The Case Foundation

The Case Foundation, created by Steve and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world, with the ultimate goal of making giving back a part of everyday life. We create and support initiatives that that leverage new technologies and entrepreneurial approaches to drive innovation in the social sector and encourage individuals to get involved with the communities and causes they care about. www.casefoundation.org

Achieve

Achieve a consulting firm that provides expert guidance and delivers strategies to strengthen donor relationships and increase fundraising performance. Achieve works with nonprofit organizations on millennial engagement, donor acquisition campaigns, and multi-channel fundraising programs. www.achieveguidance.com
 

Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates (JGA)

JGA has been providing authentic, strategic philanthropic consulting services to non-profit clients since 1994. JGA’s team of senior consultants offers client-focused, highly customized philanthropic consulting services to private colleges, independent schools,and large cultural and community organizations. JGA specializes in capital campaign counsel, feasibility studies, philanthropic assessments, and development audits. www.jgacounsel.com

On the morning of June 22, 2011, laptops and desktops across the country booted up as hundreds of people began to fill the virtual halls of the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit (MDS11). The Summit, a collaborative effort between Achieve, Johnson Grossnickle and Associates (JGA) and the Case Foundation, brought together more than 1,000 participants representing 100 organizations. From academic institutions to small community-based organizations and corporate entities to nonprofits, the Summit was created in an effort to spotlight the unique characteristics of the rising generation and to help nonprofit executives better understand how to attract and engage Millennials in their work.

MDS11 was the first attempt at a completely virtual convening for the conference organizers. While we had all tried our hand at a variety of online and live streamed events, from tutorials like the Case Foundation’s Gear Up for Giving and CaseSoup episodes, or webinars like Achieve’s Access, we knew this would be a different kind of experiment, and one that was on a much different scale and level of complexity. The word “experiment” became our mantra—and as we progressed throughout the day we quickly realized that the participants generally felt they were in on this little experiment with us, which helped refine our techniques.

Perhaps it's important to note that online conferences are not an entirely new way of convening and have been attempted in different formats with varying degrees of success for many years now. The American Cancer Society hosted a “virtual gala” using the platform Second Life, and last year, the American Red Cross experimented by simultaneously convening people in-person and around the country to focus on social media and its impact on disaster preparedness. Today, there are a handful of conference providers that have entered the online market space and the technology is advancing in ways that make it possible to incorporate nearly all of the facets of an in-person convening into a virtual setting.

While some will argue that an online convening could never replace the value of the relationships built, and the networking opportunities that stem from being in the same physical location at the same time—there is a strong argument to be made for keeping costs and travel expenses at a minimum and involving individuals from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and industries who may not be able to otherwise participate.

The Millennial Donor Survey was the perfect topic on which to experiment in this type of virtual setting. For the past three and a half years through the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens initiative, and through Achieve and JGA’s Millennial Donor Survey, much has been written about the rising generation and the many ways they are changing our institutions. We knew a virtual convening was very much in line with how Millennials are comfortable connecting, and that often the Millennial voice and presence is left out of more traditional in-person conferences, since older, more senior staff have the budget to attend gatherings and are usually the ones shaping the content. The Summit allowed us to bridge that gap and create a dialogue which was inclusive of different perspectives in terms of age, demographics, geographic location and other important factors.

If you have never participated in a virtual convening, it may be difficult to envision what you’re getting yourself into. Technology has advanced in a way that allows for nearly all of the components of an in-person gathering to take place online. We’ve included some screenshots in this report to help you visualize the experience of a virtual convening, but here are the main elements that made up MDS11:

Plenary Sessions & Breakouts: Plenaries were scheduled so they were the only event happening during that time period. Plenaries allowed a speaker to present on a topic and then invited Q&A from the full audience. Breakout sessions were conducted in a similar format, but several smaller sessions were taking place simultaneously and participants could choose to stay in one for the full 45 minutes or hop around to different sessions. Recordings of all the plenaries and breakouts were made available to registrants for one year following the Summit.

