Community matters.

Months into a global lockdown, many of our communities have been stripped away from us. We’ve had to say goodbye to fellow students, coworkers, and friends — all for an uncertain amount of time. As naturally social creatures, we crave human interaction, yet we currently find ourselves sorely deprived of it.

Over the past couple of months, many of us have found ourselves reflecting on the communities that matter to us. For some, this loss has been particularly poignant. What do you do when your community is defined by in-person gatherings, and when it’s a major source of personal empowerment?

Over the past few weeks, our team has had the pleasure of working with an incredible non-profit that touches the lives of thousands. We’ve proudly helped them revitalize their community at a time where in-person events are impossible, and we think their story is worth sharing.

The community

NOAH, the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, was founded to serve the albinism community via offering both information and support. Their stated vision says it all:

“We envision a world where people with albinism are empowered to be fully-functioning members of society, where barriers and the stigma of difference no longer exist, and where people with albinism have a quality of life that is rewarding, dignified and fulfilling.”

By bringing people with albinism together, NOAH builds a community where those impacted by the rare condition can find meaningful support.

NOAH hosted their first event back in 1982 — a modest 100-person conference. The organization’s flagship conference, NOAH CON 2020, was set to be held in July in Orange County, California.

Obviously, COVID-19 changed everything. Faced with the challenge of bringing this 4-day event completely online, Lori Aubrey, our main point of contact at NOAH, spoke with us to understand how Gatherly could help. Here’s what Lori said about her biggest priorities and concerns around bringing NOAH CON online:

“As our core conference planning team pivoted from an in-person to a virtual event, we knew that we had an abundance of educational content we could deliver, but we were concerned about providing opportunities for the community to informally connect in a meaningful way outside of official programming and sessions. Social interaction is an integral part of our biennial conferences but was proving to be a challenge in planning our virtual event. When selecting a venue for our in-person conference, we pay careful attention to the physical spaces of a property that lend themselves to conversation and connection, facilitating the sharing experiences of living with a rare genetic condition, but we were unsure how to replicate this on a virtual platform.”

Right off the bat, Lori saw the potential in using Gatherly for NOAH CON 2020. Here’s how she described her initial impression of the platform after her first demo with us:

“Upon seeing the Gatherly platform, our team was giddy with excitement about the opportunity to bring people together in a way that most closely replicates in-person interaction. It was the missing piece in our virtual conference plan.”

Excited to be working with such an amazing organization, we quickly began the process of determining some of the specifics for what NOAH CON 2020 would look like on Gatherly.

Prioritizing accessibility

From the get go, the usability of Gatherly for NOAH CON attendees was the number one priority. Not only was this a large scale event — spanning nearly 10 hours over 4 days with a capacity of 1,000+ people, many of the attendees were visually impaired.

Seemingly trivial details such as the contrast of color palettes or the type and size of fonts can play huge roles in determining the usability of software for those who are visually impaired.

In order to account for this, we worked with Lori to customize the colors used on Gatherly’s map to create a high-contrast design. While this wasn’t a customization that we offered previously, we were happy to make this change completely free-of-charge, and now offer it to all of our future clients. After some iteration, here’s the design we settled on:

In order to test the usability of this design, Lori had our team meet with Mike McGowan, NOAH’s Executive Director. Mike faced no issues with the high-contrast design, and was able to use the platform effectively right away. With the green light given from the decision-makers over at NOAH, all that was left was delivering on the actual event.

Delivering a great experience

As a company, we know that hosting an online-event can be a daunting task. So many components, from the planning to the technology, have to come together to create an experience that is ultimately intuitive for organizers and attendees alike.

Once NOAH CON 2020 was underway on Gatherly, we made it a priority to stay flexible and offer quick support. Here’s a few ways we did this during the four days of the event:

• Prior to the start of the event, I gave Lori my personal phone number as well as the phone number of our lead engineer, Piyush, in case she had any urgent questions or technical difficulties.
• When attendees were using Gatherly outside of the predetermined times that NOAH had paid to use the platform for, Lori asked whether she should ask them to get off of the platform. We told her not to worry, as we don’t charge for any stragglers.
• Lori heard from over a dozen NOAH parents that their kids wanted to get on the platform but were not able to due to our terms of service, which requires that individuals are at least 13 years old or are accompanied by a parent or legal guardian (due to federal policies). In order to accommodate these preteens, we set up an extra password-protected room free-of-charge. There were ultimately over 20 preteens that filled out a special waiver to use this room to socialize during the event!

