12 January, 2021 | Virtway Events

Organizing a corporative event calls for a great effort from the organizers, as well as a significant investment of the company’s resources. For that, it is essential to have positive results and ensure ROI (return of investment). That is, events should guarantee the generation of an economic value that positively affects the company.

The best way to evaluate an event is by measuring the results, as without this analysis, all efforts could be in vain, and we would not have any information for future events.

With this objective, it is essential that all marketing professional, particularly the event organization specialists, count for their day-to-day tasks with a number of tools to help them analyze the data and the results.

Each action taken within the company can be measured, no matter the type, but, in the case of virtual events, this is multiplied. In fact, online meetings are considered strong tools able to quantify the return of investment achieved, they give us the possibility of obtaining valuable data during and after the events that can be later analyzed to make a real assessment of the results.

This is the objective of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It consists in performance metrics that allow us to gather information and checks if our event had the expected success.

These indicators should have a leading role in the organizer’s agenda, as they offer all the key data to determine the return of investment. Furthermore, they would give us the opportunity of improving future events and optimize the projections of this.

Thus, the advantages of the metrics or KPIs can be summarized in:

Capacity of obtaining valuable information for the company
Possibility of carrying complete result analysis
Great potential for decision making based on objective and reliable data

Fist step in measuring virtual event success: Strategic Planning

When it is time to organize a virtual event, the fear of failure is present for the whole process, especially the fear that the audience will not appear or will disconnect early.

The best advice when planning a virtual meeting is to comprehend what the assistants need, what they expect and what they will obtain. In this sense, it must be borne in mind one fundamental premise: great ideas generate great experiences.

For that, during the planification phase, it is important to reunite all possible information about future attendees. This includes data about what motivates the audience and get to know how the conceive the event and what they expect from it.

By efficiently collecting this information, organizers can guarantee that the offered contents and activities meet the audience’s desires. And most importantly: they would be able to design an event that appeals to the assistant.

In this scenario, virtual worlds are the most favorable environments to create immersive experiences, and for that, they have become great allies for event planners.

8 Core Indicators to Evaluate Virtual Events

Once the event has been planned, it is crucial to use a series of metrics to measure it. Regardless of the stated goal, we should always count with objective reliable data obtained through these KPIs:

1. Check-in

Find out how many assistants have come to the event versus how many registered to attend.

2. Number of regular assistants

This metric allows us to analyze the customer trust and the value of our events.

3. New clients

An essential KPI that allows us to know the number of new clients obtained thanks to the organization of the event.

4. Interest in the activities

Within a virtual event, the activities that can be carried out are numerous. Webinars, Team Building activities, videoconferences, virtual classrooms, etc. For that, when trying to measure the success of our proposal, it is important to collect data regarding which was the most popular.

5. Satisfaction Survey

The best way to know if the assistants have enjoyed the event is by asking them. And, if we plan our questions in terms of numerical answers, the measurement will be even more efficient.

This technique is not only reliable to know the level of satisfaction, but to know to what extent they will recommend the event. The KPI Net Promoter Score provides this information: just by including the question, “From 1 to 10, how likely is it for you to recommend this event to another person?”, we can learn which assistants can be considered as promoters.

6. Interactions

Every virtual event stands out for offering different experiences that encourage the interaction between participants. This metric exists, for instance, to know the number of assistants who visited a company stand at a virtual fair or within an interactive chat, who was the most active, either by speaking with their microphone or by the number of messages sent.

7. Social media interaction

This method of communication is by far superior to the rest nowadays and its measurement is an excellent tool to assess the repercussion of your event. In order to measure it, it is necessary to think about an effective hashtag and follow it to see how many times it has been mentioned by the assistants.

It’s also important to count the number of ‘likes’, both in publications and in mentions or in the company’s profile during and after the event.

8. Gross and net incomes

One of the KPIs that should never be forgotten. It is essential to know the profits made by an event to measure the return of investment.

These are the most important KPIs, but, depending on the kind of business or event we want to organize, we could use others. In fact, in most cases, it is advisable not to choose between one or another metric, but to learn how to combine them to elaborate exhaustive reports that present us a global image of the event and make the appropriate decisions based on these objective data.

Teleworking is the order of the day. No matter if it is full-time or part-time, merging remote with in office work is a formula that has successfully spread in recent years, even before the situation caused by the coronavirus.

Companies that are opting for telecommuting are fostering a change in mentality contrary to the old perception of how and where to perform our professional tasks. Besides, this has entailed major changes in the relation between workers and their workplace, especially in the past few months, when companies were not able to find an alternative.

Even though the number of remote workers has significantly increased in all countries, there is still a lot of work to catch up with countries such as the United States, situated on the top of the list.

This is because, despite it was almost compulsory for companies and its workers to make this change, not all industries and people were, and are, ready to make this new approach part of their everyday life.

