How to Host a Hybrid Conference in a Physical Venue

With professional teams growing more global by the day, we’re seeing more Melbourne businesses investing in remote enrichment for staff overseas. Keeping remote team members engaged and involved can help unify global teams and encourage interpersonal relationship building, leading to smoother digital communications and strengthened collaboration.

On top of this, events like hybrid conferences that integrate participation across both local and global staff, help facilitate knowledge sharing across diverse teams. In a nutshell, hybrid conferences help globalised teams take full advantage of their diversity of cultures, professional backgrounds, and experiences.

Granted, hybrid conference models are still pretty new, so it’s fair to have some questions on how you can set your enterprise up for success with its first foray into hybrid conference events. So if you’re looking for the right corporate venue to accommodate both on-site and off-site (i.e. remote and/or global attendees), then let today’s guide be your jumping off point for corporate event planning.

Here’s our definitive how-to guide on hosting a hybrid conference and other types of hybrid meeting events for your organisation.

What is a Hybrid Event?

Hybrid events are conferences, seminars, and other types of events that combine both in-person and online or virtual attendance. The construct of hybrid events is popular amongst corporate event planners, as they accommodate professionals working remotely, whilst still ensuring organisations can cultivate and maintain a strong events calendar filled with enrichment and networking opportunities for their staff.

Why Host a Hybrid Conference?

We already touched on some of the major benefits of hybrid conferences above, but let’s collate them for you here:

• Supports communication and collaboration across on-site and remote teams
• Accommodates guest speakers based in other geographic locations
• Reduces travel demands for conference attendees
• Boosts event accessibility for attendees with disabilities, health concerns, family commitments, etc.
• Reduced event expenses (i.e. small venue sizes, reduced catering demands, simplified logistics, etc.)
• Dynamic engagement opportunities (through digital polls, Q&A seminars, live chats, etc.)
• Allows for data harvesting on event engagement, participation, feedback, etc. for improved ROI measurements

How to Host a Hybrid Conference: 10 Key Tips & Tricks

Below, our team of expert event planners at Canvas House have shared their top ten tips gathered from experience on hosting hybrid corporate events.

Here’s how you can make sure your hybrid conference is enriching and engaging for both in-person and remote attendees.

1. Define the Scope of Your Hybrid Conference

Start by first establishing what the purpose of your hybrid conference is. What key takeaways do you want your attendees to have at the end of the day? And what kinds of speakers and subject matter experts will you want to collaborate with?

This is also the perfect phase to finalise your event budget. With strong estimates for your spend, you can determine whether it may be worth ticketing your event (for profit or to cover costs, for example). Gauging attendees vs. cost is also essential for events like corporate dinners where you can anticipate a set cost per head.

2. Send out event invitations and track RSVPs

Once you’ve outlined the scope of your event and whether or not you’ll be offering invitations or paid tickets, you can finally prep your promotional materials, ticketing platforms, and RSVP systems. Establishing a method for tracking RSVPs across all attendees (both in-person and virtual) is essential for maintaining an accurate overview of your attendee list. That way, you can make sure you provide enough seating for in-person attendees, and enough moderator visibility and other support for virtual attendees.

3. Find In-person and Virtual Guest Speakers

The beauty of hybrid conferences is that the hybrid setup works both ways: you can have both virtual attendees to strengthen ticket sales, and also virtual guest speakers to build event interest. In other words, the geographic location of your hybrid conference doesn’t have to be a barrier for prospective guest speakers that may be a great fit for your event, despite the fact that they’re based overseas and are unable to travel.

So the next time you want to invite a TED talker to a business seminar, see if they may be open to being a virtual guest speaker! That way, you can add their image to your promotional materials and inspire greater interest in your upcoming hybrid event.

4. Finalise Your Conference Agenda in Advance

Knowing all that’s on the docket for the day is likely also going to encourage more prospective eventgoers to grab their tickets ahead of time. So work with your fellow corporate event planners and guest speakers to finetune and finalise your conference agenda in advance. That way, there are no surprises on the day of, and your conference speakers and other participants can know exactly what events and activities are running when.

