While hybrid events are very much here to stay, that doesn’t mean that it’s always a seamless transition from in-person events, to online events, to events combining the best of both worlds. The challenges of hybrid meetings make many organizations hesitant to introduce them to their audiences. Still, the good news is that there is plenty you can do to overcome these challenges and support all your attendees, whether they are with you in person or joining remotely. No matter what your concerns may be, here are five ways for you to overcome the challenges of hybrid meetings and events.

Hybrid Event Challenge #1: Planning Two Events

When planning your first hybrid event, it may feel like you’re planning two events: one for in-person attendees and one for online attendees. If you’re not careful, it will indeed feel like two disparate meetings and not a single seamless hybrid event.

Choosing a meeting platform that supports both approaches seamlessly is essential to support a unified event experience, both online and offline. In particular, this means connecting your in-person and remote attendees, both with each other and with the speakers and presenters, to ensure that nobody feels left out and to maintain a high-quality experience across the board.

It’s also important not to go overboard with experimental features at the expense of attendee satisfaction and engagement. Working with a hybrid event planning expert will help you choose the right event technology to support your goals without draining your budget – which is easily done when you first transition to hybrid meetings.

Hybrid Event Challenge #2: Setting Prices for Events

Many event organizers struggle with event pricing when they switch to hybrid events. This is one of the critical challenges of hybrid meetings because you want to ensure that pricing is fair but also reflects the differing experiences of in-person and remote attendees. For example, remote attendees won’t receive any catering as part of their ticket, so they would usually expect this to be reflected in their ticket price.

If this is your main hybrid event challenge, consider using a tiered approach to pricing. This puts the onus on the attendee to decide on the value of a particular event or experience. For instance, you may offer tickets to in-person attendees for $100, with tickets for remote attendees priced at $75. This allows the attendees to choose the event experience that best suits them without isolating any group.

Where prices differ between in-person and online tickets for your hybrid event, it is worth setting out precisely what each event experience entails. For instance, will remote attendees still be able to participate in networking sessions? What catering will be provided for in-person attendees? Being transparent and upfront about what attendees can expect from each experience will make it easier to justify your pricing tiers and for attendees to select the right ticket.

Hybrid Event Challenge #3: Connecting Online and Onsite Attendees.

One of the major hybrid meeting challenges for event organizers is ensuring that online and onsite attendees are equally engaged and included in activities throughout the event. Online attendees won’t be happy if they are excluded from many of the onsite activities, so it’s important to carefully consider your choice of event technology to maximize involvement and increase engagement at every stage of your event program.

Usually, this means paying extra attention to the online experience, which can often feel like a poor substitute for the in-person experience. Working with a hybrid event planning expert will help you leverage your event platform to set up virtual networking lounges, incorporate tablets onsite to ensure a better connection between onsite and offsite attendees, create social media feeds and replicate in-person resources digitally to ensure maximum inclusion.

A key time to consider is meal breaks. If your in-person attendees break for a catered lunch, what will happen to your remote attendees? Instead of presenting them with a blank screen for an hour, perhaps you could create digital breakout rooms for online networking or allow online attendees to book a time to speak with your event’s presenters. This will help you create equal networking opportunities for all attendees.

Hybrid Event Challenge #4: Catering to Different Time Zones

One of the main hybrid event benefits is the ability to open up your event to attendees outside your immediate area, which significantly expands your global reach. However, this brings with it the challenge of catering to multiple time zones.

Of course, your hybrid event timings will be tied to the onsite experience on a practical level. You can’t expect in-person attendees to turn up to your venue at 11 pm to cater to your online global audience! However, there are ways to overcome this common challenge of hybrid meetings.

Running the event at different times over multiple days (for instance, a Monday afternoon and a Tuesday morning) will help you catch more of your global audience at a suitable time. You may also consider running key sessions more than once for remote attendees or creating on-demand sessions that can be accessed when it suits remote employees.

The beauty of hybrid events means that even in-person attendees can attend online when necessary. Many event organizers choose to run live sessions at a time when the most attendees can participate, which may not sync up with your local time zone. If this is the case, anyone outside the target time zone can watch the session at a more suitable time, leave comments, and ask questions ready for follow-up at a later time.

Hybrid Event Challenge #5: Proving Value to Event Sponsors

Hybrid meetings are still a relatively new concept, meaning many event sponsors are unsure of the benefits it may provide them. However, your hybrid events should be presented as a huge opportunity for sponsors to maximize their investment with widespread brand exposure.

Today’s hybrid meeting platforms allow full customization, supporting digital banner displays and realistic virtual booth environments. Online scheduling apps support “virtual matchmaking” for attendees. Opting for both in-person and online experiences means that you can target a much wider audience, which can only be a plus for your event sponsors.

An added advantage to hybrid meetings is that virtual attendee traffic can be more easily tracked and recorded. You can track who visits your “virtual booths,” who clicks on banners, and what content people are interacting with, which provides you with valuable data to pass onto your event sponsors. This helps you turn one of the challenges of hybrid meetings into a powerful opportunity to understand your attendees better and keep your event sponsors happy as an added bonus.

If you’ve made the switch to hybrid events in the last two years, like the rest of the world, you may be wondering what the impact might be on your overall event strategy and how to proceed now that the world is starting to open up again. Or perhaps you’ve ceased all events entirely and now want to dive into the world of hybrid events. Either way, we’ve got you covered with our top 6 hybrid events benefits.