Exhibit Hall: All participants had an opportunity to connect with vendors and organizations in a virtual exhibit hall. The booths look just like booths you might see in an in-person exhibit hall and featured branding and customized structures. Once “in” the hall, attendees could ask questions, video chat one-on-one or simply browse around and pick up virtual swag like codes for discounts or brochures and information.

Lounges: Virtual lounges were set up near the exhibit hall area and coordinated by different sponsors or organizations. During a pre-determined time, conversations on various topics took place in the lounge area and were open to all participants.

Virtual Briefcase: Registrants were also given a virtual briefcase to download session materials, PowerPoint presentations and contacts they could reference after the event.
 

Agenda
 

Anyone who has coordinated a conference or a large in-person gathering has a general idea of what to expect and how to prepare. Inevitably there will be a few name tags out of order, a carnivore will get stuck with a veggie sandwich and someone's boss will have to fill time on stage as the audience awaits a speaker racing across town in traffic to make his keynote. These are all nuisances, but they are also things we have come to expect as inevitable, no matter how much attention we give to detail throughout the planning process. What’s more, since these things are happening in real time and right before our eyes, there are creative ways to troubleshoot. We found that despite the months of planning that go into the day for a virtual conference, there are actually more things that can end up beyond your control than within it. And those things are of course largely, but not completely, related to technology.

One thing to keep in mind during preparation is that everyone has a role to play. A virtual summit is just as much a cross-team project as an in-person conference. We involved everyone from our marketing and communications shops to our IT Departments to make the day a success; we could not have pulled it off without them. A common misperception is that hosting an online virtual conference will be easier or less complicated than an in-person conference; however, that is not necessarily the case.

Here are the best ways you can help prepare your staff for game day:

1. Identify one decision maker: While many staff members will contribute to the development of programming and overall conference logistics, on the day of the event and in the preceding weeks, it is important to have one designated person appointed as the “decision maker.” Things will be moving fast, schedules will likely have to shift and technology will not always be on your side—so, it’s important that one person be able to make last minute calls that could impact the overall flow of the day.


2. Set up a central hub of activity.  The hub will become an in-person war room of sorts. It’s where all the activity on the backend takes place and it’s important to find a location with enough bandwidth and plenty of space to support three different stations of activity.
   
   
   • Station 1: Set up for technology troubleshooting with participants—this becomes a virtual help-line so participants can call or email with specific questions and conference staff can either help troubleshoot or pass them on to the conference provider for additional support.
   
   
   • Station 2: Direct interface with conference provider. It was important to have a constant line of communication with the conference provider to ensure transitions between sessions and events went smoothly and tweaks could be made throughout the day.
   
   
   • Station 3: Direct interface with each of the panelists—ensuring they are prepped, ready to go live with presentations uploaded correctly, etc. This was also the station that monitored a live-feed of the event so we could troubleshoot connection delays and ensure that we always knew what the participants were seeing (or not seeing)!


3. Appoint chat room monitors. Each session should have at least one monitor who can help participants troubleshoot in real time and can also serve as a moderator for questions and comments at the appropriate time in each session. We found that having one designated staff person in each room helped contribute to the flow of conversation and facilitate greater audience engagement. Chat room monitors should be individuals who are familiar with the subject matter and can help generate questions and conversations if there seems to be a delay in participation.


4. Don’t forget to delegate. As with any conference there are many different roles that must be filled. One of the biggest misperceptions is that there are fewer roles in a virtual conference than an in-person one, or that one person can do it all. The online summit platform presents a number of responsibilities that must be filled: panelist and speaker coordinators, technical support, booth contacts, lounge contacts and chat room monitors to name just a few.

Once you have selected a date and a topic conducive to a virtual convening, it's time to spread the word. Given that participants will not be concerned with booking travel in advance to cut costs, we found they are also not so interested in registering for the conference far in advance. In an effort to quickly get some early excitement and begin building an audience, we deployed a few different tactics to build participation.

1. Create a “Blogging Team”: Identify a core group of influential bloggers interested in the topic and have wide readership. We invited several prominent bloggers (Katya Andresen, Beth Kanter, Kivi Miller, Amy Sample Ward and Nathan Hand) in our space to form a special “MDS11 blogging team,” and offered each of them free registrations to give to their readers through social media contests during the weeks leading up to the Summit. We also were able to utilize the SocialCitizens.org platform and the MillennialDonors.com site as central repositories for guest blog posts on related subjects, resource lists, Twitter feeds, exclusive video interviews and more.

