Series: Building a Successful Online Festival in 2021, Tips and Tricks from LTX Fest
Below is the first installment of a 3 part blog series on building a successful online event.
When the pandemic hit and forced the events industry to re-think strategies and plans for 2020, a significant number of conferences decided to cancel their events. Moving an event online seemed like an impossible feat for some, and a big number of organizers decided to postpone theirs until 2021 or indefinitely.
At LTX Fest, which is the largest in-person annual gathering of Latinx tech professionals, we knew that now more than ever, it was critical to create and hold space for the community at such a difficult time. Our community has been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and we wanted to offer them a chance to gather together — virtually — to learn, inspire one another, and network.
Of course, moving a conference online is no easy task, however, LTX Fest successfully hosted the nation’s largest conference for Latinx professionals in tech for the fourth year running, with more than 7,000 registrations!. During 4 days in October, we hosted an online festival with live sessions, recorded talks, online networking and recruitment booths which provided attendees with invaluable knowledge, learning opportunities, job opportunities and a chance to meet and connect with people like them.
We’re proud of what LTX Fest achieved in 2020, and now that we’ve had some time to go through all of it, we wanted to share some of the learnings and best practices with the community. Hosting an online event can seem challenging, but we believe that there a key items that will help you succeed so you, too, can make your online conference a success.
Adapting an in-person event into an online experience
1. Emphasize and Celebrate the Community’s Power
In the initial stages of planning the festival, we turned to the community to find out about what our attendees needed and wanted to learn and hear.
- We hosted listening sessions with community leaders to hear their suggestions and turned to them again for feedback. We also partnered with 24 community organizations to help spread the word and involve them in the event.
The success of any festival or conference depends on the sense of the community it offers, but that sense has to be strong for an online festival:
- Seek out key people or reach out to your potential attendees and ask them what they’re struggling with.
- If you invite speakers, make sure you select experts that align with your audience. A big-name speaker may attract attention, but if they’re not talking on a relevant subject that connects with your community, the talk will fall flat.
The results were more than 2K registrations within the first 48 hours since launch, and more than 7k total registrations by the time the event took place. When you’re planning your online festival, you have to put your community first — you can’t assume you know what the collective wants from your own desires and assumptions.
2. Keep Attendee Costs to a Minimum (or Make it Free)
We knew that, in the nature of putting community first in a global pandemic, we wanted to make the event free for attendees. This meant we could invite more people than ever to attend, and we opened our doors to the wider community since we were no longer confined by physical space and location.
Taking a conference online cuts significant costs from running an in-person conference since you don’t need to pay for the venue, as many staff, and additional benefits for speakers. While it won’t be free, try to find creative solutions to fund the festival’s costs.
- At LTX Fest we worked with our sponsors to bring down entry barriers for attendees and we made sure we were able to cover all of our costs without having to charge any ticket fees. If you want to reach underrepresented communities, this is essential.
- Our event did not suffer due to the price-point being $0, not only this increased attendance, but our sponsors more than supportive to make this a reality by providing extra resources and knowing that the event had no cost to the community.
3. Ask Sponsors to Be Involved
When you’re working with sponsorships to fund your event, it’s important that you don’t simply work with anyone willing to give you the money. We were careful to ensure our sponsors understood our event’s mission and goals and that their business’s values aligned with those of the festival.
We also asked our sponsors to actively participate in the festival, we wanted their experience to be more than the placement of a logo and we built our offerings to involve them in a genuine way.
- When planning their involvement in our event’s content, we asked them to share real stories of their Latinx employees, how they were impacting it and to feature their stories by recording videos sharing their experiences.
- Beyond financial support: each company has a product that your community can benefit from, find creative ways to showcase their products while giving back to the community.
- Comcast, one of our long time supporters and funders, provided the funds to cover the Pitch Competition and we also launched an Instagram giveaway to gift over 350 copies of Latina-authored books.
- During LTX Fest, Skillshare, which was one of our sponsors, offered all attendees a month free subscription and chose 20 attendees to receive a one year membership. This provides sponsors with a bigger brand awareness but it also helps our community to access educational resources to help them learn, deepen or discover skills.
When you’re seeking sponsors for your event, look for aligned companies who are willing to put up more than cash. Can the CEO talk for a few minutes about something that would be valuable to your audience? Can they offer a discount or free access to their platform? Don’t be afraid to respectfully ask for more — the worst they can say is no!
Follow me on Medium to receive a notification for part 2 of this series coming up next week!
If you missed LTX Fest or would like to see some of the sessions in action, you can find the conference available on-demand at www.ltxfest.com. We can’t wait to show you what’s in store for LTX Fest 2021, so make sure you follow our Twitter or Instagram channels to stay up-to-date.