After NOAH CON 2020 was over, I touched base with Mike and Lori (on Gatherly, of course) to discuss their experience. Here’s some of the aspects of the experience that Mike highlighted:

“I really see [Gatherly] as the next step of video conferencing. This is beyond webinars and Zoom. I’m just really blown away by the technology”

“We’ve got some experience doing social distancing via Zoom, but there are some limits. Gatherly really made it a much better experience.”

“I had a number of people say to me that they had been to a number of virtual conferences and they said that this was by far the most engaging.”

“In person experiences are absolutely valuable. We had a lot of people say that they missed hugging people! What I do see with online experiences though is that we can create opportunities to connect people who otherwise couldn’t do it — families can easily spend thousands of dollars to attend an in-person conference.”

Additionally, Lori commented on how she could see NOAH using Gatherly in the future:

“We’re really hoping, moving forwards, to have opportunities to bring people together on Gatherly once in a while. We’re trying to keep people connected between conferences. Usually, it’s 1–2 years before you see one another. You might have the numbers of a few people you meet, but it’s not the same as a group event.”

Our takeaways

After working extensively with the folks over at NOAH over the last few weeks, our team has learned some valuable lessons about hosting accessible online events.

Accessibility isn’t hard, it just requires time and flexibility. Startups often make the mistake of assuming that creating accessible software is too difficult of a task to do until reaching a certain scale. At the end of the day, however, accessible design is good design. When you’re willing to listen to and adapt according to the interests of your clients, it can actually help to improve your product. Working with Lori and Mike certainly cemented accessibility as a core pillar of our product.

Providing great interactive experiences is defining for us. Part of Gatherly’s vision is to improve digital interactions through a delightful online platform. At the end of the day, enabling NOAH CON 2020 attendees from all around the world to gather and interact in a novel way was incredibly gratifying. It’s a feeling we’ll be chasing.

And finally, we’re changing how people think about online events altogether. What started off as a one-time event with NOAH has blossomed into a partnership in which we aim to host multiple recurring events in the future. We’re on a journey to radically improve how people interact with one another online. Once people use our platform, we hope that it’ll change how they think about online events altogether.

We hope to continue bringing communities together despite the current circumstances. Thanks for reading — we’re excited to have you follow our journey!

Looking for a better way to engage online? Zoom not cutting it for your events? Check out Gatherly, a video chat platform built around natural movement and interaction.

Designing accessible online events shouldn’t be hard was originally published in Gatherly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The verdict is out — COVID-19 is normalizing virtual interaction. This isn’t a temporary disruption, but rather the beginning of a larger shift that is making our lives increasingly (if not predominantly) virtual.

While some events have been cancelled or postponed, many have been brought online, often with varying levels of success. In order to understand how events big and small are going virtual, our team has spoken to over 200 event organizers over the past few months.

Many organizers have had to make do with platforms like Zoom, and we’ve learned of some interesting hacks being used to make these events more interactive. While creative, these “solutions” leave much to be desired, and highlight some of the core issues of using traditional video chat platforms for hosting events.

Multiple video calls

Setting aside the current pandemic, imagine a room filled with a hundred people walking around and talking to one another. How are they interacting?

Are they all standing around in one giant circle, waiting for each other to talk one at a time? That’s precisely the experience that putting many attendees onto a single Zoom call creates. In a single video call, one person can talk a time while others are forced to sit around and listen.

In real life, however, many conversations happen in parallel. Groups dynamically form and dissipate as people wander from one conversation to the next. In order to allow multiple conversations to happen in parallel, an interesting approach we’ve heard is that of creating multiple Zoom calls for a single event.

The concept is pretty simple, but execution gets complicated fast. Who should join which call? How do you share the different links? In order to manage concurrent calls, one organizer we spoke to discussed a spreadsheet-based system he used in order to run a recruiting event.

