The perfect VIRTUAL-world event for REAL humans: making your next online gathering a success

Disclaimer: This article is about three months overdue as I have been meaning to write it back in December. Despite the delay, I think it’s still worth sharing for anyone who’s considering organizing a virtual event and making it a success.

“So much much more than a bag… “

If you are a “Love Actually” fan, I am sure you remember the jewelry scene. Alan Rickman is buying a necklace for his love-interest (and work colleague) and is being “helped” by Rowan Atkinson. Rickman’s character is in a hurry because his wife is shopping nearby and he doesn’t want her to see what he’s up to. Trying to speed up the whole gift-wrapping process, at one point, he snaps: “I don’t want it in a bag, I will just put it in my pocket”. To which Atkinson replies, bewildered: “Oh but this isn’t a bag, sir. This is so much more than a bag”. (If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend doing so to find out how this exchange unfolds:)

I am always reminded of this line when I think about the virtual online Christmas party we organized last December in collaboration with Confer-O-Matic — because a well-planned, well-executed virtual event is so, so much more than a Zoom meeting…

In this article, I would like to share our experience and some practical tips for anyone who’s on the fence about whether a virtual event is right for them.

“Looking for anything in particular?”

The involuntary “relocation” to an online world caused by the coronavirus pandemic has forced many of us who deal with communications and employee engagement to find new, creative ways to keep our people energized, motivated, and connected. For work-related activities, such as meetings, the transition was not that difficult — after all, many of us were zooming regularly already before the pandemic. But while zoom may work well for a one-hour-long, small team video conference, its limits really show when you are thinking about how to throw a party for 2000+ people.

So when we started thinking about how (and in fact, whether at all) to organize a Christmas event for our globally dispersed family of colleagues, we knew we had to look for something brand new.

Our requirements were clear:

• It had to be safe (we are a cybersecurity company, after all)
• It had to work across multiple time zones
• It had to accommodate 1000+ people (we knew that not everybody would join, but what if…)
• It had to be easy to access and navigate even for non-technical people
• It had to make people feel connected, engaged, entertained for the duration of the event (planned for approximately. 3 hours) and possibly beyond :)
• It had to fit a reasonable budget
• It had to be ready in about 6 weeks time

Our choice of partner fell on Confer-O-Matic, a company that builds interactive virtual platforms for large public or company events in a 3D virtual world. I would say you have to see it to understand it, but here is at least a basic description of how it works:

To access it, you need to download the environment on your desktop. Once you enter the platform, you chose an avatar and move it around the virtual world through simple commands that allow you to walk, run, jump, or even fly (more on that later:). All avatars run around with the names above their heads, so you always know who you are meeting. A simple chat function is available and allows attendees to send direct messages to each other. An administrator can also broadcast messages to everyone, which can In certain areas, marked by concentric yellow circles and dispersed in multiple locations across the platform, the avatars can interact with each other — once they enter the perimeter, a video chat is automatically enabled for anyone inside. Up to 15 people can chat at the same time/in the same zone.

These additional attributes and features make it worth exploring:

• It allows you to facilitate chance encounters — something that’s sorely missing from all those deliberately planned zoom meetings. I would say this is where a virtual world most closely resembles the good old days, when we were all able to “bump” into each other accidentally, striking an impromptu conversation.
• It makes your attendees go all-in and get engaged. On a traditional video call, it’s easy to be in the passenger seat and be passive. In the virtual world, nothing happens for the attendees unless they start moving around, interacting with the environment and others in it.
• You can have the environment tailored to your preferences/wishes. Fancy an event in a Hogwarts-like castle or in a futuristic-looking spaceship? No problem, you can even have both at the same time. Since the world is built to your liking, you can obviously “dress” the whole thing in your brand colors and leave other unique clues scattered around the environment to make it your own.
• It gives you the opportunity to bring together colleagues who are in different locations across a country, region, or the world — something that would be prohibitively costly to do in the real world.

Tempted to give it a try? Here’s what I think you need to take into account to make it a success:

Treat it like an offline event

The world may be virtual, but the needs of the attending humans are no different than if they were meeting in person. Keep that in mind at all times when considering how much time, effort, and yes, budget, it will take to make it great. Inviting people into the environment is only the first step — you still need to offer them a good quality program, create opportunities for interactions, make sure they feel comfortable and welcome, and have the support they need throughout the event.

Have a support team lined up to help the attendees feel welcome and comfortable. Make things as easy as possible and provide support throughout the event — in our case, we opened up a dedicated slack channel, our default chatting platform, to quickly resolve any issues and answer questions.

