Never heard the term Virtual Event Manager (VEM)? Luckily, the meaning is pretty self-explanatory:
A Virtual Event Manager is a tool designed to help facilitate your virtual events.
As more of our lives take place in virtual spaces, it’s becoming more important than ever to make sure our live online interactions are as seamless and engaging as possible.
But let’s face it, facilitating these experiences is HARD. Veteran tools like Google calendar might be great for 1-on-1 meetings or small groups, but it’s not great for larger, more complex groups like bootcamps, cohort-based courses, or online communities.
That’s where a Virtual Event Manager comes in.
But what are the pitfalls of managing events without a VEM? And how can a VEM solve these problems to make sure your events are 100% delightful? We share our thoughts below.
Here are some of the major challenges you may face when running live online events without a VEM:
1) Awareness
It can be tricky to make sure the right people find out about the right events. What if you invite the wrong group of students? What if you create your event on the wrong calendar? Who’s who? Without adequate segmentation, you might end up with a confused group at your next session (or no one at all)!
2) Accessibility
By now, it’s likely that we’ve all had live online event join mishaps - can’t find the Zoom link, can’t find the password, got the time wrong, etc. Without an easy to follow event join process, members might not know where to go or what information they need, which can lead to last-minute confusion.
3) Engagement
Let’s be honest - live online events can sometimes be dull. Getting members to consistently attend and interact can sometimes feel like pulling teeth. With our increasingly short attention spans, if you don’t keep things simple, you’re likely to lose attendees and momentum.
When you leverage a VEM, you can automate tasks and overcome human error. Any good VEM should solve these problems:
1) Audience management
Instead of having to copy and paste email addresses into Google Calendar, a good VEM can keep track of who you regularly host events with and automatically populate their emails into calendar invites. That way you can be 100% sure that your invites are going to the right people.
2) Calendar automation
The whole purpose of a VEM is to automate the logistics around creating events.
Automations for calendar invites, tracking attendance, exporting data, sending surveys, etc… Not to mention that a good VEM makes joining events totally seamless with accessible join links and easy to follow join instructions.
3) Attendance Tracking
The best way to track engagement is to see who’s actually showing up to your events.
A VEM can tell you which members are most actively attending events and which ones are at risk of falling off. With detailed attendance data, you can keep tabs on your event performance and get ideas for iteration and improvement as time goes on.
4) Data Exporting
While your data can live in a VEM, a good VEM should be able to sync this data between your source of truth for your member data - whether that’s Airtable, a CRM, or something else.
Why is a VEM better than Google Calendar alone? Find out here.
Virtually’s Virtual Event Manager (VEM) goes above and beyond these basic VEM requirements.
With Virtually, you can automate the hairy logistics of hosting events on Zoom. We take care of scheduling, sending reminders, tracking attendance and collecting feedback so you can focus on delivering an exceptional member experience (while also playing well with your chosen community platform or learning management system (LMS)).
Schedule a demo call with a Virtually team member to learn how to simplify your event management or get started for free.
Read next: Here’s How to Get Members to Show Up to Live Events
Laura Marks is Head of Customer Experience at Virtually