Fortune Telling: 5 Predictions for Funding Hybrid Events

Hi, and welcome to Fortune Telling: Five Predictions for

Funding Hybrid Events.

I am John Pollard and I will be your moderator today.

I'm joined by Erica St. Angel who will be presenting.

She's our VP of marketing here at Sonic Foundry, and we are

delighted that you've chosen to join us today.

A few housekeeping items before we get started--

during the presentation, we invite you to ask questions,

and you can do so by clicking on the little

speech bubble icon.

You'll see it either over us or down below us, a little bit

off to the side there.

Click on that, give us the question, and if you would,

include your contact information.

In case we don't get to your question, then we can follow

up with you after the presentation is done.

We're also going to have a number of polls during the

webinar, and you can access those polls by clicking on the

pie chart icon.

And Erica will instruct you when to do that.

For those you who are wondering when and how you can

access this content after the live event, you can access it

at the very same URL you are using right now.

So I think that takes care of the housekeeping.

Indeed.

Without further ado, I will hand you off to-- in the very

capable hands, I should say, Erica St. Angel.

And thanks for joining us, again, as John said.

I'm really excited to present on this topic, because it's

near and dear to my heart.

It's about money.

And today we're going to talk about predictions for, how do

you fund a hybrid or virtual event?

And if you'd like to be tweeting, we're tweeting at

@ericastangel or @mediasite, or you can

also reach John at--

@johnp_sofo.

There you go.

Great.

So, first up, I've got a lot of images in here.

A shoutout to people who allowed me

to use their images.

And some quick definitions--

so we get asked a lot, what is a hybrid event, or what is a

virtual event, or how are they different?

In a hybrid event, you've got a face-to-face event

happening, so you've got a physical

audience that's gathered.

And most of you I'm sure have planned these types of events.

They're all together in one place experiencing something

in real time.

When you go hybrid, you're actually taking a piece of

that and you're streaming it or webcasting it out to a

remote audience.

And so, synchronously, there's two things happening on-site

and online.

In virtual, there's just the online bit.

So it could be that all your speakers came together and

you're streaming that out to the remote folks, or it could

be that you've recorded the stuff in the past, maybe even

at a hybrid event, and now you're repurposing that, so

it's asynchronous content.

But that's the difference between hybrid and virtual.

We're going to talk a little bit about both today, but most

of the examples I'm going to give you are more of the

hybrid flavor.

So first up, we have our first poll.

And every time you see this little pie chart, it's a

reminder to go look for the pie chart in

your Mediasite player.

So click on that, and you'll see question number one.

Have you planned a virtual or hybrid event?

We just want to get a read on the audience, and also John

will then report back.

The results will take a little second or two to push through,

and you can click on View Results and see the answers to

the other people that are watching us today.

So have you planned a virtual or hybrid event?

Yes, no, or this is a very timely presentation because

you're planning your first one right now.

Do we have any results coming in?

No.

A few?

A few on the no side.

And you can go ahead.

If you feel like taking the rest of the polls

right now, you can.

Otherwise, we'll be directing you back in there.

So it's a new thing.

This is early days for virtual and hybrid events.

So don't feel bad.

I'm glad you're with us, and we'll hopefully guide you into

some ways that are-- now that you're going to do this for

the first time, how do you fund it?

We get asked all the time, what should I charge?

When you've decided that you're going to create a

hybrid or virtual experience, you've gone through the

discussions internally about, we have people

who can't make it.

This isn't about cannibalizing the face-to-face experience.

It's about adding to it, because for whatever reason

there are people who can't make it there.

Either they have conflicts or they have travel bans or

budget constraints.

So you get this question of, what should I

charge for this event?

And the answer is, unfortunately, it depends.

There are several different ways you could look at it.

You could say, first of all, I'm just out

to fulfill my mission.

The reason that this event exists is because we need to

educate a bunch of people about some topic, and

therefore money isn't really an issue.

We might lose money on this because we've received a grant

or it's part of our institution's mission to do

whatever it is that's bringing all these people

together face to face.

And in that case, your hybrid event might have the exact

same requirement.

Or it might be that you want to make money, that this is

revenue-generating, and we see this a lot in corporate events

where you're bringing together vendors and introducing them

to other people who might be interested in your content.