    

   

    

2. Identify anchor partners and provide discounts to their networks. In exchange for spreading the word, we offered our partners discount codes for their members if they registered by a certain date. In our case, we partnered with relevant groups we thought would have interested constituents such as Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (EPIP), the HandsOn Network and the Council on Foundations (COF) to promote the conference. This technique not only offered a special benefit to our partners, but also provided much needed awareness and publicity for the event to new markets. We ended up keeping those discounts available until the day of the Summit to further encourage our partners’ continued promotion.
   

    

   

    

3. Partner with a media outlet and find creative ways to leverage their audience and reach. We were able to secure a partnership with The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which highlighted the conference in its publication leading up to the Summit. In addition, MDS11 organizers worked with them to host an online chat the week before with two of our featured speakers. Employing this tactic was another way to build interest in the conversation and create “buzz” among our target audience on and offline. Lastly, we created a targeted media list and promoted the Summit to more than one hundred media outlets in the hope they would either cover the Summit itself, and/or promote the Summit to their own readers.

As with any conference these days, the key is to encourage broad participation outside the conference walls. You know you’ve been successful when people who aren’t at the conference feel like they are missing out as their Twitter and Facebook streams fill up with highlights. The difference with an online conference is that if you can build enough buzz in the first few sessions, people still have an opportunity to register and join for the rest of the day. We saw several instances of this as “on the spot” registrations started to pick up because of social media activity.

Throughout the day and in the days following the Summit, more than 2,000 tweets were recorded using the official conference hashtag, #MDS11. In fact, the Twitter presence was so powerful that a subgroup of participants created a weekly #millennialchat to follow up on topics of interest from the Summit and turn it into an ongoing conversation.

Here are some suggestions to help you keep it social:

1. Designate social media correspondents. Social media correspondents were tasked with keeping the communications happening in real time during the conference. They highlighted interesting quotes from speakers and participants and helped provide additional context for people who may not be at the conference. This ended up being a great role for our interns, as they were able to identify interesting moments throughout the day and help keep the conversations going on both Facebook and Twitter.


2. Create, publicize and use an official hashtag and Twitter handle. We found that Twitter was one of the most powerful tools to bring the conversation to the public and beyond those who were watching the Summit live. In fact, in some cases we received “on the spot” registrations from people who wanted to join the Summit based on the great Twitter traffic they were seeing.

   

3. Blog, Blog and Blog some more. We’d suggest finding bloggers who have an active presence in the space you are highlighting and can rally their readers to get engaged in the conversation in the months and weeks leading up to and following the conference. A few of our designated bloggers also provided live reports from sessions on their blogs as a way to take the conversation beyond the conference participants.

The success of a virtual summit is directly linked to a speaker’s ability to keep an unseen audience attentive and actively engaged throughout the session. You should always try to schedule speakers well in advance and make sure they will be in a location conducive to presenting to a virtual audience on the day of the summit. Speakers may be quick to say yes to a virtual conference, thinking they can participate from whatever city or hotel they happen to be in on that day—but beware, the variables that this arrangement can produce such as sound, lighting and connectivity can (and will) backfire.

With that in mind, here are some tips for preparing your speakers:

1. Ensure your speakers are comfortable communicating without a live audience. It’s important that speakers are able to keep the energy level high throughout the entire presentation, and doing so without an audience to react to can be a difficult feat. Just because a speaker has a dynamic presence in person, it may not come across that way if they're used to feeding off a live audience.


2. Schedule time for an A/V check: Each speaker should do several run-throughs and at least one full A/V check one week prior to the event to make sure they can log in, upload their presentations, test their mics and video, and familiarize themselves with the chat functions and any other tools they may need to access on the day of the summit. This could also be a good time to come up with a “Plan B” scenario in case they encounter technical issues that they cannot address on the day of the event.


