What Does a Community Need? A Short List of Best Practices
This is our second of three articles pulling from our research on analyzing remote academic events, conferences and communities, looking at the kinds of support and emerging best practices from this space. We, Convocation Research + Design and Simply Secure, were funded by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this work across 2021. Check out first article here.
In our first article, we set the stage about our research with the Sloan Foundation and Simply Secure, exploring what academic remote convenings and communities need and why we are researching digital event best practices. In this article, we outline some of those best practices! The following is a selected series of best practices and observations from our report “What Does A Community Need?”
Our Condensed Series of Best Practices
Digital events require as much organization and curation as an offline event, but they bring new and specific challenges directly related to software and digital environments. Our recommendations might seem a bit obvious at first, but they are all generally focused on streamlined communication, event support, understanding how tools and facilitation can help engagement and why structure for organizers and for attendees. These kinds of recommendations can help lower the burden and cognitive overload that attendees might be facing right now, especially this deep into the pandemic.
Having streamlined and easy to find information about an event is extraordinarily helpful for an academic or researcher, be them senior or junior. Creating a schedule that’s easy to access allows attendees to know when and where they should be online without having to dig through multiple websites, emails, or sign-up sheets. But a schedule helps organizers stay on task and respond to any of the issues that could arise with digital, such as low bandwidth, loss of Wi-Fi, or a tool randomly shutting off. Even with a structure that’s easy to access and follow, having a moderator facilitate a digital event helps situate newcomers, engage junior and senior scholars, and keep conversations flowing. All these recommendations can be utilized to help make digital events more accessible, and engaging for participants, as well as organizers.
Create Clear and Concise Information Update for Users Over Email
Placing key information in email, a very central platform to almost all attendees’ lives, is one of the better ways to inform and update attendees. Scialog sent all event information in an email, along with a link to a Google Drive with key documents. Each day they sent an email only with that upcoming day’s schedule and key information. Scialog used email in a very searchable, serviceable, clear, and legible way. It did not feel overloaded, and it made the experience much more manageable and easier to engage with, even with a jam packed agenda. Conversely, asking attendees to sign up for what could be a new platform for them, such as Discord or Slack, can lead to tool overload, and users ignoring or signing out of the tool, thus missing key information. Email is more searchable, archivable, and used multiple times a day by users. Clear and legible information on easy to access platforms that your audience is already using is key.
Event Planning, Programming and Moderation Matters
Producing an event is a skill. Digital events require just as much planning, organizing, and ‘herding’ of speakers and participants as offline events. There are two key roles within event planning and programming: the event planner or program manager, and the moderator. The event planner or program manager helps plan, coordinate, and run the event, responds to attendee or speaker requests, helps coordinate sessions, provides impromptu tech support, and generally oversees the run of the show. The moderator helps coordinate and run the event sessions, by responding to attendees’ questions in real time, by moderating, mitigating, and de-escalating harm should it arise, and creating a conversation with the speaker, if there is Q&A. In our observations, moderators played a crucial role in helping kick off digital conversations; sometimes there would be a lull or a quietness in the chat until someone started speaking. A moderator can help seed questions and engage participants. These are two separate and necessary jobs for digital events, and ones that need proper resourcing to help a digital event feel engaging, organized, and accessible for attendees.
A Schedule and a Plan Matter for Engagement
While obvious, having a clear plan and schedule matter for event design and community engagement. This includes not just a plan for how the day(s) of the event will run, but also creating a schedule for moderators and organizers to follow, along with creating a schedule for preparation, months in advance before the event itself. For example, Scialog starts planning their events nine months to a year in advance. Within six months of the event, they will have assembled the entire team of organizers, facilitators, speakers, and moderators. For the days of the event, the organizers create a specific schedule and script, along with contingency plans for lost connectivity. For the Scialog event we observed, there were three main organizers, each with two devices connected to different Wi-Fi sources. By having multiple devices, an organizer can be logged in on one machine as an administrator and on the other as an attendee, allowing the organizer to see in real time what an attendee sees. Andrew Feig, one of Scialog’s core organizers and a program director for the Research Corporation for Science Advancement explained, “we’re using [this second device] to see what the participant is seeing, so that we can tell if there’s a faux pas In what’s being projected or screen shared.” Scialog’s multiple devices also provided fast backchannels for the three organizers to message one another.
