Demystifying hybrid event budget requirements
Once your hybrid event strategy is in place, next you’ll need to confirm your hybrid event budget and requirements. Don’t forget that a hybrid event combines live and virtual experiences, so you’ll need to think with both an event planning and communication path mindset. In the world of hybrid, the goal is to strategically make two different audience types feel like part of one connected experience.
Solving the Puzzle
In our thirty years of event production experience, it’s safe to say we’ve seen a thing or two. Most companies roll hybrid event costs into a larger event budget. To save yourself some trouble, separate the costs so you can easily identify where you received the most business value.
Here are five hybrid event budget cost areas to consider:
- Program Planning and Pre-Production
- Content Strategy and Execution
- Virtual Platform Assessment
- Live Event Production Requirements
- Virtual Event Production Requirements
Program Planning and Pre-Production
Use this time to identify essential resources and pre-event communications needed to support your overall event objectives. During the initial program planning and pre-production stage, focus on determining creative design requirements, assessing virtual event platform options, scheduling site visits, and securing keynote speakers.
Content Strategy and Execution
This is where your brand and message intersect to confirm how you’ll tell your story. You can use your event to share information through videos, product demonstrations, live and pre-recorded presentations.
PRO TIP: Encourage your virtual attendees to participate in your event theme or messaging by requesting submission of video content. These videos can connect to a theme, an idea, or action and can be incorporated into event media and social media channels. Here are more compelling types of content you can use to increase virtual attendee engagement.
Virtual Platform Assessment
If audience engagement is a key objective, selecting the right virtual platform shouldn’t be taken lightly. The platform is your connection point to the virtual audience – and these days, there are seemingly endless options!
The costs for a virtual platform can vary greatly based upon functionality, interactivity, analytics tracking, and reporting. Again, here is where leaning into your hybrid event strategy is critical. Engagement and interactivity are key and can drive your platform selection, along with price! For smaller scale, one-day virtual meetings, virtual platform pricing can range anywhere from $4,000 to $20,000. Larger scale events typically fall between $20,000 to $75,000, according to MeetingsNet. These are events that include keynote presentations, a general session, and multiple speaking tracks.
PRO TIP: Look for an all-in-one event platform that offers registration and ticketing, event check-in, live engagement and networking, sponsorship and exhibitor management, data analytics, and post-event reporting.
Live Event Production Requirements
Venue-specific or regional regulations will inform design opportunities and attendance numbers. From a hybrid perspective, you’ll need to consider unique ways to bring the virtual audience into the ballroom. This is achievable through multiple camera views. A dynamic mainstage with great site angles and sound is key – and never underestimate the power of lighting to drive impact.
PRO TIP: Punctuality is key – you must run your sessions on time to ensure a seamless connection between your live and virtual audience. Having an experienced live event production team on-site will help keep things on track.
Virtual Event Production Requirements
Connecting live to virtual is what production solves. Thinking like TV, enabling multiple camera views, keynote interviews from the show floor, remote presenters streamed with TV-like graphics are all examples of high-impact virtual production outcomes.
PRO TIP: Streaming and production services will likely be your largest costs, amounting to more than 50 percent of the total budget on average.
When you spread attendees across multiple locations, new technology elements force changes in our method of communication. Different communication and participation environments for content delivery and collaboration are created.
Have more questions on building out a hybrid event budget? We’re happy to help. Contact us and one of our event experts will be in touch to get the conversation started.