So that might be your mission.

Or it could be that you fund other activities in your

organization based on the money that you make during the

face-to-face event, in which case hybrid or virtual might

be a new revenue stream to fund those activities.

Or last, you might decide, we just want to break even.

Our goal for this event is to get the information out there,

to bring the content to somebody who's not been able

to experience it before or for whatever reason this year

can't come.

So whatever it is, I have a prediction for you of how you

might fund all of these things.

I do want to take a moment and say what we're

not going to do today.

What we're not going to do is answer the question, how much

does it cost to put on a hybrid or virtual event?

And that's actually going to bring us to our next poll, and

we'll be going back to these poll results at the end for an

exercise we're going to do together.

But the second question is, how much did your event cost.

And I'm asking this not-- if you haven't planned hybrid or

virtual event yet, go ahead and put in the number of

whatever your last face-to-face physical on-site

event cost. If you have done a hybrid event, include the cost

of the face-to-face and the online bits.

And if you were just on virtual, obviously just

include the cost for virtual.

What I'm curious about is to see, what's the range of the

group of people we have watching here today, of what

you've charged, because my hunch--

so again, click on that little pie chart button and you can

answer that question.

My hunch is that we're going to see a pricing range of

modest to elaborate.

It's kind of like saying, how much does it

cost to build a house?

You can build a house that's 1,000 square feet, or you can

build a house that's 10,000 square feet, and all of the

bells and whistles that go around that.

And obviously, with events, you can do it very

cost-effectively.

You could have a sales meeting that happens at a TGI Fridays,

and you're sitting around a table talking about what the

goals are for the next year, or you could have it in Aruba

and use it as an incentive meeting.

So we're not going to talk about what it costs to do

virtual and hybrid.

That's a topic for another day, maybe.

What we are going to do is talk about, now that you've

decided to go hybrid or virtual with your event, how

do you decide how to fund it?

What are the tools that you can use out of the toolbox

that will help you recoup the costs or break even or make

money on going online.

And so this conversation begins after you've already

decided, this is our goal for the event, this is why we're

going online, this is what we're hoping people will

accomplish, this is what we want them to take away, this

is how we're going to evaluate how it goes, this is the

experience we want them.

There's all these conversations that you're

going to have leading up to the point that we're engaging

right now of, OK, now that we've decided all that stuff,

this is what we're going to charge.

So I don't want to make you think that you begin this

process with just the money, because it usually comes after

you've nailed the strategy.

So a word about free.

Free is a very powerful thing.

You're watching today for free.

It creates buzz.

It gets people excited.

They try things when it's free that they maybe

wouldn't try before.

And many people decide, when they're going to do this for

the first time, that they're going to make it free.

It can be scary, especially if you're worried that people

are-- oh, if they can get it for free, they're not going to

come to my event.

As a side note, we haven't seen that borne out.

But free can still be a way to generate money.

I mean, there are other ways that you can use a free live

hybrid event, after the fact, that might still help recoup

some of the cost of doing it for free.

So I just want to point that out.

We are going to talk about free today.

It doesn't mean that everything

online has to be free.

And I'm going to show you some examples of that.

So this presentation's called Fortune Telling, and I'm going

to give you a little definition of what divination

is, because I think it's salient to how this

conversation could go today.

It's the art of practice that seeks to gain insight into a

question or situation, and we're discovering hidden

knowledge, usually by the interpretation of omens or the

aid of supernatural powers.

We're not using supernatural powers here.

We're keeping it on the knowledge-driven side of the

house, not the pagan side of the house.

But the idea is that this is kind of hidden knowledge.

It's not like people go to cocktail parties and just

ultimately start throwing around, this is how much money

we made on our last event, or this is how much we're going

to lose on our next event.

People seem very willing to share their catering ideas and

their social media ideas and how they did breakout rooms,

but when you get to the money part of the conversation, I've

found, at least in the last couple of years of trying to

engage people in conversation about this, people aren't

necessarily really forthcoming with the money side.

So today what I'm hoping we can do is just join together,

and for those of you who have done this, I hope you'll share

honestly what your answers were.

It's anonymous.

