using the question and answer feature--

which I'm sure we'll use later-- within Mediasite,

we're able to really get that level of engagement from the

virtual attendees.

And that's really exciting.

It's a big step ahead for us and we're looking forward to

doing that.

And then for the marketing people, we have our

presentation stats on the back end so we can see how we did.

We'll be able to adjust our behavior based on having good

information.

Another tool that we use that we're very excited about,

because it helps us a great deal with very little

investment, is Wufoo, which is the single easiest and most

powerful tool we've used to aid in information collection.

We've used this for our call for speakers.

And it's very exciting because I can create-- or anybody in

our marketing department can create-- a web form.

So a form you complete on the web which asks for all

different types of information.

Anyone can set it up and anyone can use it.

For example, our call for speakers, which had been a

source of great trouble for us years ago.

When we would put out a call for speakers on our website

with an email address attached and prospective speakers would

just send an email and they'd put their photo or not, or

their abstract or maybe not, and a little bit of

information.

And it would go into our program director who would vet

the presentations.

But it was a very cumbersome process for him.

By using Wufoo, we created a web form in about 10 minutes,

which allowed our speakers to submit their presentations

online, their abstract.

We forced them to put their photo in at the beginning of

the process.

We forced them to put a bio in.

And we also required them to agree to being webcast, which

is another source of trouble for us.

In the past where we wouldn't ask that question, we'd get to

the venue and several speakers did not agree to be recorded.

So it's very good to get their agreement up front and then

you have it.

So this allowed us with our call for speakers to have a

great deal of collaboration on the back end.

We had approximately 120 presentation submissions for

40 spots and that took a lot of review by a

whole team of people.

On the back end of Wufoo, we were able to review all of the

data that came in in a very nice easy to use format.

And we could each comment and our initials would be assigned

to that comment.

And people could basically give their thumbs

up or thumbs down.

We were able to collaborate on the back end by using Wufoo,

which just was so powerful.

We've used it for also gathering information from our

sponsors and exhibitors, like their logos, which is another

source of trouble for us.

When you have 60 exhibitors and 10 sponsors, getting all

of their details-- their marketing contact, their

exhibit contact, their corporate address, all of

that-- we requested once up front and then we have it.

We can use it for surveys and contests that we deploy

through email.

It's just a wonderful tool and no matter how many users you

put on it it's probably going to cost you

less than $100 a month.

And again, it allows us to download all of the

information into an Excel spreadsheet and upload it to

our Drupal website.

There's just a number of things you can do with this

information.

It just collects it and makes it nice and easy

for everyone to use.

Another exciting tool is SCHED*, or SCHED* as some

people call it.

It's a WAP site.

And WAP means Wireless Application Protocol.

That is a website for mobile use.

And something we've heard in the past that people wanted to

do on our live event was-- and this is primarily for the

on-site attendees-- was to have a mobile website that

allows them to build a schedule for the event and

then share it with other attendees or just put it out

in social media.

Print it.

Send it to their iCal.

SCHED* does everything and then some.

And again another tool that's very inexpensive.

Less than $1000 for the whole event application.

It's, like I said, low investment and it's great for

mobile devices to build your schedule on your iPad or your

iPhone or Blackberry.

The last tool that I wanted to talk about is Cvent.

And Cvent is a very powerful registration system.

We use it to take credit card payments and to create group

discounts and special promos.

And it's very stable and robust. We've been using it

for four years now.

And it's just a great system that helps us to stay in

communication with our attendees.

It allows us to set up separate email lists to our

speakers, to our sponsors, to our attendees, and message out

important information like confirmation information.

Or message out special promo codes.

Or if they haven't responded to an invitation that we send

them-- like for our pre-cons, they are both invitation only.

And so we invite a number of people to come to the event

and they need to accept the Cvent invitation that's sent

to them by email in order to get their free registration.

So we have tracking mechanisms in place.

Cvent is a wonderful tool again and it rounds out our

technology platform.

