Planning Your Event - Timing

So we’ve thought about the why of your event, we’ve thought about who your main audience is and how you will communicate to them about attending, now we need to get into the meat of planning your event and the first part now is determining when the event should take place and how long it should last. Event producers who are familiar with the cadence of an in person event are often curious whether there are similar optimal times and durations for online events. There is no exact science in answering this - however there are some guiding principles which must be considered:

In Person Events will often require an attendee to take time out from their usual schedule. It may include travel and accommodation. If this is the case for a significant portion of your audience, then it is often wise to make the hassle involved in travel and staying away from home worth it. The event producer must be concerned with the creation of space in the event and time for networking and meetings as well as determining the potential for curated moments in plenary sessions which unite the messaging and can mobilize the entire audience.

Hybrid Events typically have the same considerations as in person events (as it mirrors the in person event). It often comes as a surprise to first-time hybrid event producers that the people attending the online portion of the event are actually physically at the event. They may have other commitments or they’re in a hotel room and they don’t want to miss out on certain parts of the event. It may be that they missed a plenary session because of an offline meeting and they are catching up with the flow of the event. The bottom line with hybrid events is that you should simply mirror the in person schedule.

Exclusively Online Events may be treated slightly differently. Since they don’t require attendees to take time off work, one more significant consideration is that attendees may only be joining outside of work hours (unless you are hosting a work event - in which case, holding it within typical working hours becomes optimal). Many in person expo type events have very little “main stage” time and spread the event over a number of days so that attendees can network, have offline business meetings and grab a coffee or lunch together. These same components are not present with online events. The event is not constrained by a physical place and therefore the times when aspects of the event happen will differ. It is important that you give thought to when your main plenaries in a virtual event happen for this reason. If you typically have longer plenaries, you may think about condensing your main program slightly timewise. I might add that it is important not to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, it is not unusual for our project managers to advise clients on the need to actually include breaks in the schedule rather than just having a multiple hour broadcast. In addition, while you can’t grab lunch with someone online, there are still numerous networking tools that should be factored in. Maybe give thought to how your event can be more than a simple one way broadcast. 

The question remains when you should schedule components within a longer event. There are no hard and fast rules, but we typically see spikes in audience size at the beginning of an event (which is not often the case for in person events) and then when top billed presenters or music acts are on (which is similar to in person events).