Hybrid Events Benefit #1: Improved Audience Engagement

One of the major hybrid events benefits is the ability to significantly boost audience engagement, which will hopefully lead to your desired action (such as increased sales, customer loyalty, or improved staff performance.) Hybrid events give your attendees the flexibility to decide exactly how they want to engage, which may include:

• Live Q&A sessions – many people don’t feel comfortable speaking up in front of a large group, so hybrid events ensure that everyone has the chance to ask questions and have their say by typing questions into the online chat or Q&A box
• Gamification – many virtual event platforms today include gamification add-ons, including trivia, competitions, and escape rooms, enhancing the experience for virtual attendees and boosting audience engagement
• Live polling – presenters can conduct polls among attendees in the room but also replicate the poll for virtual attendees to capture everyone’s thoughts and opinions
• Live chat – virtual attendees can participate in the in-person conversation by chatting to other attendees in the online chat
• Small-group breakouts – while your in-person attendees break out into smaller groups to discuss a topic, your virtual attendees can do the same. The presenter can quickly split your online audience into small groups so that they can benefit from the same discussions with their peers
• Networking sessions – virtual attendees often feel that they are missing out on the networking opportunities that take place at in-person events. One of the top hybrid events benefits is replicating the in-person networking experience virtually, allowing your online attendees to engage in group conversations or break away into separate “rooms” for one-to-one conversations

Hybrid Events Benefit #2: Extended Reach

Switching to hybrid and virtual events exponentially increases the reach of your events. Suddenly, you go from inviting attendees in your immediate area to welcoming guests from all over the world. However, this extended reach must be managed properly. If you’re looking to open up your hybrid events to an extended audience, here are some key considerations to bear in mind:

• Consider time zones – always include time zones in your schedules and plan networking and group events with global audiences in mind. That 11 am meeting may work well for your in-person attendees but less well for virtual attendees halfway around the world. This means understanding your desired and potential audience and ensuring you accommodate as many time zones as possible to ensure that global groups don’t feel left out.
• Think about what additional security might be required – hybrid and virtual events can be susceptible to intruders, and running multiple concurrent in-person events (perhaps joined together virtually) will multiply your in-person event security
• Adapt the flow of the event – breaking your event down into smaller segments will help you cater to your wider audience. Perhaps you could restructure the day to allow attendees in different time zones to attend the most relevant parts of your event (such as moving discussions relevant to European attendees to the start of the day to allow them to attend in their afternoon), or clearly publicize the agenda to help virtual attendees understand which segments they should attend.

Hybrid Events Benefit #3: Faster Time To Market

When you switch to hybrid events, you can benefit from enhanced business agility. Opting for hybrid and virtual events means that you no longer need to wait for everyone to be in the same room. Instead, you can gather people together to make the critical decisions that keep your business moving no matter where they are.

This faster time to market is one of the benefits of the hybrid event, as you can collaborate on product launches, advisory boards, feature release meetings, and more without having to fly stakeholders to a single location to talk in person. The sooner you can get people talking and aligned on key issues, the faster you can bring your initiatives to market and start reaping the rewards.

Hybrid Events Benefit #4: Improved ROI

One of the biggest hybrid events benefits is the improved ROI. A hybrid event strategy may enable you to reduce the spending on in-person events, which can significantly impact the overall cost of your events.

Hybrid events also allow you to harness the power of both in-person and virtual experiences. Not only can you address the needs of attendees in your immediate area, but you can also expand the reach of your event and make it easier for people to attend remotely. This keeps travel, accommodation, venue, catering, and resource budgets down, while still providing an engaging, highly tailored experience for your remote attendees.

Unforeseen circumstances, such as extreme weather conditions or last-minute changes and cancelations (which are more common than ever in the post-pandemic world), can have a significant impact on your events budget, so having the option to pivot to a hybrid events model at the last minute will provide “insurance” to make sure your event goes ahead no matter what.

Another of the benefits of hybrid events includes the ability to open up your event to additional sponsorships. A major sponsor based elsewhere in the country (or world) is unlikely to sponsor your local, in-person event. Still, if they know that you are catering to a broader audience, you may have more success in securing more sponsors.

Hybrid Events Benefit #5: More Choice and Flexibility

Potentially the top hybrid event benefit is the extra choice and flexibility afforded to organizations adopting a hybrid meeting model. This applies to meeting planners, presenters, event sponsors, guest speakers, and attendees. Instead of limiting yourself to a specific venue, a limited guest list, and a strict agenda, hybrid and virtual events give you many more options in terms of the type and format of the events you host.

Some attendees will be excited to travel to a new destination and network with their peers in person. Others may not have the time or inclination to travel but want to hear from your speakers. Providing your attendees with the choice to attend in the way that suits them means that the hybrid events model ticks all the boxes.

As well as providing extra flexibility to attendees, it also gives you as an organizer the opportunity to engage with a wider range of speakers and presenters. In-demand speakers may not be able to travel internationally to speak at your event, but a hybrid event means that they can join by video link to address both in-person and virtual attendees. This gives organizers huge potential to attract renowned global speakers to attract even more attendees.

Hybrid Events Benefit #6: More Sustainable Events

 Environmental concerns are becoming increasingly important for event organizers. Going green is no longer a vanity campaign; it’s a necessity. Hybrid events reduce the carbon footprint of having everyone onsite by eliminating travel costs for a proportion of your audience.

Public transport can be encouraged for local in-person attendees, while attendees based further afield have the option to join in virtually. With the right hybrid event setup, remote attendees won’t feel like they are missing out on the in-person action, and you will reduce your environmental impact without reducing your event’s impact.

One way to maximize the sustainability of your event is to reduce the cost of tickets for virtual attendees and explain the sustainability benefits of attending virtually. You could also explicitly tell your hybrid attendees how you will be ensuring the event’s sustainability for everyone, including encouraging the use of public transport, providing digital-only resources, and sourcing local food for the catering.