Having a clearly coordinated schedule, along with multiple devices, worked as a form of a contingency plan for any kind of event and remote specific hiccup that could occur. For example, what if an organizer lost Wi-Fi connectivity? Scialog had a plan for that. Feig mentioned, “we have a written script in the background that none of the participants see, but we have assigned the tasks that we know what each other’s tasks are. And so, if any one of us were to lose connectivity, for some reason, we know what the other person is supposed to do at each time point throughout the entire two days of the meeting.”
However, we also found that the structure and event structure for attendees worked well. One attendee, Professor Trinity Hamilton, mentioned how much she enjoyed the structure, and prompts of sessions, and it helped circle back on thoughts, discussions, and learnings. She mentioned, “I think having the prompts of, ’This is what we want you to discuss in this hour and a half session. And then, the facilitator popping in. And also keeping notes. Because, then the note taker would be like, ’Wait, I didn’t understand what you were saying, and I need to write it down.’ And then at the very end, in the last 10 or 15 minutes, they asked us to summarize what came of our discussion. I think having, again, just that tiny amount of structure, where someone’s writing down key points [was helpful]. And, if that key point wasn’t clear, or they just wanted to make sure, then they could interrupt and say, ’Hey, let’s slow down and just make sure I get this down right.’”
Scheduling Unstructured Time For Participants to Mingle
Another attendee cited the importance of breakout rooms or official spaces for participants to gather, and specifically structuring that ‘unstructured’ time to just engage and meet other participants in the event itself. Melissa Santos recalled, “The one thing that I really like about online events is when we do little breakout rooms, I get to actually talk to some people. I just want my human interactions. And we just didn’t have any of that… this year.”
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Breaks Matter (and Are Needed!)
More than half of our events we attended did not have scheduled breaks. As a result, our researchers would tag team events to create breaks for themselves, but this could provide barriers for a regular participant who would have to decide when to leave or miss an event for a break.
The Tools Chosen for Events Matter…
The tools that the organizers choose shaped the whole experience of the event. Something that is difficult to understand will create friction for users. One of the NBER interviewees (and the organizers) commented on how easy it was to engage with NBER, since they were already comfortable with Zoom from having been trained to use Zoom to teach in their schools, and with Gathertown, which had already been used in other conferences they had attended.
Knowing your audience or community is key in selecting a tool. WeRobot selected a tool that, while it was new to their community, helped replicate some of the ‘in person’ conversations or create more ways to engage, which was what their community needed. WeRobot is a heavily and highly engaged event, with a core community. So, selecting a tool that allows for different kinds of communication and commentary is key.
…and So Does the Training You Offer
WeRobot offered training prior to the event on how to use Whova, which one of our interviewees used. This training helped our interviewee better understand the platform and its design.
Not All Engagement Can Be Equally Measured
Not all engagement is the same and can be measured the same; sometimes cameras off or a quiet chat is not a good indicator of if participants are engaged or not. Most or nearly all of the events we attended were considered high engagement, but with the kind of engagement differing per event. For example, a few interviewees, particularly from more academic and conference based events, lamented participants attending with screens off. However, those same events had a high amount of engagement amongst many different participants in the chat channel.
There is No Hallway — But People Need the Ability to Create Their Own Spaces In Events
Spaces need to exist for participants to have sidebar, semi private and semi public conversations, but those spaces should be created by the events. Multiple conferences, like Write the Docs and WeRobot, chose platforms that allowed for multiple video conferencing rooms to be created and then seen by users within their platforms. WeRobot and Write the Docs then created specific, unstructured socializing rooms; some were even named “Hallway Conversations.”
Switch Up Your Schedule to Accommodate for Time Zones
Most events seem to have a set structure, especially if the event is across multiple days, meaning each day will have the keynote at the same time, with the job fair at the same time, etc. One attendee, based in Europe attending an event with more US centric time zones, mentioned that the event could flip up its schedules on certain days. They suggested having the social hour in the morning one day, and in the evening another day, this way international colleagues could have a chance to engage or participate in that event. This suggestion could apply to all events. Perhaps one day is a bit more US centric, with another day being more centric to another time zone to give all attendees a similar experience.
Nothing Can Replicate in Person
There’s no real way to replicate in-person events. By accepting it’s not the same, perhaps we can yield to this new medium of remote or accept and see its benefits, instead of focusing on what this medium lacks.
While there are many things you can do to support your community, these are just a selection of observations and findings we noticed in our research. If you’re looking for more findings, and best practices, please check out our report. But one of the biggest things we want to emphasize is that all communities are different- and it make take just a little bit of time to figure out which tips and tricks resonate and work best with your community.