5. Set up Teleconference Links for Each Activity

When you’re choosing a venue for team building activities, you try to make sure your space can be set up optimally for each of the fun things you’ve got planned for the day. The same goes for planning hybrid conferences: you want to make sure your physical event space is not only supportive of in-person attendees, but that your digital infrastructure for the day is also accommodating of virtual attendees as well.

A great way to achieve this is by simply making sure that all the different activity components planned for your day (i.e. different panels, workshops, etc.) all have their own clearly labelled event links. That way, your virtual guests can simply add those links and invites directly to their digital calendar, and click through to the next event/activity they’ve RSVP-ed to with minimal risk of finding themselves in the wrong virtual room by accident. Sorting these links out ahead of time will not only help reduce the stress of event planning for you and your fellow organisers, but it will also help ensure that your virtual attendees can get the very most out of your event experience, leading to stronger reviews and more positive feedback post-event.

6. Use Interactive Tools to Engage All Attendees

This next tip is in a similar vein to #5, but it’s well worth elaborating on. In much the same way that video conferences include interactive features like breakout rooms and digital whiteboards, you’ll also want to make sure that your conference events and panels include interactive tools that engage both in-person and virtual attendees. This can include things like digital polls, fun quizzes where attendees can answer using their phones (and QR codes), and other creative event ideas that can inspire cross-pollination and knowledge sharing across both in-person and virtual attendees.

7. Set up Roving Cameras to Support Video Feeds

Just because your virtual attendees may be watching at home or alone in their own office, it doesn’t mean that they can’t still feel like they’re in the crowd at your conference. This is why hybrid conference planners often set up multiple roving cameras and microphones to showcase not only different angles of event speakers but also to showcase the crowd/audience.

This footage won’t just make your event experience more engaging to your virtual attendees, however. It can also help promote any future events, by helping prospective speakers and event partners in the future verify the participant numbers of your previous successful events.

8. Provide Incentives for In-person and Virtual Attendees

It’s common for business conferences to offer catered lunches to event attendees, but sadly this isn’t really a perk you can offer to virtual guests – so should you still offer catering for hybrid events? Ultimately, the answer to this question is up to you and your fellow event planners, but given our commercial kitchen facilities here at Canvas House, we’ve personally seen plenty of hybrid event planners successfully offering catering to in-person attendees whilst simultaneously providing perks to remote eventgoers.

One option here is to provide satellite catering services by partnering with other local caterers and event planners. This is a great option for hybrid conferences where remote attendees are likely to all be based in the same location. Simply set up catering for your in-person guest list and satellite catering for your congregation of remote attendees that are all logging in together.

And if your remote guest list is more scattered, per se, you can still provide other perks in the form of gift cards, discount offers to master classes or industry equipment, and other financial or professional incentives.

9. Establish On-site and Virtual Event Moderators

Panel events typically have a moderator to help control conversation and the flow of Q&As for on-site events. Contrastingly, virtual events have chat moderators in place to make sure that digital communications stay on-topic.

For hybrid conference events, you’ll naturally need both on-site and virtual moderators, so it’s best to have these positions filled in anticipation of your event day. Here, it definitely pays to do some due diligence and hire experienced moderators, so be sure to ask virtual moderators if they’ve had experience facilitating digital conferences.

10. Provide Channels for Event Feedback

Finally, after any successful corporate event, you’ll naturally want to know what worked and what didn’t. So alongside setting up links to all your panels and activities, you should also share links for attendees (both on-site and virtual) to give their feedback. Whatever insights you can gain from your feedback systems can naturally help you improve your hybrid conference events with every iteration.

Host Your Next Hybrid Conference at Canvas House

At Canvas House, we’ve set up our space to be inclusive of both in-person and virtual eventgoers. Our full AV system with Bluetooth connectivity makes setting up computers and speaker equipment a dream, supporting in-person event planners in getting all their technical infrastructure in place with minimal turnaround times.

Check out all the picture-perfect in-person and virtual conference events we’ve curated in our space across our gallery, or simply get in touch with a member of our dedicated events team to start planning your next hybrid conference.