Few people thought of virtual events before the pandemic struck, but this format has fulfilled a unique and important need for companies and organizations large and small during the pandemic. But what will virtual events’ value be as more of the world attempts to return to life before COVID-19?
To find out, we caught up with top executives and investors in the sector to learn about the big trends they’re seeing — as the sequel to this survey we did in March 2020.
Certain use cases have been proven, they say. Today, you can find numerous small niche events available year-round that might have been buried in the back of a larger in-person conference before 2020. For organizations, internal virtual events can also be instrumental in helping connect and promote engagement for remote-first teams.
However, some respondents acknowledged that low-quality virtual events are growing ever more common, and everyone agreed that there is much more work to be done.
We surveyed:
- Xiaoyin Qu, founder and CEO, Run The World
- Rosie Roca, chief customer officer, Hopin
- Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners India and investor in Hubilo
- Paul Murphy, former investor in Hopin with Northzone (currently co-founder of Katch)
Xiaoyin Qu, founder and CEO, Run The World
With the pandemic hopefully becoming more manageable soon, do you feel a return to in-person events is inevitable?
Certain types of events will go back to in person. Obviously, something to do with a President’s Club — the company rewards you with a party in Hawaii — that kind of thing will not go virtual. I think events more focused on increasing reach will continue to trend toward virtual.
We’re also seeing that many events are getting smaller, more niche. Before the pandemic, if we look at a general pediatric conference, for example, an attendee may only be interested in two topics out of the 200 offered. But now we’ve seen that there’s a rise in many niche events that focus on very specific topics, which helps streamline these events for attendees.
I think such events are still going to happen virtually just because they’re easier to organize and people can have more in-depth conversations. Internal virtual events for employees is another category that is getting more traction, because companies have been going remote. So many the internal events like the company happy hour — events that help employees engage better — we think that’s still going to happen virtually. So there are a number of use cases we think will continue to be virtual and are probably better virtual.
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What sort of trends do you think will emerge once in-person events are possible again?
Another important trend we’re seeing is that a lot of organizers have begun hosting events more frequently. They were doing large conferences in the past, but now they’re pivoting or they’re rethinking their strategy. They realize that hosting maybe 10 events a year is better than hosting one big event every year. A traditional conference is usually multiday, with maybe 200 different topics and 100 different speakers. Now a lot of people are thinking about spreading it out throughout the year.
Our data also lets us see the attendee perspective — they don’t want to spend more than 60 minutes at an event. So now the events are getting shorter, which also means that organizers change the format from like a three-day, 200-speaker, multitrack event to maybe one event every two weeks. They do a one-hour session featuring a 45-minute deep dive by a speaker and change the format as well.
Will screen fatigue play a role in driving decisions once in-person events are permissible?
Screen fatigue is a real problem, but I don’t think it will influence virtual events. I don’t think you can mix those things together, because they are two different issues. Obviously, people have screen fatigue, but the issue is more that you can’t get out [of your house]. When we open up that will be less of an issue because people will have more options.
We have established that there are certain types of events that are going to be better virtually, regardless of screen fatigue. I think events that are looking to shift to in-person will be impacted more by whether or not they will be better in a virtual format. When it’s possible to go to in-person events, people will optimize for the better option whether it’s virtual or in-person.
Do you think more companies will consider adopting a hybrid model to try and get the best of both worlds? What sort of hybrid event models do you think will be prevalent?
Right now, it doesn’t seem like people really know what hybrid means for events. There are a lot of different ideas on how it works. I don’t have a particular prediction, but the industry is open to many different options when it comes to hosting hybrid events. One basic option is to have an in-person conference with a camera set up to livestream to a virtual audience.
Some people believe we can have a networking component that lets you start networking with somebody virtually, and then you can move that networking with them to the in-person part of the event. Another model involves having one in-person event [with everyone] just focused on having fun together and meeting people. Then we can have maybe four or more virtual events focused on the content delivery part.
This obviously gives organizers and attendees all sorts of options. We have some components that are only in-person, some are only virtual, and then maybe the keynote speeches are open to all. Right now, there hasn’t been much practice to see which option works best.
