What Do Meeting Planners need to know about a hybrid meeting?

What You Need To Know ABOUT HYBRID EVENTS

HYBRID EVENT Tips, Tricks, and Things To Know

What Do Meeting Planners need to know about producing a hybrid meeting? Turns out it’s more than you think.

Tips from expert hybrid meeting speaker Brad Montgomery.

Lately we’ve all been hearing about hybrid meetings. As in: The Association of Cob County Cornhole Players will be hosting a hybrid meeting this year, featuring motivational speaker Corny Cornwallis, presenting his Keynote Address: Kernels of Wisdom: Cornhole in the Age of Covid. Attendees will participate both in person and virtually. Sign up today!!

All joking aside (Corny Cornwallis—hahaha! Hilarious!), hybrid conferences and annual meetings are here to stay folks, and it’s important we know what to expect, how to prepare, and things meeting planners should think about before welcoming your attendees.

First, just a basic—a hybrid meeting features attendees coming to the event in person to hear, say, a funny motivational speaker (like me), and other offerings arranged by the meeting planners in hotel meeting rooms just like in the Before Times. However, hybrid meetings also have many, if not most, attendees participating via Zoom or other on-line platforms, such as Microsoft Teams or GoToMeeting. There are TWO audiences and now the meeting planner suddenly has to plan for twice as many things potentially going wrong: both in terms of in-person attendees as well as those attendees on a virtual platform.

What’s an awesome meeting planner to do? Well, first, meeting planners should hire me, Brad Montgomery, to deliver an awesome funny motivational keynote address that will wow both in-person and virtual attendees. Ok, ok, I’ll back up a bit. While it is important to have a motivational speaker who has experience with hybrid meetings (like me), other things that are important to think about when preparing for one are many-fold.

HYBRID MEETING UPDATE From A Pro Speaker

Here’s a short list:

1. Will you hire a separate production company to handle all the technical details or will the venue staff handle that particular area? While venue tech staff are great with in-person events (usually), they might not be super familiar with all the nuances of hybrid events, such as camera placement, audio-video feeds, monitors and the interactive abilities of the on-line platform. When I do hybrid events or 100% virtual events, I usually hire a production assistant to handle many of the technical details that I don’t want to mess with while I’m interacting with the audience.

2.Will you hire an emcee or moderator to keep things rolling along both in the in-person space and the virtual space? There’s a lot to be said for having an emcee to help manage all of the balls that are in the air at hybrid events—they can put out fires that are happening behind the scenes with your other hybrid speakers; they can make sure the virtual attendees are cued up properly and have access to all of the extra-visual information that a speaker or panelist may be using; they can act as an intermediary between panelists/speakers and the virtual audience by bringing questions and comments to their attention.

3.Having a sound-check is routine for in-person events. Now you have the added issue of conducting audio/video checks for the virtual platform feed, making sure that the video and interactive features work smoothly and that you can anticipate any likely problems during the event. Make sure you schedule enough time for this important dress-rehearsal. And that’s exactly what it is: a dress-rehearsal for your motivational speaker or panelists, so there won’t be any surprises. Practice makes perfect!

4.How will your virtual audience ask questions or offer comments? Will someone be monitoring that aspect of the virtual platform so that the virtual audience always feels they are feeling included. Your hybrid speaker must remember that there are TWO audiences now. Both are equally important, and in many cases, the virtual audience makes up a greater percentage than the in-person audience.

5.Going along with that, be sure to make your motivational speaker aware of all camera locations in the room. It is so important that the presenter speaks into the camera almost as much as she makes eye-contact with the in-person participants. Nothing turns off a virtual attendee more than feeling like the speaker doesn’t even know they are in the room.

Well, I could go on with all the important aspects of hosting a hybrid meeting, but you get the idea. Have I scared you? There is one easy way to help alleviate some of the anxiety that goes along with producing a hybrid event, and I mentioned it before: Make sure you hire an experienced motivational speaker or keynote performer who knows and understands the ins and outs of working with both virtual audiences and in-person audiences AT THE SAME TIME! Who, you might ask, could be this wonderful savior? Why, Brad Montgomery, of course.

I am an experienced funny motivational speaker with years of experience on the platform before live audiences. Now I have multiple hybrid and virtual events under my belt, so I offer meeting planners a sense of confidence that my part of the program will go smoothly. I also have serious emcee chops in the virtual arena and can help you run a virtual and hybrid meeting from start to finish, while adding a lot of funny commentary along the way.

Funny motivational speakers or Zoom speakers or hybrid speakers or online motivational speakers whatever you want to call them often don’t have the experience that I do in pulling more than my weight at hybrid events. A polished and experienced hybrid speaker can put a meeting planner’s mind at ease and help deliver a finished product that garners both rave reviews and imparts valuable information that your group needs to learn.

So give my office a call. We’ll answer your questions, calm your anxieties if this is your first hybrid meeting, and leave you knowing that a successful hybrid meeting is in the bag.

Bio of a Motivational Speaker

Funny Motivational Keynote Speaker Brad Montgomery is an award-winning speaker. He speaks to audiences across the globe (and across the USA), and is based in Denver, Colorado.

Although he speaks to audiences in nearly every industry, he is known as a funny health care speaker, a education speaker for teachers, a real estate speaker, and a sales speaker. He got his start as a magician & comedian, but now is known almost exclusively as keynote speaker.

He speaks both at live, in-person events, as well as online and virtually as a zoom speaker. No matter what you’re trying to accomplish with your audience, if you’re ready to invest in your people, give us a call now.