The North American Collaboration Summit (NACS), the very first hybrid Microsoft community event, is a wrap! It was one day of full day workshops followed by two days of sixty-minute sessions. Throw in an attendee party for on-site folks and raffle prizes for all, and it was an experience I hope attendees, speakers, and sponsors enjoyed and found value in. I really do want to thank everyone that helped make this event possible. It went more smoothly than I could have ever imagined, and I believe hybrid events like these will soon become the norm.

Just to make sure we are all on the same page, by “hybrid” event I mean that all the workshops and sessions would be available to all attendees whether they were in person in Branson, Missouri or at home in their pajamas. I wanted to make sure that everyone participating felt engaged, heard, and that they got value for their money.

In case you are wondering why I decided on a hybrid event, maybe a little backstory will help. This year is the 11^th year for my event and the original dates for the event were April 2-4 in Branson, MO. Two weeks before those dates the world shut down. With two weeks to go we had to postpone the event. What’s more, because it was two weeks away everything had already been ordered, contracts signed, and payments made. It was about the worst timing from a planning perspective. This meant I couldn’t just cancel the event and refund everyone’s money and wait until 2021. So, we postponed until the end of September (surely the world would be back to normal by then?). Well… as the dates drew closer and parts of the country started opening up, other parts of the country remained closed. Employers were not allowing their employees to travel, and the international borders were still closed. I had a decision to make. Do I postpone the event again? Do I move forward with the September dates? Do I bankrupt my organization and just forget the whole thing? It wasn’t a simple decision.

Luckily, my venue (The Hilton Branson Convention Center in Branson, MO) made my decision easy. They had been hosting events since May without any issues. They had new processes for keeping people safe from new sanitation protocols, food service protocols, to setting up seating in all breakout rooms so everyone was spaced 6 feet. Throw in the enhanced cleaning procedures by the hotel and it meant that these folks were prepared and knew what they were doing. Also, the convention center was gracious enough to give us more space in the venue and increased network bandwidth at no extra cost making the decision even easier.

I had a group of speakers willing to participate, some attendees climbing the walls at home to get out, and a venue willing to bend over backwards to keep us safe. I knew that if I could just figure out the technology challenges of putting on a hybrid event that NOW was the time to make it work.

So, I went for it, and I’m glad I did.

TLDR Version

This is an exceptionally long post, if you don’t want to read the whole thing you can jump straight to the “How Did it Go?” section and I’ll do my best to summarize everything I talk about in the middle.

How we did it

After 11 years, we had the on-site piece down. We’ve been at the Branson Landing for several years now and knew exactly what to expect, but how were we going to handle the online piece? Luckily, the Microsoft Teams Product Group were actively working on a “Community Tenant” whose purpose was to host community events using Microsoft Teams. A community event is given its own Team and can pretty much do whatever they want to with it. This was our key to pulling off the online portion of the hybrid event.

Thank you Karuana, Laurie, and team for making it possible for us to have this hybrid experience! The Community Tenant Program will be rolling out of the pilot phase soon! If you’d like to sign up your group for a Team you can request access now at https://aka.ms/communitytenantsignup   

So, now we had the means for the online piece, but how could we structure our Team and take advantage of the many features offered to us through Microsoft Teams to make it work?

Live Events vs. Teams Meetings

The first decision we needed to make: do we want to use Teams Meetings or Teams Live Events? We had used Teams Live Events for a virtual event on April 2^nd for the attendees that originally planned to be in Branson and it went fairly well. However, Teams Live Events do not give attendees a way to really engage with each other since there is no open chat. There was no way to see multiple web cams on the screen at the same time, nor could attendees unmute their mics and talk.

We didn’t just want to talk at our remote attendees! We wanted them to feel engaged!

We decided to go with Teams Meetings instead this time. We weren’t going to hit the size limitations and the ability to speak and chat as an attendee is just critical to help fight frustration if a question isn’t getting answered and helps them feel like they can actually participate. In addition, if we had used Teams Live Events we would have been limited to a 4 hour duration which would not have worked for our workshops.

Channel Setup

Every step of the way we had to think about how to make this event work as a hybrid event. Virtual events have become the new norm, but this event couldn’t work the same way. We couldn’t pre-record all the sessions (and didn’t want to), and because people were getting so burned out on virtual events we wanted to do SOMETHING different to improve the remote experience. So, we heavily relied on channels within Microsoft Teams to structure the Team to behave like an on-site event.

