Gina van der Linden
Senior Event Manager , Europeana Foundation
Four months on from turning all our events online, we've learned a lot. Now, we're sharing that with you in a guide to organising online events and the recording of our webinar on the same subject.
It’s been a fun ride to test, fail, learn and improve running digital events and we would love to share our knowledge and experiences with you. We’ve created the ‘Europeana guide to organising online events’ and we’ve recorded a webinar about what we’ve learnt so far.
This document is a work-in-progress. It is being designed so that we have a set of useful and usable guidelines for digital events organised by Europeana or organised in cooperation with Europeana.
Fantastic webinar from @Europeanaeu Communicators about running webinars and lessons learnt so far. If anyone needs a handy guide to running online events, this one is a great work in progress: https://t.co/TiqckLzahU#europeanacommunities#culturefromhome
— Lisa Randisi (@LisaRandisi) July 7, 2020
The guide takes you through all the decisions you’ll need to make to organise and deliver an online event like a webinar or workshop, from thinking about what you want to achieve and what platform to use, to how to develop your communications plan and support your presenters.
This hands-on guide also provides planning templates to help you with each step - including a planning calendar, action table, roles and responsibilities, presenter brief, example survey and running order, and emergency protocols for when things go wrong.
To give you a taster of our guide, here are our event manager Gina van der Linden’s top tips…
We feel the best way to organise any event is to start by thinking about the kind of experience you would like to offer and what it is you'd like your participants to take away from the event.
Once this is clear, you can start creating a list where you pencil down what is needed to reach that goal.
A tailor-made event plan
A great organising team
A format (workshop/webinar/panel session)
The tool that fits your needs
A communication schedule
Drafting a plan: Write every single step down, even if it doesn't seem important. This means you need to look at the event from the perspective of a speaker, a colleague, an organiser and a participant!
Your team: Build a team and make sure you choose people who own the skills you need to organise an amazing event. Respect each other, listen and have as many meetings as needed to build trust which in the end will result in a strong and solid team.
Format and tool: Not all online meetings are the same or share the same goal. Pick a format and a tool that fits your needs best. Most important here are the amount of people you expect and how interactive you want your meeting to be. Our flowchart may come in handy when making this decision.
Communication: Put your event out there! If people aren’t aware what you are organising they won’t be able to attend.
Don't be scared to make a mistake, we are human, that's just what we do once in while - and you can hear more about our mistakes in...
In this webinar, moderated by Europeana Communicators co-chair Susan Hazan, we talked to some of the people behind the online events that Europeana and the ENA communities have led in the past few months.
The panel discussed how to encourage people to interact in a webinar, how to measure the impact of digital events and what problems we’ve encountered so far - and how to deal with them.
Going to keep raving about that webinar. Used QR codes to share materials and an interactive questionnaire that was really impressive. I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themself needing to teach or run a meeting online. #europeanacommunities
— Cinnamon Stephens (@Artantiq) July 7, 2020
