How to digitalise your events – before, during and after

Companies invest a lot of money on different kinds of events each year: capital market days, trade shows, career and talent communication events, as well as seminars, public conferences and internal events. In Sweden, lots of companies also attend and organise events at Almedalen, a yearly week-long event where politicians, organisations and corporations meet and debate on the Swedish island, Gotland.

When planning an event, it is important to also remember to add a digital layer to the communication efforts in order to reach out wider and increase the effect of what you are trying to achieve with the event.

Before the event

The first item is to have a main event hub for gathering the digital communication. This is usually some place on the website – a page with details about the event, agenda, speakers, how to register, social feeds etc. Since event attendees will probably use their mobile phone, it is important that this hub is optimised for mobile surfing.

If your current corporate website has trouble accommodating these needs, then perhaps a temporary WordPress-site might be a solution.

Be sure to talk up the event by delivering related content: story articles, pre-interviews with event speakers, teaser tweets and status updates on social media. Choose a hashtag early on and stick with it.

In addition to the event hub which should always be on your own platform, you can create a Facebook event to communicate about the event. Facebook has the added bonus of allowing attendees to see which of their other friends are also attending and the people who have registered via FB can get event updates directly in their feed.

During the event

If possible, record the event and add a live-feed so people can attend from other locations.

Have someone from the organisation live-tweet and perhaps also live-blog from the event. Take photographs and update Instagram, Flickr and other social media accounts.

You can also use Twitter for receiving questions for a speaker or panel and thus letting the audience participate in the debate.

After the event

This is the time to do an inventory of everything that has been produced and documented during the event – images, videos, tweets, articles, blog posts and random notes. Remember to also do an inventory of user-generated content – who has mentioned your event and what did they say.

Post collections of edited images and videos. But be sure to follow common rules and respect people’s privacy – ask before you post photos of people online.

Remember to use your own event hub on your website or campaign site in order to gather and present the information and relevant links. People shouldn’t have to go to five different places to get an overview of your event.

Follow up with a newsletter with highlights from the event and links to all relevant material, presentations and information. Let your attendees answer a quick survey about the event to get constructive feedback. Highlights from various social channels can also be gathered and presented using services like Storify.