Every physical room at the event in Branson had a corresponding channel in Teams. To attend a session in person, an attendee would walk into a room in Branson. To attend a session remotely, a user would enter the channel for that room and then click on a link for a Teams Meeting to attend the session.

Additionally, I added a couple of “Online Only” tracks so that remote speakers could participate in the event as well and created channels for each of those tracks. On-site attendees could also easily join these online sessions by logging into the Teams Meetings for those sessions.

These channels also gave the speakers a place to upload their slide decks so people could easily find them later.

We did NOT want to create a Teams Meeting for every single session, that would have been tedious to create and maintain. Instead we created a “Morning” Teams Meeting and an “Afternoon” Teams Meeting for each room and made that a repeating event for one day. This greatly reduced the number of meetings we had to maintain while at the same time giving attendees a definite place to go to attend a session.

You may be wondering why we didn’t use Channel Meetings since we were using channels for the rooms. That’s a great question. We decided not to use Channel Meetings because you cannot specify the presenters using a channel meeting and we wanted to clearly specify who the presenters were so that attendees were not accidentally muting the presenters.

Workshops were a slightly different beast. Attendees had to pay extra to attend our full day workshops so we could not just create those as a standard Team. We ended up creating a Private Channel for each workshop and then used Teams PowerShell to add the users that paid for workshops to those channels. Then we set up Teams Meetings for each workshop and posted the links to those Teams Meetings in the workshop Private Channels.

Now that we had the sessions and workshops sorted, we needed to address the other elephant in the room: Sponsors. The sponsors paid for their sponsorships assuming they would be there in person, and many of the sponsors could not make the trip to Branson. How could I help ensure that attendees would be able to interact with the sponsors in a very similar way as they would in an on-site event.

To accomplish a better sponsor experience, I created a channel for each sponsor. Sponsors had complete control over their channel. They could add tabs, post raffles, announcements, and use their channel to interact with attendees. I also created a “Virtual Expo Hall” channel where I would post announcements, do raffle drawings, and where sponsors could also post announcements. I created a tab in this channel with links to each sponsor’s channel to make it easy to navigate from the expo hall directly to a sponsor channel.

I also put together a YouTube video to walk attendees through how to navigate the Team. You can watch it here if you are interested: https://youtu.be/SVUedVVjHac

User Access

One of the greatest assets and maybe one of the greatest challenges for using the Microsoft Community Tenant is that every attendee, speaker, and sponsor was given their own @msftcommunity.com account to log in with. This meant they had to log out of their existing tenant and log in with a different account. On one hand this was great from a privacy perspective as no attendee’s contact information was visible to other attendees or sponsors (which I think is critical) but it also meant I had to deal with a lot of people not understanding (no matter how many times I told them) that they needed to log in with this account. To help with that, one of our volunteers (thanks Teresa) created a PDF to explain the process to users. If you’d like you can view that PDF here:  https://aka.my/zBg

If this sounds like a headache to you, not to worry. As the Community Tenant Program rolls out of the pilot phase you will be allowed to add guest users and the requirement for everyone to have @msftcommunity.com account goes away.  

Getting the Remote Attendees more Engaged

Let’s face it. It’s too easy to tune out if you are a remote attendee. Work happens, people know you are at your desk and you are probably really burnt out on online events. I totally understand this and needed to find ways to encourage attendees to pay attention and find reasons for them to engage with sponsors. I tried a couple of different approaches.

Sponsor Bingo

Sponsor bingo is a staple for in-person events where each attendee is given a “bingo card” and they travel around to each sponsor to get their card stamped. Then a raffle is done with those cards for prizes. You can’t really do that in an online experience though. So, we ended up giving each sponsor a “secret word” and it was up to attendees to go to each sponsor and find out their secret word.

Attendees could then fill out a Microsoft Forms Quiz where they could submit their responses. I would then take the Microsoft Forms responses and randomly pick a winner. This worked with limited success. Sponsors had to find a way to get the attendees the secret words without making it too difficult, but at the same time hard enough so that they needed to actually engage with the sponsor to get it.

Raffle Prizes

Something else I tried that seemed to get good responses is that I would randomly raffle off gift cards in the “Virtual Expo Hall” channel and tag winners and give them 10-15 minutes to react to the message to claim the prize. This helped make sure people were paying attention.

