Hosting Online Events

So you have a message board on your organization's site, but are you doing anything to promote it? A message board can be a wonderful tool for building relationships and increasing your organization's credibility. But your boards will likely be a pretty lonely place if you don't put some effort into proper planning and marketing. (For more about planning and marketing, see TechSoup's article Using Message Boards to Build Community.)

Hosting online events can be a great way to get new people involved in your community, remind past users why they should come back, and encourage those already participating often.

About Online Events

Online events are much like other events: you'll need an overarching topic; "speakers" (experts in the topic who host the discussions); smaller sub-topics for hosts to discuss; and marketing to get the word out and generate interest. An online event lasts for a specific amount of time, and it takes place in a specific place — a page on your message boards.

Online events give your users a chance to interact with an expert in a specific topic area. They also provide you, the community manager, with a reason to remind them that you are around. They are useful for renewing interest in your community by reminding occasional visitors that the community exists and giving them a reason to return. They can also be a great way to pull in new users who might specialize in some aspect of your event topic.

Events can also facilitate collaboration with other organizations as they provide a platform for networking and sharing ideas. You can ask members of other organizations to serve as hosts, generating publicity for your boards and for their work. And you can involve members of other groups with whom you've never before communicated.

Online events take careful planning, and hosting regular events will make your users come to expect announcements of future events. These events can be a fun way to renew interest in your community, partner with other organizations, and create a buzz on an ongoing basis. They also provide your hosts with an additional opportunity to shine, allowing them to take the stage and lead a conversation for a week.

Planning and Producing an Event

At TechSoup, we've found that the entire event planning process takes approximately four weeks. It can be broken down into three sections: planning, marketing and promotion, and host communication and support.

The Online Events Worksheet (53 KB ) breaks down these tasks into a checklist you can use as you work on your event.

Planning your Event

The planning phase should take place one month before the event is scheduled to occur. This phase includes identifying a topic, finding a host (preferably one with numerous contacts to help promote the event), reviewing roles and responsibilities with the host, and researching organizations that work within the topic area to find additional participants for the event.

Planning and scheduling online events is an ongoing task. Keep the business cards of people you meet at conferences and events, and keep them in mind for future event hosting. Remember, most people welcome the opportunity to talk about their organization's mission, so you will be doing them a favor as well.

It helps to have a few events in mind for future months, in case things need to get switched around at the last moment. Here at TechSoup, we generally schedule monthly events, skipping a few months for holidays. Some events we have held here include: Spammers and Scammers, e-Riding, Web Site Building, Wireless Internet Access, and Digital Storytelling. A successful topic tends to be one that is broad enough to reach a wide audience and timely enough to create a buzz.

Promoting the Event

Online events can only be successful if they are properly promoted. The marketing phase involves the host and the event producer or community owner. Together, they pick the event subtopics are picked (usually picking one for each day works well for weeklong events) and craft the email announcement for the event promotion. The announcement should include the topic and sub-topics, and it should identify the host. By creating a text-only announcement with links and no attachments, you'll ensure that it is accessible to users with different browsers, email clients, and connection speeds.

After everyone has agreed on the announcement, the hosts and community owner should compare their recipient lists to avoid sending multiple announcements to the same contacts. They should also decide who will post the announcement to various listservs, and identify the listservs. If you won't be using your standard announcement for everything, you should still agree on a consistent message regarding the topic of your event and what will be discussed.

Producing an online event gives you a legitimate reason to promote your community to various listservs, as you'll have a topical focus and a specific reason to ask people to visit. Even when your community is more established, you will need to remind your users that you are around and open for business.

While it is easy for the average user to forget that your message board exists, advertising your online community just for its own sake is considered tacky. You can use this to your advantage. Most users find it difficult to remember to participate regularly in an online community, but the time-limited nature of a week-long event creates a sense of urgency. If users know that they can only have access to a certain expert for a week, they will be more inclined to participate, especially if you provide a link directly to the discussion in your announcement.

In addition to the tasks outlined in the Online Events Worksheet (53 KB ) , here are some other simple steps you should follow to market your online event:

• Two days before the event, send a personal message to your short list of contacts to give them advance notice of your event and tell them you will remind them again.
• On the first day of the event, send that reminder to them, and ask them to forward it to their friends and colleagues.
• On that same morning, send the announcement to as many listservs as possible. Ask other members of your organization to send notices to their lists. It is important that you already have a credible presence on these listservs so you are not perceived to be a spammer. This is why involving others from your organization can be helpful; nobody can maintain a credible presence on every relevant list.
• Advertise your event all over your site, in your newsletter (if you have one), and on your message board in the form of (tasteful) banner ads and spotlights.

Allowing the Stars to Shine

In the course of running a message board, you'll find that some users make an extra effort to participate and keep the community alive. It's important to encourage them so that they continue to act as star members. Let them know you acknowledge and appreciate their work.

While recognizing your star members through special titles or by highlighting their profiles is helpful, you'll find no better way to engage them than asking them to use their skills to host an online event. When your hosts are engaged and challenged, they will take the event — and the community as a whole — more seriously and the event will be more successful. This also means that the hosts will expect you to communicate their roles and responsibilities effectively.

Host communication and support involves setting realistic expectations for your hosts. You must inform them of the level of commitment that you expect from them. This includes the number of times you expect them to check in with the event, the number of posts you expect each day, any summaries of discussions you want them to write as a mid-week check-in, and whether you expect them to help procure other experts to assist in the event discussion. The more commitment you require and obtain from your host, the more successful an event will be.

A successful event plan requires an initial e-mail invitation to host, a follow-up email to confirm, a meeting in which both parties agree on roles and responsibilities, a merging of contacts to prevent overlap, and a pre-approved announcement with the event agenda.

Finally, I find that it helps both parties involved to host a wrap-up session after the event where everyone discusses the lessons learned in the course of the event and reviews the participation statistics.

It is often difficult to measure the success of an event, as the definition of success can subjective. The success rate of an event can be determined by the sheer number of posts, although we at TechSoup tend to judge by a few different criteria. The level of the host's involvement and the variety of participants is also a way to judge a successful event. It is also a sign of success if your event yields new active participants and offers to host other events. If you take the time to adequately prepare and promote your event, and to communicate with your hosts, you will have a successful online event that can lead to a successful community.

More Resources

Find more information about nurturing online communities on TechSoup and around the Web:

Examples of successful virtual communities:

• WebJunction
• TechSoup's Community forums
• Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, an invitation-only community whose Life Online forum deals specifically with issues pertaining to managing an online community. You will need to write Howard a note telling him why you want to join the community. (Tell him Susan from TechSoup sent you.)