Tips for preparing your first digital-only event

With businesses adopting a digital mindset during Covid-19, events have a huge question mark on them. Kavita Singh shares some tips on delivering a seamless digital experience for your virtual events.

Map out the game plan

Mobile satellite communications company Inmarsat delivered Flightplan, an all-day broadcast event that was derived in only six weeks. Inmarsat’s mission is to bring connectivity in the aviation industry and it felt that holding a virtual event would be a great way to achieve its goal during this time of uncertainty. Once the company confirmed it was a good idea, it formed a strategy.

Once your company has a concept, you’ll need to figure out how you’re going to support and set the foundation of the event through variables such as budget, people and technology. 

Inmarsat took eight to nine days to find out who was on board in terms of guests, journalists and speakers. When you’re creating your wishlist of people to include as speakers, really consider the topics you want to focus on first and the list should build itself.

Dom Walters, VP of marketing communications and strategy at Inmarsat says: “It started out as a virtual broadcast that would hold debate, insight and conversation which ended up being a 7 ½ hour broadcast event. This was about how we bring everyone together from a brand perspective and that snowballed on leading airlines jumping on board.”

You’ll need to break down the event by every hour. You should ask yourself this key question that Dom asked himself: How are we going to deliver in both an engaging and relevant way?