GIGO

Garbage in, garbage out, they say. Your party-goers’ experience will be only as good as the program/content you provide. In the virtual world, building a big stage and inviting people to it is easy. But if the programming is no good, no one will want to watch or listen, and you will hear about it once the feedback comes back in. The better the program you offer, the more engaged your attendees will be and the more reasons they will find to stick around at the event. So either make sure to dedicate an internal team to it or outsource this part of the preparation to an external provider.

For our event, involving outside experts made all the difference. We teamed up with Skola Improvizace, whose amazing group of instructors prepared a series of fun improvisation-based workshops. We also enrolled Cryptomania, who delivered a series of incredible cipher challenges that pitted small teams of colleagues against each other.

Break the laws of nature

Back in November when we first started toying with the idea of having our holiday party in a virtual world, we tested the waters with a few colleagues, asking them about what they thought about the idea. The most common objections and reactions typically went like this: Are you serious, another online event? We are all over-zoomed as it is… Well, maybe the platform is actually OK, but a party is about being able to have a drink and a laugh with someone in person, no? …. I really don’t think this will work…

Sure, I get it, these are all valid points (well maybe except for the third one:) But as Theodore Roosevelt said: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Well, we weren’t ready to do nothing and not have an event, going “virtual” therefore made complete sense. And in some ways, relocating the party from an actual to a virtual world gave us the permission to break or outright ignore the laws of nature which would normally apply. It also gave us the opportunity to exploit the potential of the virtual world to the fullest and turn it to our advantage.

• Ignoring the limitations of an actual world, we built three different environments for our event — a winter wonderland, a beach, and a nightclub, all connected through a futuristic portal, enabling the attendees to quickly teleport themselves to their destination of choice. This setup gave our party-goers a variety of places to explore and things to do.
• We dressed our organizing team in an Avast-exclusive Avatar “skin” (uniform), making them easily recognizable and accessible to all attendees who needed help and support during the event.
• We guided the attendees to certain activities by rewarding them with enhanced “superpowers” on completion of a task or a challenge. For example, upon successfully navigating out of a maze, they were able to unlock the flying feature — and believe me, in a vast virtual world that spans across multiple different destination sites, flying comes in handy:)

To be fair, the virtual world obviously comes with limitations — for example, when you met another avatar, it was impossible to read its emotions, and that made interactions more difficult. We weren’t willing to settle for this hindrance and found a way to deal with it — that’s how the “wheel of emotion” was born — a new feature was added, allowing every user to select a gesture and/or action, and enabling them to indicate to others how they were feeling. Thanks to this tweak, the avatars can now wave at each other, swing their hips, and even dance, Gangam style :)

“Ready in the flashiest of flashes”

If you were organizing an event for 1000+ people in the real world, you would give yourself plenty of time to prepare it. I would strongly recommend taking the same approach when planning a virtual event. Devoting enough time (8+ weeks) to planning and preparation is critical if you want to make it a success. In the beginning, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the platform and its potential. If you don’t get a good grasp of all the available options and features, it will make any subsequent planning difficult and inefficient. As your first step, create a brief that articulates the event goals, so that you are clear about what you are trying to achieve. It will guide your subsequent decision-making process and help you chose the right things to incorporate and the right partners to onboard. Once you start creating your virtual world and all of its contents, collaborate early end often with the Confer-O-Matic team to enable or add any functionalities that are critical for you.

“You won’t regret it”

When the party was over and we collected the feedback, the reactions were mixed. Understandably, as I believe that’s always the case when you try something new, untested. Some people felt the whole concept was wrong and thought we should simply put off such events until it’s possible to meet in person again. Others had technical difficulties which prevented them from enjoying the experience. A few felt we didn’t do a good enough job on the program and that the whole thing was a waste of time. That’s OK, constructive feedback has always been the propeller of future improvements.

But from all those people who liked it, we heard things like these:

• Awesome idea — to meet in the virtual world and have some activities together!
• In these hard times, it was a great opportunity to meet other people “informally” or what is even better by chance
• I loved just being able to bump into people and then chat
• I also just thought the whole things was much more fun than I expected
• As someone usually not liking big gatherings or parties, I have to say this was a great, enjoyable, surprising event. And I had the impression that one could enjoy it in many different ways. So big thanks for making this happen!

Comments like these are what make it worth the effort. So if you want to connect your people and recreate that long-lost magic of inadvertent encounters and moments of serendipity, give a virtual world a chance. After all, it is so much more than a zoom call…