5 things I learned about online events as an organiser

Since the start of the pandemic, we have all had to make significant changes to our lives. Here in Spain, things went crazy around mid-March. I had just started my new job as a Senior Developer Advocate at Auth0 in February. When the lockdown started, we needed to find a solution to go online - and fast.

That’s when Avocado Labs was born: An online meetup space for online talks and community hours. It started as an experiment - We wanted to have a platform where amazing speakers could still give their talks, as due to the pandemic many conferences were being cancelled or postponed. As an alternative, we wanted to deliver this amazing content to the comfort and safety of your homes.

When we started Avocado Labs, not just the pandemic was on our minds, but also the fact that there are many, many people in the world that just cannot attend in-person events, for whatever reason that may be. We wanted to make it possible for more people in the entire world to access the great content that is normally shared at conferences.

After the first 6 months of running Avocado Labs, I want to share with you some things that I have learned so far:

Experiment! There is no one-fits-all solution.

One of our main priorities is to create a safe and welcoming environment for both speakers and attendees. So, when we first started Avocado Labs, we decided to use a tool we knew and that we were used to: Zoom. We had heard about “Zoombombing” so we decided to make it a Zoom webinar, which allows for only panelists to share their screens. We thought it would be the right option.

We also opted for Meetup as a central event organisation platform, again because it’s a tool we already knew and lots of communities already use it.

In the first episode, we had some chat bombers, which wasn’t very nice. After this we decided to disable chat for attendees. This obviously wasn’t the community vibe we wanted, and it was a very “cold” experience, although we still had the Q&A option open. We knew we had to change.

That’s when we decided to ask our community what they wanted, and I’ll go more into detail about this in my second learning. Long story short, we decided to move away from Zoom, as it turned out not to be what we were looking for. Through our own experiences as speakers at other virtual events, we found an awesome tool called Streamyard, which allows us to stream to both YouTube and Twitch simultaneously.

Streamyard also made it a lot easier to invite speakers, as we only had to share a link with them! We now have this link in the calendar invite and then we hit “Go live” when we are all ready, without the necessity of recording additional tech checks. Streamyard also has a cool feature to add comments to the screen so that both the audience and the speaker can read the questions that we select during Q&A sessions. You can also personalize the live stream with banners, logos and graphics, in order to add branding to your videos.

Streamyard is still the tool we use for streaming today. For testing purposes, we stopped using Meetup for a while somewhere in between, but we went back to it, because it turned out that it was helping us reach our audience. But the moral of this story is that you need to find what’s right for you and your community and it’s OK to try new things or go back to your old ways.

Starting with our next episode, we will be streaming only to Twitch, as we’ve seen a huge decline on the YouTube live stream and a rise in Twitch, but we will still be posting our videos on YouTube later.

Get your audience involved.

There are many ways you can get your audience involved. I actually don’t like the word audience because I believe that Avocado Labs is much more than that. We’re a community and at the end of the day a community is a group of people that share or have certain attitudes and interests in common. In our case it’s all things tech.

We involve our community before and after events by asking them what they want to see on Avocado Labs. During our events with a Q&A session and live chats, we keep a close eye on the comments to block/report/ban anyone who doesn’t follow our Code of Conduct.

We also involve the community in other ways such as helping us decide what tools they’d like to see us using. When we figured out that Zoom wasn’t working for us, we reached out to the community on Twitter and ran a poll to see where they’d like to see us stream to:

Avocado Labs

@avocado_labs

We are trying to build a community for you all and we want your advice! Which platforms do you prefer to watch talks on:

10:48 AM - 22 Jun 2020

(Click on the tweet to see the results!)

We have also reached out to see what event format the community preferred - whether they wanted 1 talk per episode or 2 shorter talks. We asked this because we noticed a decline in our viewers after a certain amount of time. Remember to look at your stats on the platform you’re using because you can learn a lot about what your community wants!

Avocado Labs

@avocado_labs

Would you prefer 1 talk per episode?

We have noticed a decline in our audience towards the end of our episodes and were wondering if maybe our episodes are too long?

16:00 PM - 24 Aug 2020

(Click on the tweet to see the results!)

Figure out what topics your audience wants.

You can figure out what topics your audience wants by doing the two above: Experimenting and asking your community. But also by looking at which episodes attract more attendees than others. I personally feel that events that have more interaction have a higher chance of people attending.

Online talks can always be watched on YouTube later, but having the chance to ask your questions, speak to the speaker or other ways of interacting is more unique and will attract people to actually turn up.

Our community hours, which are 40min episodes where people can bring their questions on the related topic always have a good audience! We’ve hosted episodes on how to get into tech, how to create a product in 2 weeks and even a more Auth0 specific one where people could come and ask their developer support questions.

Also assess the situation: If there’s already a good online event on something you want to share, for example “How to train a puppy”, maybe find something that will differentiate you from the rest!

Report, report!

Trust me, I really don’t enjoy reporting, but I still do it. What do I mean by reporting? Well, putting down in a document how the episode went and why I think it went well or failed miserably. I also add numbers in there, because after a while they can be tricky to find. Those numbers include the amount of live attendees, chat questions, etc. You need to figure out what’s important for you.

Then you can look back at the reports whenever you need to and figure out what worked and what didn’t! Another useful thing is to create a spreadsheet and throw in numbers from each episode and get some graphs. This will make things a lot more visual and also easier to understand.

Tools, just enough but not too many.

Tools are nice to have and we tend to always want the newest fanciest one that has just arrived. It just adds on to our to-do list, so be wary of this! Also, sometimes we think that we might need a tool when actually we might just need a simple spreadsheet.

What do I mean by adds on to our to-do list? That it’s just another thing that we will have to check off our checklist for each episode and trust me, those checklists start off by already being very long.

We use the minimum:

• Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/auth0
• Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/avocado-labs-talks/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ14qQz3cfJLVoaRUdk5JOzOpTvV3BYE4
• Our own Website: http://avocadolabs.dev/
• Google Docs/sheets

Overall there isn’t a one solution that will fit every online event, you do you and make it unique. Just remember that your community will show you what they want and need, so you just need to listen and adapt. Just make sure to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.