Another thing I offer at NACS is there are a couple of premium sponsorships where a sponsor gets the ONLY session at the end of the day and attendees must attend that session to win end of the day raffle prizes. To make this work, I posted a link to a Microsoft Form at the beginning of this end of the day session and then randomly picked winners from those that submitted the form.

Bribery works! But seriously, I think using the raffle prizes for remote attendees was a big factor in making them feel like they we part of the event. It wasn’t just jumping from one session to the next, they had places to explore and things to look forward to.

Moderators

One of the smartest things we did for the event was use moderators to help with each session. We needed to find some way to ensure that the people attending online were able to have their questions heard and responded to effectively.

Each session was assigned a moderator. Each moderator was responsible for starting and stopping the meeting recordings as well as watching the Teams Meeting Chat for questions and problems and interrupt the speaker if necessary. This allowed the speaker to present their session as they normally would without having to pay attention to chat.

The good moderators even pitched in and answered questions during the chat. These unsung heroes helped keep things flowing and problems down to a minimum and let the speakers focus on their sessions. If you glean ONE thing out of this really long post, I would highly recommend you use moderators for your hybrid event. HUGE kudos to Christian Buckley for owning this piece of the event and organizing it. It took an enormous weight off my shoulders.

We even had a couple of full day workshops where the teachers for the workshops were remote and the moderator was in person in Branson. This also worked out really well! We just had to ensure there was a decent sound system in these rooms so on-site attendees could hear.

The Technology

Doing a hybrid event comes with technology challenges. We were streaming all sessions and workshops, so we had to take into account the presenters that were in-person in Branson and allow them present an “in-person” session as they normally would to engage the on-site attendees, but also make sure those remote attendees could see and hear the presenter as well.

To accomplish this, I purchased a few pieces of hardware. First and foremost I purchased a wireless USB microphone (this one to be exact). This allowed the speakers to walk around the room while still allowing the remote attendees to hear them clearly. These mics worked flawlessly on every computer except one and I heard from numerous remote attendees that the quality was excellent. I even had one on-site attendee tell me that she had problems hearing in one of the rooms, so she went and found a comfortable chair and watched the session remotely and really enjoyed the experience.  I also purchased USB webcams so that the speakers could position the cameras as they desired which again freed them up to walk around the room and still have remote attendees able to see them. Finally, because of all these devices I purchased USB hubs for every room since many computers these days have a limited number of USB ports.

I was concerned that having the presenters double mic’d (the USB wireless mic and the mic wired to the session room’s PA system) would cause feedback issues, but luckily this was never a problem.

In case you were wondering, we had seven concurrent workshops streaming at the same time and NEVER experienced connection issues: not once. Each room had a wired internet connection with dedicated 10mbs speed.

Because of all of our technology choices we actually had an issue turn into an opportunity. In one of our sessions there was an issue with the presenter’s computer connecting to the projector. So, while the room waited for the technicians to show up, all the attendees on-site joined the Teams Meeting and were able to see the presenters screen and continue the session.

How Did It Go (TLDR)?

All things considered; the event was a big success. There were no issues with people connecting to Teams. Attendees stayed really engaged online with lots of questions and interactions in chat. There was a lot of positive feedback. Here’s a quote from one of the virtual attendees:

“As a virtual attendee at a truly hybrid event, I wasn’t sure if I would feel part of what was going on in Branson. I needn’t have worried (although I did have to cook my own bacon). The ability to use chat in the sessions meant that everyone, regardless of location, was able to interact. Being able to ask questions, provide responses, and genuinely contribute meant that these sessions really were highly interactive as well  as informative and entertaining. This was a very positive experience and I hope more conferences adopt hybrid opportunities to maximize attendance and participation. Thank you so much, NACS team!” – Caroline

What Worked Well

Thinking of planning your own event? Here’s a list of things I’d highly recommend you do:

• Use Teams Meetings for your sessions and encourage participation from remote attendees
• Create a channel for each physical room at the event so remote attendees know where to go and on-site attendees know where to go for slides or to catch a session remotely
• Create a channel for a virtual expo hall and a channel for each sponsor so that sponsors have their “space” to interact with attendees
• Use Moderators for all sessions.
• Get someone to help organize and schedule the moderators (Thanks again Christian)
• Do a tech-check before the event with speakers, sponsors, and attendees to make sure they can connect to the meetings
• Purchase hardware like USB wireless mics for the on-site speakers so they can feel free to get up and walk around without remote folks sacrificing the ability to hear them.
• MAKE SURE to have all speakers repeat questions from the audience so that people online can hear them and be sure to re-cap all side bar conversations for the remote folks!
• Use raffles to give attendees that something special to anticipate
  • Use Microsoft Forms for a simple may of getting someone’s “submission” for the raffle
  • I just used a random number generator to pick a winner from the excel spreadsheet

Lessons Learned / What do I plan to do differently next time

As smoothly as things went, there were opportunities to do some things better and we learned a lot. Some of struggles and lessons learned are:

Getting people to read & follow the instructions!