By contrast, some American companies have, for some time now, completely eliminated their physical offices, solely relying on remote communication platforms to work with employees located all around the world. Their excellent results show that it is possible to make teleworking the new basis of corporate culture and the foundation of future success.

These are not isolated examples, they are only the tip of the iceberg of a tendency on the rise and which meets the desires of many workers, especially millennials, the generation who has gotten to the business landscape to change the traditional perspective we had until now.

For it, a lot of enterprises are looking for a way of motivating millennials at work, and teleworking is one of the best possible offers, as it is an option increasingly embraced by these young talents.

But they are not the only ones that see telecommuting as a key asset when directing their professional future to one or other company.

It was thus asserted by a recent report on remote working, “State Of Remote Work” (2019), which presents some interesting results regarding the perspective and aspirations of remote workers.

In fact, the results are quite striking: 99% of remote workers plan to continue developing their professions for the rest of their working career. The reasons attributed to this mindset are: a flexible schedule (40%), the possibility of working from anywhere (30%), and having more time to spend with their family (14%).

How to maintain a good "digital relationship": Learn to properly manage remote teams

These and other figures highlight the rise of remote working, an option that will be chosen by even more people after the COVID-19 crisis. But which, despite opening a world of working possibilities, it also presents a number of new challenges.

Coordinating an employee team, involving and motivating them so that they feel as an active part of the organization, promoting the participation in virtual meetings and helping them to effectively manage their time are the main challenges companies have to face.

In a working environment like this, increasingly dynamic and open, it is essential to count with means that can not only help the communication and organization between “on-site” and “virtual” workers, but also enhance productivity and reduce costs.

In this regard, collaborative tools are the key to ensure that the intelligence and knowledge of remote workers is seized upon; but, how to do it? what is the most efficient way to manage this kind of teams?

To find the answer to these questions and help teleworking become a cornerstone of companies, it is essential to consider these 3 fundamental keys to run remote teams:

1. Promote teamwork

Being a remote worker doesn’t mean you have to feel alone. The philosophy of collaboration should be present in every process. Therefore, it is essential to create synergies between all the employees, and not just with them but also with the company as a whole, to build a strong team culture.

As neither the employees nor the employers are in the same physical environment, it is necessary to establish meeting areas. For this, new technologies will play a leading role, particularly those technologies related to virtual worlds, as they will procure close relationships, despite being afar.

The effectiveness of these applications come from the use of VoIP technology, video and chat, thanks to which it is possible to carry out virtual meetings and conferences for remote workers. These are events that allow direct interaction, as they use specific technologic tools that attain immersive experiences in which it is possible for the participants to ask any doubts and for them to be solved in real time.

2. Create learning and developmental opportunities

It’s essential that remote workers are trained continuously, despite not being able to partake in conventional in-person activities. It likely wouldn’t be coherent for the company to opt for the telework, and then, ask them to physically attend training courses.

Company executives should provide innovative training options to help employees strengthen their knowledge and build new skills. And, once more, virtual technology is one of the stand-out solutions. For example, virtual classrooms for businesses.

This is a system that presents a great deal of benefits, such as time saving and cost reduction, together with more flexibility and accessibility, among other things. Hence, these alternatives are considered as essential tools when dealing with the training of remote teams, since it is not necessary for neither of its members to move, just to have a device with internet connection.

These virtual events allow us to create personalized trainings since they give us the chance to install specific plugins and design each of the elements that will make up the virtual classroom. Moreover, its operation is remarkably simple, thanks to intuitive interfaces that allow us to rapidly access not only the platform, but each of the materials shared during the training, no matter the format.

3. Strengthen bonds between workers

In the work environment, no matter if it is presential or not, work is not everything. Interpersonal relations are essential, and they should always exist in order to share experiences and develop our human side together with our social and communicative skills.

To achieve this, virtual Team Building activities are the best option: Recreational proposals designed to encourage communication, integration, and fellowship, among others.

Nowadays, there is a large public offer on this field, but Virtway Events presents one of the most innovative ones. Our company has developed a way of providing, through an advanced virtual 3D technology, immersive experiences inside of a virtual world with interactive avatars.

There are countless options available, all of them designed to provide workers, both remote ones and those who work in the physical company environment, with stimulating online experiences. Virtway Events opted to create 3D interactive avatars, which mimic each of the participants taking part in the activity. These can be used for different group activities oriented to virtual training, from group meetings to conferences or interactive games.

Even if it is indirectly, businesses are greatly benefited by teleworking. They have more freedom of decision and organization, as well as for a real conciliation with the personal and familiar domain. All of this in the end leads to increased productivity. One only has to know how to use the means that technology provides us to efficiently manage a remote team.

Day: January 12, 2021

Metrics to Measure the Success of a Virtual Event