After creating multiple Zoom calls, each manned by different members of his recruiting team, the organizer created a Google Sheet that was then distributed to all the attendees of the event. Here’s an idea of what it looked like:

The document was managed by the hosts of the event, who would edit it in real time to reflect the activity occurring in each of the different Zoom calls. Green signifies calls that are mostly empty and welcome to new people, yellow is for calls nearing capacity and already busy, and red indicates a call that is completely full. All this, just to manage capacity between different conversations within the same event.

Not only is this approach confusing for attendees, placing the burden of communicating the information about each room on the organizers detracts from the overall experience. Instead of focusing on having on engaging conversations with attendees, organizers are distracted by the constant task of updating the central management tool, in this case the Google Sheet, to reflect the state of their room.

In conclusion, while creating multiple Zoom calls might seem promising, it quickly becomes akin to having multiple separate events that are desperately trying to communicate with another via some external tool.

TLDR: would not recommend.

Breakout rooms

So, is all hope lost? If you’re an experienced Zoom user, at this point you might be thinking, “what about breakout rooms?”

On paper, Zoom’s breakout rooms sound like a good way to create parallel discussions within a larger event. Zoom’s instructional video for the feature is linked below:

While the feature does enable hosts to create breakout sessions for an event, the process for doing so is both complex and time consuming. It can take up to 7 separate steps just to split participants into different breakout rooms! To make things worse, attendees in the event have no control over which rooms they’re placed in.

We spoke to a large event organizer (let’s call her Sally) who commonly uses Zoom breakout rooms, and the process she detailed blew our minds:

1. First, Sally conceptualizes a few different topics for breakout rooms. She lets attendees rank the topics in order of preference when they sign up to attend her online event.
2. Next, when the attendees show up and it’s time to use breakout rooms, Sally manually selects which attendees will go into which room, following the preferences she has already received.
3. After the attendees have been placed into their respective rooms, Sally hangs out in the lobby. If any attendee wants to switch rooms, they leave their breakout room and enter the lobby. They then have to switch their display name to the name of the new breakout room that they want to enter.
4. When Sally sees an attendee do this, she will manually move them to that breakout room.

While it’s creative, I’m sure you can imagine the level of confusion an approach like this could create. To make things worse, Sally has to spend valuable event time explaining this system for new attendees. Additionally, Sally isn’t able to take an active role in any of the actual conversations, as she’s bogged down with the monotonous task of manually switching rooms for people who enter the lobby.

Zoom’s breakout rooms are nowhere near as attendee driven as real-life conversations, and the many steps it takes to set them up presents a barrier which hinders fluid interaction. And while some event organizers have hacked together solutions, these unconventional approaches will always be unintuitive and difficult for attendees to get used to.

Accepting defeat

So, how do the vast majority of event organizers host interactive events online? They don’t.

Despite their creativity and drive, event organizers lack the tools necessary to make the most out of their events. While some, as aforementioned, try their best to leverage Zoom to encourage interaction, there’s no easy or effective solution here.

To no fault of their own, event organizers have been forced to accept that natural interaction isn’t feasible on Zoom. The result? Online events have been forced to mimic lectures and webinars — where one person speaks and the others listen.

Zoom (as well as other leading video chat products like Google Hangouts, Cisco Webex, and Microsoft Teams) were built around workplace productivity. Due to COVID-19, however, these platforms are being used for things they were never designed for. Networking events, weddings, social hours — they’re all being hosted on platforms built for company meetings! It’s no wonder that organizers are forced in to hacking together “solutions” to fit their needs.

In this new normal, we should turn to platforms specifically built around quality interaction. You wouldn’t use a hammer to fasten a screw — why compromise and use the wrong tool for your next event?

Looking for a better way to engage online? Zoom not cutting it for your events? Check out Gatherly, a video chat platform built around natural movement and interaction.

Why Zoom doesn’t work for interactive events was originally published in Gatherly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Years of all-nighters. Countless exams, priceless memories, lifelong friends. The college experience is for many a transformative one. A journey from youth to adulthood which culminates in earning a (hopefully useful) degree.

So how’d it go for the class of 2020? I asked a friend who recently graduated:

“Uh yeah so I spent the last 2 months of college stuck at home watching pre-recorded lectures. My fam and I then watched my name on a slideshow during the virtual commencement.”

