I’ve been producing events and working in the industry for almost 18 years. I consider myself a seasoned veteran and feel like “I’ve seen it all” at this point. Meaning, I’ve experienced all the crazy event challenges out there: medical emergencies, venue cancellations, inclement weather, power outages, horrible vendors, drunk attendees, ridiculous artist demands, internet failure, etc, etc.
But now that we’ve been forced to take our events virtual there’s a big new challenge we’re facing and it’s not an easy one to solve. It may sound simple on the surface but I promise you it’s not. Since we’re all not in the same place at the same time, we have to navigate and accommodate multiple timezones for our attendees, staff, speakers, sponsors, performers, etc. It’s something we’ve never really had to do with IRL events (except for live streams) and it’s really complex when trying to organize your agenda, maximize attendance and audience engagement. No one wants to attend an event at 6am and similarly no one wants to be watching a speaking session at 11pm. At the same time we want to include as many people as we can but how? Hmmmm……
Here are 10 tips I’ve found helpful:
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Collect the timezones of your attendees by surveying them in advance. The key is to do this before selecting a date, sharing the details, or opening up your event registration. If you can do this before going live with registration, you can skip Tip #2. If you can’t do this prior to going live, you’ll need to collect timezones from attendees while they register. Or you can simply take a chance and trust your gut on the best time for your event ???? (not ideal).
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When collecting attendee timezone as part of registration you’ll be promoting an event on a specific date or series of dates but not an exact time out of the gates. You can leave it broad, but set expectations by telling prospective attendees how much of their day it will take. For example, you can say a half-day event, or two half-days, etc. Remember, it’s okay to crowdsource and explain to attendees exactly what you are trying to accomplish and why. Attendees will understand that you want to make sure you optimize the event for as many people as possible. And remember, for an in-person event, the attendee would have likely blocked all/most of the day for your event anyway so we’re asking them to do the same here and we’ll actually be giving them time back on their calendars once it’s locked in.
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Host your event to be optimized in the timezone where the majority of your attendees are.
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Include downloadable calendar invite links for attendees in your registration system and in confirmation emails. Most calendar applications dynamically update based on the person’s local timezone which does the conversions for them.
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Don’t program time-oriented agenda items (i.e. lunch break at 12pm EDT or a virtual happy hour at 5pm EDT). That’s ostracizing for your audience not in EDT.
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Recognize that anything more than a 6-hour time difference between attendees is going to be incredibly challenging to execute and you should consider breaking up your event into multiple events that splits your audience. Think about it, an event that starts at noon for one attendee would either start at 6am or 6pm for another. That’s tricky.
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Anywhere you share an agenda you should explicitly list times in all relevant timezones for attendees. Do the time conversions for your audience. If you’re using an avatar based virtual event campus solution for example, you can dedicate web boards throughout the campus to display these times in many places. There are also quick and easy timezone conversion tools such as everytimezone.com and thetimezonconverter.com you can use/share. Generally this math is pretty easy but can get a little tricky around daylight savings time changes and with states like Arizona who don’t use daylight savings.
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If you’re using an attendee app as part of your event experience, try and find one that has dynamic timezone agenda listings that automatically convert to everyone’s local timezone (i.e. not hardcoded times).
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Again if you have to cross a time gap of more than 6 hours you can also consider offering a live event and then offer a pre-scheduled recorded broadcast later in the day or the following day for your audience who is behind or way ahead. So it’s sort of a 2nd event but with far less production. Just offering a post event recording will devalue attending your actual event. Make it feel like a second event just for them that’s only available at that specific time.
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Virtual events should be quite shorter in length than in person events or at minimum be broken up into shorter chunks over the course of a few days. People will not sit in front of their computer and be an engaged audience for 8 hours at a time. This actually helps with navigating timezones because its much easier to have 3 hours of programming across multiple time zones than 6–8 hours of programming. The latter will certainly force attendees to participate during sub optimal times.
Bonus Tip ????: With the vast majority of people working from home right now due to Covid-19 be extra thoughtful about how/when you schedule your event program. Meal times throughout the day can be extra hard right now as most families are all home enjoying those times together.