Let’s take this online
In mid May, the staff at Veloz, a nonprofit organization focused on electrifying transportation in California, came to me with a challenge. Their July member meeting, scheduled to be an in-person round table in Downtown Los Angeles, was going to be impacted by COVID-19 travel restrictions. Like most event planners, they wondered how to take the meeting online. The conference involved 50 members around a table discussing state policy, industry marketing, and increasing member investment. How would we move it to an online format while maintaining the networking, conversation and attendee engagement of the in-person meeting? How could we make members feel valued and invested in the organization without being with them in person?
Author and Technical Director Tim Kerbavaz takes a selfie during a session break while managing the webinar from the client’s office.
They were familiar with Zoom, and already had a Webinar license, but weren’t sure how to ensure good audio and video quality as their Executive Director hosted the meeting. They also wanted to provide an extra level of engagement for their members as they participated in the meeting.
In order to ensure that all the member organizations were able to participate in the discussions, each member was asked to designate one delegate to have a seat at the virtual Zoom Webinar table. These appointed delegates were invited to the webinar as panelists, so that they could participate in the round-table discussion. Any other member representatives, or attendees from non-member organizations, were enrolled as listen-only attendees to streamline the conversation in the meeting.
In addition to pre-production planning, Talon provided onsite AV support at the Veloz office. We turned a conference room into a studio with camera, lighting, and audio equipment, allowing the Director to host the meeting on camera with high-quality video. Talon staff remotely controlled the production from down the hall in an office suite to preserve social distance and prevent noise or distraction on camera.
Make your guests feel at home, at home
Custom Camping-Style Coffee Mugs were sent out along with freshly roasted coffee beans from a local roaster.
To ensure members felt valued, and to ensure they were alert and attentive for the meeting, each member delegate was sent a Veloz-branded coffee mug and a bag of locally-roasted coffee. We partnered with Sacramento, CA -based Seasons Coffee Roasters. Seasons offers a retail mail-order coffee service, as well as wholesale beans for retail and foodservice, so they were a natural fit to enlist for both coffee and fulfilment of the gift packages. Boxes were shipped to arrive at attendees homes the weekend before the event, to allow plenty of time to enjoy the coffee and be ready for the meeting.
What’s that sound?
Screenshot from the webinar of DJ Jon VonRonk spinning records for the conference audience.
To set the tone of the meeting, attendees were greeted by Sacramento local vinyl DJ Jon VonRonk from Kicksville Vinyl & Vintage spinning records on the webinar, joining us live from his home studio. Because the audio from the DJ’s studio was music, not speech, Zoom’s standard audio processing would have interfered with the quality of playback. To prevent this, we adjusted some key audio settings within Zoom to disable the noise and echo cancellation processing, ensuring the highest possible music fidelity in the webinar environment. While the music played, attendees were presented with some light-hearted polling questions designed to spark conversations and encourage creative thinking before the discussions began in earnest.
Feel-Good Impact
Many members made a point to have their coffee mug in the frame for the call, even a few who admitted it was filled with water because they preferred tea or cocoa to coffee. Throughout the conference, and in a subsequent meeting of the same group, members exclaimed how exciting it was to have a DJ open and close the meeting. “I’ve never been to a webinar with a live DJ before” said several attendees. Some guests lamented that they don’t have music to greet them at all their conferences.
Overall guests responded with great excitement to the “virtual coffee break” and it provided a great example of combining creative attendee engagement tools to keep virtual event attendees interested and connected to the meeting and message.
Tim Kerbavaz (he/him) is the founder and Technical Director of Talon Entertainment Audio Visual as well as a freelance Technical Producer with over a decade in corporate event production after an early career in live music production management. As both a live event technology professional and a creative geek, Tim serves as an event technology sherpa, guiding clients through production and technology decision making and delivering events to production bliss.