It’s no secret that people are canceling conferences and other events left and right due to the coronavirus pandemic, so what can you do to host a virtual conference?

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Armen Najarian, CMO and Chief Identity Officer at Agari, an email security company. Armen recently had to make the tough decision of canceling his company’s annual customer conference, Trust 2020, and quickly organized a virtual conference to take its place. He walked us through the entire process, what he learned, and how he views the end result. You’ll learn:

* How to message this decision to your organization, your attendees, speakers, partners, and others.

* What the lasting effect of virtual conferences becoming so common in 2020 will be. 

* What the benefits are of a virtual conference over a physical event. 

Trust 2020, was slated for mid-April at a luxury resort in Los Angeles, where Armen has hosted large events in the past. Unfortunately, there will not be a Trust conference this year at any physical venue. Instead, Armen and his team decided to pull the trigger and cancel the physical event and transform it into a virtual conference that will take place on May 5.

Of course, this was not an easy decision. There were a lot of factors to consider, but unfortunately, this is a path many companies and event organizers have to walk down this year.

Making the Tough Decision

At the end of the day, Armen is happy with the way his team adjusted its plans into a virtual conference. Of course, he would have liked Trust 2020 to take place in LA as a physical conference, but considering the circumstances, it’s on track to be a very valuable event to all involved.

But as you can imagine, this was a difficult decision to make.

“We had a lot of angst in the week leading up to making the decision to transition from physical to digital,” Armen said on the podcast. “We psyched ourselves out thinking, ‘oh my goodness the sky is falling, no one will want to show up, our entire workforce is going to be angry,’ and that’s not the case.”

Armen says that despite the inconvenience of being forced to make the transition to a virtual conference, this experience showed him that people are resilient and flexible.

“People understand and embrace the opportunity and are excited about this,” he said. “Don’t get too stressed out about having to make this transition. It’s something that if done reasonably well, is still very valuable, and people get that.”

Breaking The Big News

Anyone who has organized a conference before knows there’s a lot that goes into it and a lot of people behind it.

This means you have to tell everyone about the big change you’re making towards a virtual conference including attendees, speakers, everyone in your organization, the broader market, and the venue.

Of course, this news disappoints many people internally. There were a lot of people at Agari involved in putting the physical conference together, including salespeople who drove many registrations, people who worked hard on content, and more.

Your message to everyone at its most basic level has to be that you’re making a difficult but necessary decision to cancel the physical event, but the show will go on digitally. You will follow up with more information.

What this does is it gets the word out quickly in order to give people plenty of time to cancel travel arrangements and hotel stays, while giving the organizers time to logistically put together the virtual conference.

This is the route Agari took,