Don't Just Throw Together a Webinar — The Virtual Events Crash Course You Need that intangible magic of getting groups together .......... “Like all the founders, marketers, event organizers and community builders across the country, we’re in this suspended state, pausing offline efforts while we work to bring events online as quickly as we can.” ........ “Everyone, even community experts, are still in the ‘figuring it out’ stage,” says Spinks. “Some, of course, have been doing virtual events already, but it wasn’t their core strategy so it’s still a big shift.” ....... “The startups in the other group are starting from scratch right now and thinking ‘Crap. Our typical sales and marketing channels are drying up, our trade shows are getting canceled. We’ve got to figure online events out, fast.’ But it’s not as simple as just hosting a webinar. There’s a lot more to a virtual event than that.” .............. targeted tactics for making the virtual discussions format more valuable, from the tools to use to the techniques that will help you encourage engaging conversation. .......... wealth of wisdom drawn from over a decade spent deepening the moat of community. ........ now there’s this perfect storm of companies having no choice but to go virtual, and everyone being stuck at home, online and looking for ways to stay engaged and learn. That's making virtual events work really well right now. Most folks are seeing through-the-roof engagement. The jury’s still out though on whether virtual events will work as well after the dust settles. ............. “At the very least, in-person events seem to be on hold for the next few months. So pausing conferences and meetups, until at least the fall, is advisable. While this is a really difficult time for a lot of community teams and event organizers, you can also look at this as an opportunity to sharpen your virtual event chops” .......... you can hit a lot of the same value points of in-person events and lean into some of the unique advantages of virtual gatherings ............... Move quickly. “Everyone’s going to be organizing virtual conferences over the next six months. There will be more competition for attention than ever before. ............ “You don't need a big group to start a community, and you don't need to have a fully-fleshed out community engagement plan to start hosting events. Just start gathering, learning and iterating,” says Spinks. “Growing a community is more like growing a tree than building a house. You don’t need to have blueprints for what it will all look like from day one. Just start bringing people together and over time your community will organically find its form. .......... when you bring the right group of people together into a shared space, with the right purpose, it’s almost impossible for magic to not happen. ................ you just want to get people talking to each other right now and make sure they have a space to do that. .......... “People are organizing meetups, dance parties, music festivals, singing circles and all kinds of different virtual experiences right now. ............ targeted, high-quality content that’s focused on real pain points that real people are experiencing ......... It’s much easier to build a community if you’ve already built an audience. To build an audience, start helping people. To turn it into a community, start helping those people help each other. ........ online, stage space is unlimited, and attendees can choose their own adventure. Rethink the entire experience ......... "Instead of a tote bag, create a digital version where sponsors can include gifts, discounts, gift cards or donations to organizations in need right now. Instead of welcoming everyone into one big room, why not match up every attendee with a relevant buddy? Think about the things you can do at scale online, that you couldn’t do in an offline event.” ........... Ask yourself: What problem are you solving? How are virtual tools uniquely positioned to provide that value? ......... there’s always been a tension between cultivating authentic communities and bringing it back to the business results. “Business and community building have to be integrated. As warm and fuzzy as it may feel, it’s naive to say ‘We're just going to build community and not worry about any business objectives.’ ........... Your members answer support questions and teach others how to use your product, resulting in reduced support costs and customer expansion. ........... Members offer feedback and ideas for improving your product offering. ......... The community drives awareness, leads and prospects. ........... The community contributes content, code or products to your platform. .......... As a result of participating in your community, customers become more loyal, increasing retention. ........ If you’re also measuring the impact on the business, that doesn’t make it less of an “authentic community” initiative. In fact, it’s critical to be able to show the value of your community, because that’s what will help you justify and grow your investment in serving your members. ......................... Make sure you’re actually trying to solve a problem, not just take advantage of an opening. Set both community and business goals and stay accountable to both .......... Measure, measure, measure .............. you can actually gather deeper data with virtual events. ......... With your virtual events, you can go deeper and track who attended each session. Then use surveys to measure community health. Questions like: Do you feel like you belong in this community? Do you feel welcome in this community? ............. Discussion groups have become one of my favorite formats for building community. They’re genuine and intimate. Something about having a small group of people listening makes folks feel like they can be more open and vulnerable. And the networking value is huge. I’ve met so many high-quality humans and formed lasting relationships through discussion groups” ......... Stay under 10 and over 30. .......... Keep the “small” in small group discussion. Stick to 8 or fewer people and extend the conversation to 60-90 minutes so you have the room to dig deeper. ........... When a participant starts taking up all the airspace, you’re the only one in a position to step in, and ask them to step back ........ Finish the call by asking each participant to share one commitment they will make as a result of the discussion, or a next action they will take. .......... “Sometimes it’s important to just let the silence sit, and leave it to your participants to fill it in with their voice.” ........... We need to be much more explicit than we think we need to be in virtual discussions ......... “That means directing specific questions to specific participants. As Nina says, open-ended questions like ‘What do you think about this?’ posed to the whole group is a recipe for radio silence or worse — the dreaded conference call cacophony of multiple participants trying to speak at the same time.” .............. “Even if you’re an extrovert, organizing and interacting all day can be incredibly draining. And what we're seeing right now is unprecedented” ........... “We're adapting to quarantines that could go on for months, shuttered businesses and nonstop worries about our friends and family. For all of us overachievers in the startup world, we already had full plates — and we just had a lot more to worry about dumped onto them.” ........... Reset your lifestyle for the new norm and build habits so that you can continue to take care of yourself for the foreseeable future while this crisis plays out ............... “Social media right now is the most stressful place in the world. There are updates every second about new numbers, sad stories and what the government’s doing. It's really important to control how you're consuming information right now, because it all feels important but it’s easy to get overwhelmed ............. “I'm also trying to lean into my meditation practice, sitting for longer than usual and taking my time in the mornings. And I’m exercising every day, getting my runs in while we're still allowed to go outside unimpeded.” .............. the number one priority is being a resource and helping people right now. It’s not to make more money out of this, or take advantage of opportunities. It's to be there for your community. People around the world are experiencing helplessness, loss of normalcy and lack of connection in a difficult way right now. How can our businesses be that resource for people? How can we create safe spaces for people to come together now when they need it most? ............. “There's nothing that builds community as strongly as shared struggle. If you're canceling events, your business is struggling, and you're having to change up your strategy, bring your community into that process. Be transparent with them about what's happening. Let them help and get involved. You'll be shocked at what your community is capable of when you give them a chance to rally together.”
Why you shouldn’t fear the gray tsunami Many worry that aging populations will doom the world economy and make life miserable for everyone. Here’s why that’s wrong. .......... The aging of the world is happening fast. Americans 65 and older are now 16% of the population and will make up 21% by 2035. At that point, they will outnumber those under 18. ............ Japan leads—more than a quarter of its population is 65 or older—but Germany, Italy, Finland, and much of the rest of the European Union aren’t far behind. A quarter of the people in Europe and North America will be 65 or older by 2050. ........ Not only is the overall population aging; you will probably spend much more of your life being old. ......... on the basis of data from 1980 to 2010, that a 10% increase in the population age 60 and older has decreased growth in GDP per capita by 5.5%. ......... if the past is any lesson, that the aging US population could slow economic growth by 1.2 percentage points this decade and 0.6 percentage points in the next. Some of this will be because fewer people are working, but two-thirds of it will be because the workforce is less productive on average. ............ it’s not that workers become less productive as they age, but that the most productive ones stop working. ......... a big drop in productivity isn’t inevitable. New technologies and business policies might keep talented people working longer. ......... Teams made of both young and old people, with diverse experiences, might even be more productive ......... Countries with aging workforces have been quicker to adopt industrial robots to compensate. The resulting boost to productivity is “softening the doom and gloom around aging” ............ they could help us stay healthier longer in old age. ............ “The most important thing is extending the healthy life span” ........ Beyond being scientifically disingenuous, the aging-as-a-disease crowd is promoting a dangerous message. Not only does treating aging as a disease cast a negative light on getting old, but it distracts us from the most pressing issue: How do we keep ourselves productive and healthy as we grow older? ........... Academic research indicates that Zuckerberg and Khosla are wrong. In a rigorous study that looked at 2.7 million company founders, economists at MIT, the US Census Bureau, and Northwestern University concluded the best entrepreneurs are middle-aged. The fastest-growing startups were created by founders with an average age of 45. In a 2018 paper they found that a 50-year-old entrepreneur was nearly twice as likely to build a highly successful company as a 30-year-old. And contrary to Khosla’s tweet, it turns out that industry experience was a significant positive in predicting success. ............ Blatant age bias might also explain why Silicon Valley has done such a terrible job of creating startups in biomedicine, clean energy, or other areas requiring scientific expertise and knowledge. ...... most great scientific achievements in the physical sciences and medicine come in middle age, not from the precocious young. ........... Ageism is a particularly pernicious bias because it is a fear of our own selves. We’re all going to get old (if we’re lucky) and die.