Nobody can go through and say what your responses were.

But using all of that, we'll aggregate it, and then we'll

conjure up a formula for how, if we were all putting on an

event, what the pricing might look like.

So the next question--

and this is the first one of I hope you'll share a little bit

about your past experiences--

my last hybrid event or virtual event lost money,

let's not talk about, it was a painful thing; or lost money

but it's OK because it's part of our mission; or we broke

even and that was our goal; or it broke even, but our goal

was that we needed to make money; or we made money, yes;

or we made a lot of money, double yes.

So if you've done a hybrid event or virtual event, or

even if you haven't and you're looking at the last

face-to-face event, if you could let us know what your

experience was.

And again, totally anonymous, but go ahead and take that

poll, click on the little pie chart, and we'll use that

information again as we go into the calculation formula

at the end.

So to look back before we go forward, to look at the

pricing past lives.

Most of you, I'm assuming, and I have a little bit done these

face-to-face events where you've got to come up with how

much are we going to charge.

And so I want to run through quickly all the different ways

that we've either employed or considered or talked about

when planning our own user conference, for ways that we

could generate funding to help offset our costs.

And again, there's a pie chart there.

If you've used any of these, go ahead and throw a vote of

confidence to them.

So the first one's registration, obviously.

You ask people to swipe their credit card and pay to come

on-site, and usually that's to offset the cost of the

catering and the facilities and maybe

your keynote speaker.

You may have exhibitors, where you say, you're going to pay X

amount and then we give you this spot on the floor.

In a virtual world, you might have said, we're going to have

a virtual exhibit hall, you pay out X amount, and we get

your branding up there.

The same thing with sponsors.

That may or may not include exhibition, but you have maybe

a few, a smaller group usually than your exhibitor pool, of

people who have paid an extra amount to sponsor either the

whole event or individual slices of the event.

You've done maybe pre-conference workshops where

you've said, we're going to offer this high-level or

intermediate, beginning--

could be any level of knowledge, I guess.

But we're going to offer something ahead of time that's

going to be a little bit more in-depth, maybe a little more

technical, maybe a little more--

get you up to speed or has some kind of certification

according with it.

And we're going to charge you for that.

Or you do post-conference materials where you've

aggregated all the conference content, or there are papers

created and you're going to charge people to have access

to those materials.

You might do certification where you say, I'm going to be

taking these courses, and if you take these courses either

in pre-conference or during, then you're going to be able

to maintain or achieve a certification level.

Or you're allowing people to, once they've got the

certification, continue on with that.

Those letters behind their name because they're taking

continuing education credits.

You might say membership.

You'd say, OK, you can come to the event for this price, and

that includes a membership fee that will then give you access

to a bunch of valuable content throughout the year.

Or it might be, this event is only for members, so you get

people to join and then once they've

joined they can go online.

And then "other." There's other things out there, and if

you've used other modes, go ahead and use the ask button,

the little speech bubble, and send us a note and let us know

what else you've done.

This is generally what we've seen used, considered, and

when I'm talking to people out in the meeting community, this

is pretty much the list of stuff that

people will look at.

Maybe swag is another one.

Sponsorship for swag.

But these are all options when you go into the hybrid and

online world.

Some of them work better than others in terms of the

staffing that it might require or the resources to build out

a knowledge portal, but every one of these can be in play.

So don't think, just because you're going into hybrid and

virtual, that you have to abandon the models that worked

for you in the past.

Now we're going to pivot and start looking into the future.

And what I've done is watch a whole bunch of hybrid and

virtual events.

I've just taken notes on what they charge, how they charged

it, how they did their branding, what kind of

sponsorships they had, if they offered exhibiting, all that

kind of thing.

And I've whittled it down to basically about five main ways

that I'm seeing people fund their event now, right now,

even in this bad economy.

And some of these apply to all the different money models--

free, paid, sponsor, exhibitor.

Some of them are just bits and pieces that-- take what they

use for you.

In all of these, though, it'll work for a live or an

on-demand, synchronous or asynchronous, hybrid or

virtual, or a combo of the two.

And the first one is "free." We talked about, you can build

awareness, community.

Great for when you've got crucial education that people

need to get in real time.