So the early results of everything we put into place

this year is that, if you took mid February to mid March of

2011 and compared it to the same period of time in 2010,

we increased our website traffic by

146%, which is exciting.

It shows a much deeper engagement in our website than

we had in years past. And the deeper engagement comes in

large measure to the archive sessions that we have-- the

Mediasite presentations.

We also have during that same period of time 14% increase in

actual visits to our website.

Now we're just getting started with this and we're still in a

very early phase of promotion of our event in June so we

expect these numbers to rise dramatically and especially

when we have our 2011 content up.

In the past we didn't promote the session content as much as

we should have and will.

And so looking at this year compared to last year-- and

this is comparing 9 months now to 12 months in the past--

we've increased our presentation views to 442

hours of viewing.

And we still have three months to go to make this an apples

to apples comparison.

So we're just at the jumping off point here and we expect

these numbers to go up significantly.

And in looking at some of the lessons we've learned about

our event and trying to build this event into an annual

engagement with our attendees, is that community building is

so much easier in the ramp up to your

event versus post event.

And I think what often happens is-- especially when the event

is a large effort-- is that you really

do take that breather.

You know, we have a debriefing meeting.

We talk about what went well and what didn't go well.

And we have all that great data but then, like many

companies, you move on to the next thing.

And we have so many competing priorities that building

community isn't something we think about so

much after the event.

So the lesson we've learned is now is the time in the build

up to work very hard at promoting the community and

that's what we're doing.

And while we've come this far with all of the tools that

I've mentioned-- and they're great tools-- the tools need

to really talk to each other a little bit more.

So right now we do a lot of things manually.

So we may export a file from one tool and

upload it to another.

Or manually data enter information into two places.

It's not a big effort at all but I think we can have some

additional economies by bringing some IT support--

some web development support in-- to use APIs and other

tools that will allow us to have some of these systems

talk to each other because they all do.

We just need to work out a plan and get that into place

to make our lives a little bit easier.

And then the biggest and most obvious lesson, we have to

stay engaged in social media year round.

And not just when we want to promote the event.

I can't stress that enough.

We are doing it this year and I know we're

going to reap the benefits.

And sometimes good quotes come from strange places.

And this is some words of wisdom from Charlie Sheen,

saying "Plan better and it applies to everything where an

excuse now sits.

Try it.

You won't be wrong.

Ever. " It's strange sometimes where the words

of wisdom come from.

But we do want to plan better and our excuse of, we have too

many things to do or we're just too busy to work on

EduComm right now, really doesn't work anymore.

And we know that and we have some really

exciting things planned.

And we'll continue to do our promotion year round.

So what's next for us?

We're doing a lot with virtual attendees this year and so

engaging virtual attendees in the actual session, in the

break out rooms, is an objective of ours.

We know how to do it.

Now we just need to train the people that are

going to be doing it.

Which is to get the virtual attendee to be able to ask

questions in the session, so that they feel engaged, so

that they stay online longer.

That's a major objective of ours.

And then to generate more revenue

from the online community.

Sponsorship of website sessions.

As we get more views on our presentations and we have more

engagement in the community, we can have forums. We can get

some sponsor involvement into the forums. There's a lot of

opportunity for our sponsors and exhibitors to get involved

in our website and have it be a lead

generation tool for them.

And so we'll work with our sponsors and exhibitors to do

just that over the next few months.

And then lastly, and I've said it a lot, but consistent

communication.

Letting your attendee base know that you've never gone

away is very important.

And that's it.

So if you have any questions after our session here today,

you're welcome to email me.

I'll be happy to answer your questions.

And we do have a ton of questions coming in.

And if you arrived late-- so a bit of housekeeping-- there's

a speech bubble in your Mediasite player.

You can click on that and submit your question to us.

And please provide your email address because we're getting

short on time and we want to make sure we get back to you.

So if we don't have time for your question during the live

Q&A we'll follow up with you on-demand.

So several questions about your tools that you've shared,

the tips and tricks and things.

Can you provide a link to the tools?

