The end of the first quarter of 2021 marks a full year of the events industry in a Covid world. I think this is a good time to look back at the year past, and to look forward to my view of what's next for our industry.
I am also excited to be in a ballroom again, but I don’t think we’re quite going to just jump back into where we left off when the industry froze in Q1 2020, and I don’t think we should want to.
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?
I’ve found myself asking clients that question on many occasions. Big board meeting. National membership meeting. Round-table committee discussion. Meetings where there are 30 to 100 people who all need to be able to hear and be heard.
I’ll be honest -- you cannot have 50 microphones live at once in one meeting room without digital processing and expect to not have feedback. There’s no way one sound technician can manually keep track of who’s speaking and who’s up next and keep it all going smoothly. It’s not going to be pretty. And think of how many cables you’d need!
Luckily there’s a solution that lets everyone have a mic, prevents feedback, and keeps technicians from ripping their hair out.
It’s called an Audio Discussion System, or alternately known as a “Congress” or push-to-talk system.