It could also kickstart a launch, like a product launch.

We've seen that, where the new product's coming to market, so

they make this event for free.

And free can also be to a smaller group of people.

You might just invite a group instead of

making it publicly available.

It could be reporters or it could be leads, people that

you hope will buy from you in the future if you're in the

corporate world.

Sponsors, which we talked about-- maybe

have a few of them.

And sometimes the sponsorship level will allow you to make

it free for your attendees.

But the onus there is on you to really deliver the leads,

most likely, for those sponsors.

And again, it's going to increase their exposure as

their bracket of payment increases.

We've also seen people use sponsorship as

a way to get speakers.

So you basically have your sponsors pay you a certain

amount and that guarantees them a speaking slot in the

virtual or hybrid event.

For the exhibitor floor, many people think you've got to go

to some type of 3D exhibit or environment, and you

absolutely can do that.

And it makes it very easy then to track some of the lead

things, but if that's a little more sophisticated than the

path you want to go down at the beginning, what we've seen

people do is they have their physical exhibit floor, but

they invite people to give individual presentations at

one of your speaking rooms. And these can often happen at

times when you've got something else going on for

your live on-site audience.

So, say, when they go to breakout rooms or when they go

to lunch, you might bring your exhibitors in, do

interviews with them.

And then that's what your virtual audience or remote

audience is watching in the downtime.

Again, the goal there is really leads.

It's to get people to come see their presentation or register

for other materials with them.

And then lastly is paid.

And that could be a full paid--

I pay and I get to see everything-- or it could be

individual things.

You might be able to see keynotes for free but you're

going to have to pay to see the pre-conference tracks or

whatever it might be.

This can generate revenue.

The key with paid is you've really got to

have a meaty program.

You've got to have content that people can't feel like

they'll find somewhere else out there on the web.

And then when you go into, how does this work on-site and how

does this work online, this is a little formula for you.

In both sides, you can have live and on-demand

presentations.

So in the on-site, you're taking what's

happening in the room.

Like, we're here today in a room, and we're streaming it

out to you, our remote audience.

In the online, you could take those same presentations after

the fact and replay them at key times, and then do Twitter

chat or some type of audio bridge or something to have

interaction with your speakers.

But in both options, on the live side and on the on-demand

side, you can charge nothing and make it free.

You can charge a lot of money and make it paid and a revenue

generator for you or help you break even,

or you can do both.

And then throughout all of those, there's a lot of

different options in terms of how the viewing can work.

Again, for live, you're going to have remote people viewing.

In on-demand, your on-site and your online are going to be

able to go back and watch it again.

So that's something a lot of people don't think about, is

that the people who came on-site may also want to see

what happened again online.

And it's up to you to decide whether or not that's part of

their membership fee, part of their registration fee.

Maybe you get a sponsor to be the on-demand content

provider, however you want to name it.

Thanks to--

insert company here--

you're able to watch all these presentations again after the

fact for free.

And then also ponder the interaction between the

presenter, because how much interaction you have could

indicate how much you should be charging.

If it's really interactive and all of the people in the room

can ask questions of the presenter and the people

online can ask questions of the presenter, you might want

to pay a premium for that, especially if the presenter is

someone who's going to attract a lot of people to your event.

If it's just online and only on demand and there isn't any

interaction, that might be something that you think about

throwing in, bundling with other things that your

organization may offer.

So here's the big scary slide.

And I encourage you after this presentation is over to go

back to this slide, and you can use a little magnifying

button to zoom in and see.

But this is kind of what got the whole thing started.

I just started aggregating what people

charge for hybrid events.

And in here you'll see a whole bunch of different events from

different types of verticals and different organizations--

some are for-profit, some are nonprofit--

what they charge for their on-site, their live online

hybrid event, their on-demand, and then any notes about how

they might have tied that in to memberships.

And just a quick call-out--

it ranges from free to $2,100 to $3,700

to participate on-site.

And then when they do an online, it ranges from free

all the way to $885, with an additional login if you're--

this was for a university.

They would give you, one person could come in for $885,

and then other people could log in for $450.

And then in on-demand, in the asynchronous world, it was

free after four months on one of them.

It was free to members.

Premier members had to pay.