And I wanted to mention that if you click on the links

tab-- it looks like a little chain on the player-- you'll

actually find links to all of the tools that Stephanie

mentioned in her presentation.

And then I know, too, that you've done sort of a demo of

Wufoo, and I think if we can get that link from you, we'll

put that in there also just to prove how easy

it is to use that.

I did.

I built a web form in two minutes or less just to prove

how easy the tool is to use.

Drag and drop all the information on to a webpage,

submit, and make it live.

It's that easy to use.

It's a great tool so we'll definitely get that on.

We'll add that to the link.

And that'll be available in the on-demand.

And several people have asked, too, can I

share this with people?

Can I watch it later on-demand and you can use the little

envelope button to forward it to a colleague.

And the same link that brought you here right now will bring

you back here as soon as we're over.

So a couple questions about your-- you mentioned having a

tech desk or people in the back of the room

as like a help desk.

How did you decide how many people to staff

at that help desk?

And do you have a rule of thumb or any guidelines that

you've used versus how many staff versus remote attendees

or is it just who's available?

Well, to some degree it was who was available, but we only

sold-- which was good for us because it was our first

year-- but we sold 44 virtual passes.

And based on the fact that we had one track or one session

per time block available for live viewing, I was much more

concerned with the live viewing than I was on-demand

because by the time people were viewing on-demand

sessions, we were all back from the event and

we could help them.

By the time sessions were up, we were off the airplane.

We could help people if they needed it and most didn't.

But in terms of the live event, when that was

happening, we had one person at our home office, who I

scheduled to be available.

And he was somewhat busy but certainly not overly busy.

I think doing this, however, it's tough.

And until we see how many virtual passes that we'll

actually sell this year, it's tough to know how many people

we'll staff for.

But I would say at least two people to be available

throughout the entire event would be a minimum that we

would have. And often we find a person in each room, like

I'm doing right now, watching the Q&A come in.

So in addition to having people for just tech support

purposes, actually having a physical person who's there to

be the voice of the online audience in the room.

Very important.

And some questions, too, about using the old video content or

the old Mediasite content in your pre-event marketing.

Can you talk a little bit more about how you've created

incentives for people to register

early around that content?

And how exactly you let people know about it.

Was it email or website or social media?

And then how often you were hitting them with

that type of a message?

OK.

A lot in that question.

Yeah, there is.

But it's easy to answer.

We use another tool which I didn't put in my presentation,

but it's called SocialOomph.

And it allows us to schedule our tweets.

So we did put a scheduled tweet out there for our

archive registration.

And it repeats every other day.

Because Twitter messages live for about twenty seconds and

we wanted to make sure people knew the archive was there.

We've also put it on a couple of email

broadcasts that we've done.

And in terms of incentives, what really the benefit of

getting people to register for the archive for free is that

we now have information about that individual.

So it's not that we've done a promotion to get them to

register so much as we told them that it's there.

They will register.

And now we have all of that great demographic information

that we can message out special incentives to them at

that point.

And so we will.

We do offer several early bird discount-- in addition to our

regular early bird, we'll often do an extra

promotion or two.

Special contests.

We do some giveaways.

We've had flip camera video giveaways.

And iPad giveaways.

Or if you refer people to us, we might put you in a pool for

free registration.

We do a lot of creative and fun things.

And in terms of the interactivity, you've talked

about how this year for the first time people in all five

tracks every session will be able to ask questions like

you're asking us right now.

Are there other ways that you've gotten your attendees,

whether they were on-site or online, interacting with each

other within your networking site that you have now or in

the past.

Well, we've used Twitter.

I think Twitter's been a springboard for us.

We did have an application we used last year to help engage

the attendees throughout the event.

But what we found is, they engaged a lot through the

three days of the event, but after the event was over, the

engagement stopped.

And whether that had to do with the fact that we stopped

or everybody feels that well, the event is over now and I'm

moving on to something else.

It wasn't the most effective thing.

So I think, again, using Twitter as a springboard is a

great idea because it keeps your brand in front of your

attendees a great deal more.