Fine, we all know this is an issue with people. It was critical for users to open the email that had the Terms of Use for the Microsoft Community Tenant. They HAD to log in to the Team using the @msftcommunity.com username. They needed to know where to go to find the links for the Teams meetings. No matter how many emails you send, or videos you create, or how many times you shout to the roof tops, some folks are too busy and don’t spend a lot of time to prep in advance and they may miss some of the instructions.

Because this was the first hybrid event and we were figuring some things out as we went, we sometimes struggled with making sure attendees, speakers, sponsors, and moderators knew exactly what to do. Once they did though, they were more than eager to help others that might have questions.  Thanks to everyone who helped. This was truly a community experience!

Multiple presenters in a session

I did a full day workshop with Stephanie Donahue and because we were using the USB wireless mic, it meant we had to pass it between us. This was less than ideal. I need to look into options to address this in the future.

Printing is still a thing

This year I needed to cut costs wherever I could, and I thought “hey, everything is online in Teams.” So, I didn’t print out any materials. A few of the on-site attendees were frustrated by this, and I heard you. I will be printing out a limited number of schedules and event maps for folks next year.

A Remote Attendee Party?

Maybe this is where I ask for help from you. We took the on-site attendees to Andy B’s for bowling, games, and pizza (thanks again AvePoint for sponsoring). I’m still not sure how to really translate an attendee party for remote attendees so they are truly engaged and interactive? Maybe a trivia party with prizes? Something I do need to figure out for next year.

Take better care of the moderators

I’ve heard over and over from speakers and attendees that the moderators helped SO much. A good moderator will answer the easy questions, bring up important points to the attendees, and interrupt the speaker as needed. Next year I plan to do more to highlight the moderators on the event web site and give them the visibility they deserve as well as set aside funds for “moderator gifts” if possible. Don’t attempt a hybrid event without a moderator.

Make it even easier to find Teams Meetings Links

Although I had Teams Meetings links in almost every channel and a walk through video on how to access the links it was still confusing to a few people who just wanted to easily attend a Teams Meeting for one specific session. There was no simple way to see ALL sessions and get a link to a Teams Meeting for a specific session.

Luckily one of the moderators (thanks again Theresa) created a SharePoint List for me that had a list of all the sessions, their dates, and a link to the Teams Meeting that was used for that session. We got that added pretty late so I’m sure most attendees missed it, but I’ll definitely be doing that again next year.

What does the future hold?

Are hybrid events they future for conferences? Why not? We proved it can be done. We’ve shown that remote attendees can be engaged while at the same time giving on-site attendees the experience they expect. I believe hybrid events also have a lot more energy for virtual attendees than purely virtual events. The presenters get to look at and engage with the on-site attendees and get that energy that comes from being able to see people’s reactions. Everything is more vibrant… less rehearsed… all of that comes through to the remote attendees.

We have the technology for hybrid events, and it opens up a word of accessibility to people. We are all looking forward to things going back to normal, but maybe we should think of hybrid as being the new normal? Just look at the benefits of a hybrid event:

• Less crowds in-person (no lines for the bathroom!)
• More accessibility for those too far to make the trip or have a disability that prevents them from getting the most out of an in-person event. Hybrid events are more inclusive!
• Reduced costs for attendees
• Better engagement and interactivity than a purely virtual event
• More sessions are possible by doing online only tracks so organizers can provide more content without a greater cost!

If you are on the fence about providing a hybrid experience, I can tell you that the benefits out way any increase in work you must do to get there. It’s 2020 folks! If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s how to make the most out of what’s been presented to us and there’s a lot of good to be found if we look… including hybrid events.  So, sign up for a Community Tenant today at https://aka.ms/communitytenantsignup and start planning ! I hope to see you virtually or in-person soon!!