Free after a month.

Kind of all over the place.

And then there's one organization that charged $295

for the streaming and $590 if you wanted to download those

presentations and take them with you.

So again, it's all over the place.

This is a completely random list. It's just sort of over

the last year and half I've been aggregating these.

But I think what it shows you is that it's really a new

thing in the market.

There is no standard.

And the key is to really look at your organization and

figure out what's right for you and what feels right for

your members based on your goals.

So another polling question for you, if you

click on the pie chart.

How much did you charge your attendees at your last event?

This could be for face-to-face, for hybrid, or

for virtual.

Just curious to get a general gist of, are we talking to a

lot of people today who do free stuff, or are we talking

to a lot of people that are charging $1,000 or up?

So how much did you charge your attendees?

Free, $1 to $100, $101 to $500, $500 to $1,000, or

$1,000 and up?

So let us know, and we'll plug those in in a little bit.

So that brings us to the five predictions for your funding

future, and how I think that you're probably going to be

funding events going forward.

And they break into these buckets--

sponsorship and exhibits, live streaming plus community,

on-demand streaming plus community, on-demand content--

and that's for continuing education certification and

membership, with content and community as a

value add for joining.

So first up is sponsorship and exhibits.

This is an example from the Global Technology Conference,

and they sold sponsorships to the brands that you see across

the bottom with the bottom arrow.

And they created a virtual classroom.

They captured all of this content live during their

face-to-face event, but then they made it available after

the fact to online attendees.

So this is what I would call virtual.

They could've streamed it live, but they chose for their

first pilot to just do the on-demand.

And people had to register.

Once you registered, you could get in for just putting your

email and password, but to register you had to provide a

lot more information, and then all of that information was

passed on to the sponsors.

And I'm going to let Sandra talk a little bit about how

they decided how to structure their fees.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

-After the one month of the event, we wanted to give

enough time for the event to happen and sink in before we

actually posted it up on our website.

So once we put the button on the front of the website, we

then directed everybody through our website to the

virtual classroom, which then linked in to Sonic Foundry's

platform where they could go--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

-And that's where you get here, in terms of lead

generation, where it's publicly available but you're

asking people to give you the email--

-Absolutely.

Absolutely.

It is all about lead generation and sales.

-Right.

-And we want to prequalify our leads as well.

-And then did you take just-- is it all the leads who logged

in then were referred back to your presenting companies or

your sponsors?

Or was it just the people who watched their particular

presentation?

-It was just the people who watched their particular

presentation.

So multiple companies had multiple presentations.

So what I would do is just gather the leads of who

visited their presentation, and put in a spreadsheet and

email it to them on a monthly basis.

-On a monthly basis.

OK.

Great.

And this is an example of a catalog?

-Yeah.

This is a really simple catalog.

It worked out really well.

There was a lot of discussions on how we wanted it to look,

how many features we were going to allow, and in the end

this worked out really well because they can

search it by keyword.

So if there's a certain technology that they're

looking for, they'll be able to search it

in the keyword box.

If they want to view it by presenter, which is actually

the company name, they can filter it out

through that way.

Or by the date of the conference, because a lot of

people don't remember their presentation

materials or what it is.

They might just remember one thing about it and they're

able to look at it.

-And you said you noticed that the presenting companies were

often watching their own presentations.

-Oh, yes.

It's great.

It's a great tool.

You get to see who went back to view their own

presentation, like anybody would do.

But absolutely, a lot of companies go back in and look

at their presentations.

-And we've heard of companies, too, using them as their own

sales tools where they'll send the link around.

-Yes What we did provide to all of the presenters, and

that was included in the price that we charged them, is that

we would give them a copy of their presentation to be able

to post on their own websites or use in their

own marketing way.

And they really appreciated that.

-That's a great value add.

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

And the way that they got to the price of how much they

were going to charge is they basically said, this is how

much it's going to cost us to take this on-site event into

the virtual world.

And they decided that number by the number of sponsors that

they decided they were going to have present in this

special track.

So that's really easy math, but that's how they discovered

how they could hit that break-even point.

So next up is live streaming and community to remote

attendees and on-demand streaming and community for

on-site and online attendees.