And then once the community is really going by adding special

section-- like we may take a session and we might

snippet-ize it and take a little two minute section and

then create a question about that piece.

And then throw that out to the community for answers and for

collaboration.

So there's a lot of things that we're going to do to keep

the engagement going.

And one of the things you mentioned, too, was the last

session-- this was last night at dinner.

The last session that you web casted last year, that you

captured last year, really became a discussion point for

a lot of people.

And that's one of the sessions that's now

available to watch on-demand.

Absolutely.

Yep.

It was the technology disruption session.

And it was very engaging because it talked a lot

about-- we had three panelists and a moderator and the

session was really geared around the

changes in higher education.

And what technology has done to higher education.

And there were a lot of different opinions.

There was a little more controversial discussion in

that session than normal for us and so it was actually the

third most watched presentation of all

the ones we've had.

David Pogue always is the number one rated session that

we have. And I think that's a great idea of what to anchor

your on-demand content with.

It's something that you knew was exciting on-site and then

hopefully that'll translate online too.

When you talked about your presenters, you mentioned some

things that you put them through in terms of forms to

make it easier for you.

I'm wondering, do you do anything for them about when

they're capturing online-- for I know for today, this is your

first time presenting directly into a camera.

But do they need to do anything different when

they're onsite, when they come to present for EduComm in a

hybrid environment?

That's a very good question and one I think that for this

year, because last year we went into it-- I would say, we

were newbies at the whole virtual presentation style--

and so I think there's some things that I've learned just

being here that we can take back.

We have the ability in our website.

We're creating actually a presenter portal page.

Right now the content for that page is going to be some good

session slide creation tips.

So we'll put that in there prior to the event soon

because people will start working on their

presentations.

But also if there's some Mediasite content that we can

put in there as well that will help, we'll put that in there.

And then we can message that out to all of the speakers

several weeks out.

And then I think, too, just from what I've learned here

and talking with them, because this is an

educational process for me.

So bringing this information that I've

learned here out to them.

And we have a speaker ready room and we'll have additional

instruction.

And we want all the speakers to check in with us and we'll

give them some best practices at that point.

And in terms of the technology, there's really

nothing that they do on-site that's any different than just

plugging in and going.

Yep.

For them, it's pretty transparent.

And I've got a couple more questions coming in.

We do want to be respectful of your time so I'll leave you

with a pricing question because money is always the

big question for a lot of people.

But again, keep your questions coming and do provide your

email address so we can follow up with you on-demand.

So how did you decide what to charge that first year and has

it changed over time?

And have people stopped coming to your face-to-face

conference because you've made the online available?

So I guess two questions.

Pricing and attendance.

Well, in year one, we charged only $195

for the virtual option.

So absolutely not.

I don't think anybody chose the virtual over the live

event because of that.

At all.

I don't think that was an issue.

I think this year we do plan to charge more, like I said,

and probably in the $300 range for the actual virtual pass.

And there may be a little bit more of a

decision at that point.

We know that in higher education sometimes people

have budgets that are very tight or they cannot get the

authorization to travel.

What we decided was that we don't want to limit their

ability to be at EduComm.

And so we want people there live but we definitely want

them to be at EduComm.

So one way or the other, we want them to

be part of the event.

So the pricing question, is a little bit

of a dice roll still.

We certainly haven't mastered anything.

There's no formula.

It's really just something we think the market can absorb.

We think people will pay a certain amount

for the virtual option.

And we think there is-- well, we know-- there's

enough value there.

We have 40 great sessions.

We have amazing keynotes, including Dr. Stephen Covey.

And Dries Buytaert, who's the founder of Drupal, which is a

wonderful opportunity for people to learn about open

source technology.

So we're very confident in the program this year.

That's great and I think, too, what you mentioned is that you

haven't seen people flocking away from your face-to-face.

Not at all.

Just because you-- and even just in the

on-demand mode, too.

Well, thank you so much for your time today and thank you

for joining us.

And again you can click on the link that brought you here to

watch again.

And feel free to share it with your colleagues.

Hope you have a great afternoon.