Taxonomy of Virtual Event Formats
Which types of events have been moving to virtual environments?
As soon as COVID forced the world to socially distance, every live event format that was previously being done in person pivoted (or at least attempted) to being fully virtual. Facilitators, event planners, field marketers, trainers, grassroots mobilizers and activists, educators- every role, industry, profession, community- had two choices: i.) postpone indefinitely/cancel their in-person event; OR, ii.) quickly adjust/adapt/pivot the event to online.
To help understand the main types of virtual event formats that companies, organizations, brands are hosting, we looked at the broad event types that we’ve seen and organized them by features, both core and specialized.
Below, we classify the major types of online events, with examples of each, and touch on some of the features more critical based on the type of event.
Our company is focused on those virtual event formats featuring many parallel breakout groups, each in active, purposeful, engaging discussions, whereas other platforms might focus on replicating a large conference environment (with parallel presentations and/or branded vendor areas) and/or general purpose conferencing more broadly.
What event types do you host? Which feature areas are most important for those events? What distinctions did we miss?
We’d love to hear your comments below.
By the way, we want to give credit to Helen Bevan with NHS Horizons for inspiring this post as we definitely used her analysis as input for this post as well.
Features That Support All Meeting Types:
- Browser-based (no download) vs. requires download
- Recordings
- Phone or computer options for audio
- Prioritize audio over video
- Hosts’ ability to mute all or selected participants at a time
- Hosts’ ability to turn webcams on/off for everyone
- Chat with all attendees
- Social media event sharing (Facebook, Twitter)
- Late registration for last-minute invites
- Data capture
- App integrations for data upload and activities in events
- Call report (attendees, non-attendees)
- Caller dashboard for mic status, breakout controls and real-time monitoring
To download a PDF version of the taxonomy table above, click below.
Downloadable Taxonomy of Virtual Events (from www.maestroconference.com)