And in the interest of time, I'm not going to play some of

these videos for you, but you can watch all of them.

They're in the links tab.

If you click on the little paper clips in the corner, you

can actually see the webinars that these are coming from.

This is an example from the EduComm conference.

And with them, what they were doing is they realized that

once they captured all this content, they could use it to

then attract people to register for their

face-to-face event and their online.

So what they did was they took the archives from previous

years and opened up individual presentations from that, and

that became things that they would tweet out to show people

the caliber of the conference that they were holding.

And they started doing this way before, like this was

during their early bird registration period.

And then after the fact, they went back and told people--

it was a value add, basically.

If you register on-site, you're going to get access to

not only what was captured at that year, but all the other

previous years.

And then they've done a great job of curating the content to

pull out some of the best things so that people know

what to watch, now that you have this giant catalog of

information.

And then also on their home page, then, once they created

the live stream--

they chose to do their keynotes for free but they

charged a fee for the rest of their content.

And their pricing structure is on that spreadsheet too.

And once they had the live streams, then they put those

on their home page, and again that was where they were sort

of saying, this is the caliber of content that we have.

And then the last buckets-- four and five--

are on-demand content for continuing education and

certification, and membership.

And that's with using the content as sort of a lure to

have people join your community and become a member

of your organization.

And this is a great example of how a nonprofit, the Ontario

Hospital Association--

they used a bunch of these different cards.

So they said, I'm going to sell sponsorships.

So each one of these they paid to be part of

this webinar series.

And then they also, on their website, have examples of,

here's the free archived broadcasts.

Here are the archived broadcasts that

you have to pay for.

And here are the members-only.

So you can not be a member and swipe your credit card, we'll

take your money, but you also could be a member and then get

access to all this other stuff.

And Todd does a great job of describing how they came up

with the price to what they were going

to charge for these.

They basically decided on-site is going to cost the same

amount as online, and that's because they don't want people

to have kind of--

if it costs more to watch online, they didn't really

think that would be enough of a driver to get

people to come on-site.

If they couldn't come on-site, it's probably because they

have some other conflict.

They live too far away, there's a travel ban on their

airfare, whatever it might be.

If they charged more for the on-site, then they felt like

they were doing a disservice for the

people who were online.

So they just said, let's keep all things equal, and they

charged $125 for each individual presentation.

So that's the big five of what we're seeing people use

actively right now, to either break even or generate money

for their event.

I recommend you play all of these cards.

It's really a matter of looking at what your

organization is about, whether or not you have existing

sponsorship relationships, whether or not you have a

place where your members can aggregate, or where you can

aggregate the content for your members to come

back after the fact.

But I think the best people are really looking at how to

do a little bit of each one, and doing a lot of

experimenting right now because it is so new.

I do want to make a quick point about

being wary of time.

Not only in terms of presenting but also when it

comes time to start marketing this.

It's the number one reason I see people not reach their

funding goal, is they don't start talking about the online

pass or the virtual event or the hybrid event early enough.

And that usually comes from a group of people saying, if we

go hybrid, no one's going to come on-site.

It's going to cannibalize our attendance.

We keep seeing people over and over and over again.

They have this conversation, they do it, and no one is

experiencing this cannibalization.

It's a fear, and it absolutely makes sense, and we had it

when we took our own conference online.

But frankly we just haven't seen it borne out in the

real-life experiences of the people who are

choosing to go hybrid.

So the earlier you can start marketing it for on-site and

for online, the better chance you're going to put yourself

in to actually make your funding goal.

So now that we've got your answers from the polls, what

we're going to do is--

and there's an attachment in the Links file, an Excel

spreadsheet, so you can play along with

this if you want to.

We're going to go into Excel.

I know it's a little scary.

We're entering new territory.

But the idea here is we're going to plug in some numbers

based on what we've seen from your-- and we're going to just

see, if we had an event, if we decided to go hybrid, and our

event cost, just for the sake of argument, $100,000 to put

on, what would we need to do in order to make these numbers

work out for us?

So I'm going to turn it over to John and say, can you help

me plug in some numbers?

I can help you plug in some numbers.

Where do you want to start?

What are we looking at?

Let's see.

How much did people charge for their last event?