The class of 2020 has been robbed of an experience of a lifetime. Instead of walking across a stage, pumping their fists in triumph, they watched a chapter of their lives come to a close behind a computer screen. Graduation parties became replaced by disengaging 30-person Zoom calls, and the communities that defined their college experience suddenly felt distant.

The class of 2020 was the first batch of guinea pigs in a social experiment none of us chose to be a part of. COVID-19 has disrupted our ability to interact in-person, forcing us to turn our lives virtual. But as we start to settle into this new norm, how can we continue to engage meaningfully?

What’s changed so far

The impact of COVID-19 on physical interaction has been immediate and widespread. Here are just a few examples of different areas (beyond graduation celebrations) that have been adversely affected.

• Conferences have been forced to adapt. Holding large physical events is out of the question, which hurts the value proposition of many conferences. Without the draw of face-to-face interaction or dynamic networking opportunities, conferences have been cancelled, made free online, or have been replaced with video keynotes.
• Weddings have been upended. For many couples, postponing isn’t an option. Some have gone to great lengths to make the virtual replacement feel special, while others have grappled with the reality of saying “I do” in their living rooms.
• Social, community, and religious gatherings have transformed. Lively conversations that once filled a room have been replaced by large video chats where meaningful interaction can be difficult.

Fundamentally, it’s hard to stay connected online and easy to feel distant. Staring at rows of faces for hours on end can be mentally draining, and more and more people have been complaining of Zoom fatigue. According to a BBC piece on the matter:

“The video call is our reminder of the people we have lost temporarily. It is the distress that every time you see someone online, such as your colleagues, that reminds you we should really be in the workplace together.”

Simply put, this isn’t how we’re used to interacting with one another. In the case of large video chats, the experience is particularly depersonalizing. Personal connections are hard to foster while others look on awkwardly. Furthermore, it’s especially difficult to naturally meet and connect with new people, which makes creating an inclusive environment for newer members of a community challenging. So far, there’s been a lack of effective solutions to these problems for event organizers.

We often ask ourselves, “when will everything go back to normal?” The answer, however, isn’t so straightforward.

Where we’re headed

While it can be reassuring to hold out hope, the fact of the matter is that the changes we’ve experienced so far are not temporary. The world will continue to be a very different place post-COVID.

Online interaction will be normalized not as an afterthought to our daily lives, but as a core part of it. A clear indicator of this is the approach that major companies are taking towards work-from-home (WFH). Facebook and Google, for instance, have both extended their WFH policies until 2021. Twitter went even further, announcing that staff would be able to continue working from home permanently.

These companies are quickly making WFH mainstream. While there are clear benefits when it comes to cost-savings, companies will need to work especially hard to preserve culture and build community. On this front, WFH presents a unique challenge. There’s a clear loss of natural bonding moments, as every interaction has to be planned with meeting links.

Conversations often feel forced on video chat platforms, as they don’t mimic how people naturally interact in real life. Just recall, for instance, some of your most memorable encounters with your colleagues — the moments that make you feel at home in the workplace. How many of those moments happened during work-heavy scheduled meetings? How many happened during casual conversations and encounters?

Simply put, the video chat solutions we use are optimized for productivity, not for meaningful engagement.

In addition to the rise in WFH, there’s been a larger shift in how we think of holding in-person events. Traditional challenges to hosting physical events, such as cost, transportation, and accessibility, have been further exacerbated by social distancing guidelines as well as safety concerns. For many gatherings, the default option for the foreseeable future might be to meet online.

As the months of quarantine turn into years of working from home and interacting with one another behind our screens, we’ll need better solutions. Zoom fatigue can’t become the norm. Staring at rows of faces for hours daily isn’t sustainable.

Whether we thrive in this new normal will be determined by our ability to build and harness the next generation of online communication tools. If we find new ways to interact effectively online, the upside is huge. A future with better online engagement could make events more accessible, and could broaden the reach of communities.

The internet age has shown us the wonders of communication at scale. When it comes to interacting online, COVID-19 has made it clear that we’re due for an upgrade.

Looking for a better way to engage online? Zoom not cutting it for your events? Check out Gatherly, a video chat platform built around natural movement and interaction.

How COVID-19 is normalizing virtual interaction was originally published in Gatherly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.