Conferences have long been the gold standard for exchanging ideas and strengthening professional relationships in business. And since the pandemic has forced governments to apply certain regulations in order to help curb infection. Businesses and organizations learned to adapt.
Following social distancing recommendations and travel restrictions, many businesses and organizations have shifted their in-person conferences to virtual ones. And while online events like webinars existed before the pandemic, virtual conferences further present benefits and challenges to navigate for attendees as well as organizers.
For example, you can attend more than one conference to augment your professional needs while saving money on travel. However, the primary challenge of attending a virtual conference is that you lose out on the face-to-face networking aspect.
No matter the benefits and challenges to a virtual conference, always remember the reason behind why you put it up in the first place. If you’re a business owner or director of an organization, we compiled some reasons why virtual conferences might be a good idea for you.
Reduce travel costs. Needless to say, virtual conferences have removed travel costs altogether. Because of this, more people will be more inclined to attend the conference sans the usual expenses like airfare and hotel accommodation.
Cutting the in-person costs can also significantly reduce the price of admission and lets conference organizers invest their budget elsewhere.
No need to fill up a venue. Since virtual conferences happen entirely online, organizers don’t have to worry about filling a big venue. Thus, they can spend more on paying speakers’ fees and can create more focused events.
Additionally, you no longer need to sign a venue lease 10 months before the conference and hire people to work on that for half a year. You can have 40 attendees and still have a successful conference.
Broader information sharing. Having a varied list of attendees allows for a diverse range of opinions and sharing of information. Being easily able to open the meeting to a wider audience means you can invite opinions from across your business, providing insight and expertise that you may not have access to in a traditional conference.
Environment friendly. Remember, removing all that travel, untouched food, and wasted printouts, can only be a huge advantage to the environment. By hosting your conference virtually, your organization will save a ton of carbon usually associated with travel. So holding your conferences virtually directly helps the environment.
Finally, virtual conferences can scale and accommodate as many participants as needed. While in-person events are restricted by the space available in the hotel or venue. Session rooms have only a limited capacity. With virtual conferences, you can expand registrations and eliminate the need to turn away participants from overcrowded popular sessions.
The pandemic has forced us to adapt to new virtual event strategies to stay in touch with those we serve. And despite the challenge of being in different areas, there are still some ways how you can inject a personal touch into your virtual conferences.
You can send “care packages” to all attendees of your virtual conference. Some items you can include are tumblers, pens, notebooks, and sanitation kits. A perfect item for your care packages is hot towels and wipes you can also customize them to include the name of your business or organization.
Here at Oshiklenz, we have various types of hot towels and wet wipes you can choose from. Just give us a call at (+61) 2 9533 2211 or email info@oshiklenz.com.au and our customer representatives will be glad to assist you.