I tend to be bullish on designing the format based on the needs of the event. Designing the virtual to optimize for the virtual attendees and designing the physical to optimize for in-person — if there’s overlap, there’s overlap, and if there’s no overlap, then we’ll see the events happen separately.
Compared to the challenges virtual events faced pre-pandemic, are there any major obstacles in the way? What must virtual events overcome to become a major part of the events industry?
A unique aspect of our industry is that every single event is international. If organizers want to host these amazing conferences, and [if] we can’t support attendees across the globe, it’s just not going to happen. So we’ve been pushing to support all countries from day one regardless of their networking capabilities and their devices. This means we need to have better support on different devices like Android and iOS and web, and account for different networking capabilities.
Certain countries’ network speeds may be slower or, for example in certain parts of China, due to government regulations, participation may be limited. We have to figure out solutions on a region-by-region perspective to make it work well for everyone consistently. I think that was the biggest challenge, but we did it. Now we’re in 150 different countries.
The current solution kind of works as a crisis management option. That was not the case when I first started the company. Even in Q2 last year, it was more about showing organizers the benefits of reaching a wider audience. Right now, we’re good at solving a crisis as a placeholder for an event that got canceled, but that won’t be enough going forward.
I don’t think the level of engagement or interactivity is as good as we want it to be. I think there’s still much room to grow. When you think about virtual events, there often isn’t much excitement, because there aren’t many good virtual events established yet, or because there have been so many bad events.
I don’t think [the term], in particular, is very attractive either. Frankly, when people hear they’ve been invited to virtual events, it’s not as favorable as when they were invited to a physical event in Las Vegas. So we still have certain gaps in terms of experience that do exist, and that is something we need to improve on.
There are other questions we need to answer: How can people interact better with each other? How can they engage better with the content? How can you do something more than in-person events? You have to offer something new every time, and you can’t follow the same playbook because people get bored really easily. So we have to figure out ways that are not just giving a presentation and expecting it to be watched for two hours. I think that there’s still a lot of room to grow in those categories.
Rosie Roca, chief customer officer, Hopin
What trends do you see popping up in event formats? Will we see more organizers lean toward hybrid events when in-person events are feasible?
The key thing to remember is, yes, of the 1,500 customers we surveyed, 30%-35% are hopeful that they’ll be hosting exclusively in-person events. But we are excited about the rest of the 70% of our customers who plan to run at least one or more virtual events in 2021. About 52% of them are driving hybrid events. As events continue to come back and the pandemic hopefully eases up, we expect more customers will combine these strategies to drive more value and accessibility across all the events and programs they’re putting in place.
We’re seeing that transition happening. Our customers and partners have a ton of engagement opportunities and programs they run in a virtual setting. Those may not all be big conference events. We’re seeing at least 72% of them thinking about events in that way. I think we’re going to see more virtual events moving forward.
We’re going to see more tools that help event organizers, community organizers and marketers think about how they create these immersive experiences online that may be complementary to some of the in-person events they’ll have in the future. We’re seeing a transition, disruption and evolution of how we think about virtual spaces and how we think about events.
A lot of the growth in the virtual events market happened because in-person events just weren’t possible. Do you expect that growth to continue as things start to open up?
I think the world is reopening very slowly. At least 64% of the event organizers we surveyed said the pandemic remains their greatest challenge in 2021 and beyond. That’s no surprise, all of us right now are dealing with the uncertainty of the pandemic — even the delta variant today, which certainly has taken a toll on a lot of event organizers over the last year.
Our customers are hosting and continue to host, or plan to host virtual and hybrid events. The benefit of virtual and hybrid events is that they can significantly reduce the number of in-person attendees to minimize the risk, especially in times of uncertainty, as different local and state governments or countries have different policies. It helps them mitigate the impact of sudden changes while also opening up an entirely new set of audience, speakers, participants and sponsors.