Excellent.

We had a nice cross-section of data from our audience.

Thank you very much for responding to the polls.

We're going to start off.

We had six people doing free.

Then we had one in the $1 to $100 range.

We had 9 in the $100 to $500.

So that one won.

Yeah, that's the main one.

Yeah, I guess, if you wanted to pick one,

the mid-range there.

Yeah, so let's plug in--

We did have people across the board, which is nice.

It's interesting.

OK.

So we're going to plug in, let's just say, $500, since

that was kind of the top end.

Let's go for that.

Yeah.

Excellent.

And--

oops, I'm in the wrong place.

One second.

Registration.

Face-to-face registration, we're going to say, cost $500.

And just for the sake of argument, I'm going to throw

in 250 attendees.

Well, actually, we just made our number there, so maybe

I'll throw in fewer attendees.

Yeah, make it a little more challenging.

Come on.

They're not going to believe you.

OK, let's see.

We'll throw in--

we're going to say 100 attendees.

So there.

We've reached half of our break-even number.

And then, the next one was how much did your event cost. I

guess I should throw that in here.

Again, we had actually most--

In the cheaper category.

--in the under $10,000.

Interesting.

For the sake of argument, maybe

I'll leave it at $100,000.

Yeah, you could.

We do have people in--

actually, if you do the cross-section,

it's probably balanced.

You could say $100,000.

OK, so we'll leave it there to start.

Although we had plenty under $50,000 as well.

And under the funding tools, can you say what was maybe the

most common tool that people have used to fund the

registration?

Well, yes, Erica, I can.

Thank you.

The most popular--

well, we do have a tie between sponsorship and registration.

And exhibitors were fairly high.

But then there were people that dabbled in workshops,

materials, and certification as well.

But sponsorship and registration

were the leading numbers.

Do you want numbers?

Well, for this example, let's say that we've got some

sponsors, and let's say we charged our sponsors $5,000

and we had three.

So we've hit $65,000.

And, again I'm looking at this as a total

amount of the event.

So this is the face-to-face and going hybrid, is going to

cost about $100,000.

And these are maybe some of these tools we can plug in.

Again, this is really, really simplistic, and there are

amazing software programs out there that will help you do

this in a much more sophisticated fashion, but if

you're just kind of beginning this process--

and for exhibits, since we had a lot of people say

exhibitors, let's say we charge people $2,500 and we

had 10 exhibitors.

So we're at $90,000 now.

So at this point, you could make a decision, do we need to

charge to stream live?

We could say, look, we're going to recoup our costs.

Our goal is break even.

Say we're a health organization and our mission

is to raise awareness about X disease.

You could decide that, for the live streaming and community,

to go hybrid, you're going to charge maybe a fee of $99 and

you're hoping to get 100 people to register.

And there you're basically $100 short of

your break-even goal.

But you can play with these numbers.

When you move to the on-demand streaming and community,

you'll also have to make a decision there about, do we

charge the people who came on-site again--

which most people tend not to do-- or do we take what was

on-demanbd and just make that open to the entire community?

So I hope that's helpful.

And again, that Excel spreadsheet is attached in the

Links tab, the little paper clip.

So feel free to keep messing around with it.

I was just going to add that, in reviewing those of you who

have done a hybrid event and those of you who haven't, it's

a pretty even audience right now.

And those of you that have tried the hybrid event

actually said that a lot of you did break even.

So for those of you who haven't tried this yet, they

either broke even.

Some people made some money.

Some people lost some money, but they said it was OK.

They had intended that.

Hopefully that was your goal.

Yeah.

And maybe I'll just remind you that somebody had asked

earlier about how they could share this link, this

presentation with their colleagues, friends, family.

I'm sure your mom and dad might be interested.

I'm sure they're riveted.

You can send the same link that you are

watching right now.

Just send that off to your friends, and it will be

available almost immediately upon the completion of this

webcast.

Yeah.

Definitely.

And if you have any other questions for me, you can

follow up at ericas@sonicfoundry.com.

Any questions pressing?

No, that's really it.

So if you do have questions, please just continue to send

those in or send those to Erica.

And we just want to thank you one more time for joining us.

Thanks for watching.