3. Keep presentations to 15 minutes and then open the session for Q&A for another 15 minutes. We made the mistake of scheduling sessions for far too long and ended up adjusting halfway through the day. A 30-minute session is about all that an online audience can tune into, not to mention that speaking to a camera or computer with no audience feedback for more than 15 to 20 minutes is difficult to do for even the most seasoned speaker. Beyond 15 to 20 minutes you begin losing people to their email or other online distractions.

For the majority of the more than 1,000 Summit participants, this was the first entirely virtual conference they had attended. With that in mind, it was important to have staff on hand the day of the conference to troubleshoot and ensure a good overall experience to help keep participants engaged and happy during the day.

1. Schedule a participant A/V check: Since this is the first time many conference participants will be engaging in this format, it’s important to schedule a session one week before the conference begins so that participants can log on to the conference system and ensure they don’t have any issues with firewalls or other limitations that prevent them from hearing or seeing presentations. We ended up doing a half hour session as an intro to the day—which was really an opportunity to troubleshoot for those having difficulty accessing the event.

   

2. Email reminders: Send all registered participants reminders the day before and/or the day of the conference so they have the conference information (including their login and password) easily accessible.


3. Incentivize participation: The ease of participating in an online summit (from the comfort of your office or home) can also be a curse. The curse comes in the form of distractions and the inevitable multi-tasking that we are all prone to do. Keeping the attention of audience members in a virtual setting is even more difficult than in person. While it is easier than ever to join a session, it is just as easy to leave when the phone rings or a new email comes through. Given this, organizers must find opportunities for audience participation when designing sessions and panels. Think creatively about giving door prizes during the Q&A or asking questions that encourage participants to weigh in and recognize them for their efforts.

While the perception is that a virtual conference costs very little to host, the reality is that well-planned and well-produced virtual conferences can vary in cost depending on a few key factors: the technology providers, the pre or post-production cost of videos, streaming costs and the use of a conference planner/event producer. Depending on your needs, this could total anywhere from $18,000 to $32,500. When it comes to the attendees, travel and lodging savings are huge, not to mention the lost productivity that may occur during travel.

Our price point was $75 for an individual participant and $350 for an organization (up to five logins). While the price point seemed reasonable, one challenge came with individuals registering and then giving their passwords to others. We would suggest working with the provider to ensure that individuals can only log in one time, trackable by an IP Address.

Reflecting back on the Millennial Donor Summit, one thing is certain, underneath all the fancy new technology, attendees must find value in their participation. Sessions can be packed with great content, but attending all of the sessions back-to-back, while sitting in one place all day, can also result in information overload. Here are some of our biggest takeaways for ensuring a virtual convening “pops” with your audience.

1. Solid planning and execution: Virtual conferences need good planning and execution. It takes time and effort to get this right, and without appropriate planning on the front end you risk losing control of your participants in a bigger way than if you were trying to troubleshoot in person.


2. Trusted technology provider: Streaming and live video is wonderful in concept, but it needs to have a solid technology foundation so it will work no matter what the participant’s environment happens to be. Just because the technology works on your side doesn’t mean the users aren’t running into difficulty with their own firewalls, connection speeds, etc.


3. High energy, informative and interactive sessions. Just like an in-person convening, without these elements, a conference can fall flat and disappoint those who have set aside the time and paid to come together to be inspired. The same holds true in a virtual setting, but getting that right can be more of a challenge.


4. Rockstar panelists. To create interaction, presenters need to be creative, well-prepared, and have a plan for engaging the audience in the Q&A process. Engagement cannot be left up to chance, and is vital to the success of a session. Suddenly in a virtual format, participants have easier access to speakers—if the speaker is responsive to comments and questions from audience members the session will be much more engaging for all.


5. Strong visual appeal. Just like an in-person conference, the appearance of a virtual conference requires attention as well. When our site design was initially set up, the graphics featured a bunch of white men in business suits hanging around the main entrance. That was not the look and feel we were going for, and we worked to make the design reflect the diversity of the crowd we planned to attract. Virtual signage is also important so that participants know exactly where to go and how to navigate to the various venues, be it the discussion lounges, registration, expo hall, etc.