We expect organizers to opt for virtual and hybrid events going forward, because the value and experiences these formats create is really important. It has helped them widen their audiences, reach and impact. This is ultimately what they’re looking for.
Since we started in the beginning of 2020, Hopin has grown from a few hundred event creators to more than 100,000 organizations with millions of attendees showing up every month. A lot of that is anchored, obviously, in virtual, but a lot of it has also been hybrid. With the recent acquisition of Boomset, one of the leading providers of onsite event technology, we’re also seeing those events starting to grow and move forward.
Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners India
What does the future hold for virtual events? How do you see hybrid events positioned going forward?
Hybrid is just another buzzword to say that both online and offline events formats will co-exist. Of course they will. Online events expand the pie a hundredfold, just the way online marketing made it possible for anyone to run a marketing “campaign” for as little as $1,000. In the same way, events today are some of the highest ROI formats for marketing, but given the effort it takes to pull together even a small offline event, the barrier to holding an event was high even for larger companies.
Since the pandemic, we have seen the same companies run anywhere between three to five times the number of events in the online format and reach up to 100x the audience. Apple recently touched 100 million viewers for the WWDC.
We expect most corporations going forward to have an online event strategy in parallel with their offline event strategy. Over time, a lot of the growth and money will move to the online format just the way it has in the online/social media marketing world. We still see companies putting banners in physical spaces, but they have significant budgets for online marketing.
So hybrid events could just be a hybrid of both online-only and offline-only event strategies where companies will do both for different outcomes. For instance, they could do a massive online launch event once a year to get many eyeballs, and then host smaller VIP gatherings/watch parties that are more face-to-face and curated.
Alternatively, it could be a hybrid of online and offline formats in a single event — a singular platform that collects data and delivers a cohesive experience across the two formats all synchronized. You could run a treasure hunt for the event attendees with an indoor map published online, where online attendees can hunt for swag together with their offline friends, who then go collect it in the physical world.
How do you expect the demand for event experiences to evolve? What are the key opportunities for startups today, especially those focusing on virtual events?
The online event format is a blank canvas today. Most platforms — and there are hundreds of them — are just event management software that is relevant for just the day of the event. They are basically webinar platforms with some ticketing or registration, and basic chat capabilities bolted on. None of these companies are going to survive — expect a huge amount of consolidation done by leading players such as Hubilo (part of the LVP portfolio), Hopin and Cvent.
The big opportunities are in redefining the online format from the ground up — how about a platform where attendees can play a Fortnite-style game during break, designed as per the brand and mission guidelines of the company? Perhaps have a cameo integration that allows Elon Musk to show up for a five-minute keynote — if he can show up on Clubhouse, there’s a high chance that for the right event, he could show up for five minutes for a $100,000 speaker fee.
We could see a very TV-like experience during online events. Maybe even deep social media integrations that let attendees press and hold a button for five seconds to record a segment of the event and then auto-share it on Twitter with a hashtag.
Such experiences are impossible to create offline. That’s the power of the online format that a few platforms such as Hubilo are building.
Paul Murphy, former investor in Hopin with Northzone (currently co-founder of Katch)
What are the key opportunities for startups today, especially those focusing on virtual events? How do you see hybrid events positioned going forward?
While everyone has screen fatigue right now, the people I talk to on both the event organizer and attendee sides say most events simply don’t justify the travel to attend in-person. I think now that people have a taste for how efficient it can be for attendees, and how organizers can increase the quality of speakers and attendees by offering virtual/hybrid events, it will be here to stay. I think very few events will be offline-only in the future.
For startups, Hopin is a platform that’s created a lot of value in a short period of time. But it’s a trillion-dollar industry. Amazing companies still need to be built for event marketing, streaming, networking, discovery, ticketing, translation and many other areas. There’s a huge opportunity to build great tech both on and off the Hopin platform.
What was your thesis for the Hopin investment?
I made the investment decision for Hopin six months before the pandemic. So while the pandemic created unprecedented tailwinds, my personal view remains unchanged: The event industry is massive, wildly inefficient, and before Hopin, had no default platform to pull together the best technology, whether offline or online.
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