Digital Event Benchmark Report The Digital Event Benchmark Report was produced to provide event, meeting, learning and marketing professionals a tool to assess the performance of their digital initiatives and identify areas of opportunity. The Virtual Edge Institute (VEI) was commissioned by Freeman to conduct this study, and supplement the findings with other published and unpublished information in the field. The survey, distributed to physical and online event producers via email, and promoted through social media, generated more than 200 responses.
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Survey Participants: Just under 80 percent of survey participants produce physical events, with 70 percent of those respondents also producing online events. Forty-two percent of respondents indicate their in-person event attendance is trending up, while about 10 percent note a downward trend. A broad and representative cross-section of the event industry participated in the survey, with a slight majority of participants coming from associations, while corporate event planners, conference producers and agencies are also well represented. Twenty-seven percent of respondents indicate that they serve in executive management roles, while 28 percent work in event planning positions. More than half of respondents with in-person events report that those events have fewer than 2,000 attendees.
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CEUs and Participant Data: Almost 40 percent of respondents offer continuing education credits at their in-person events, and half of those charge a fee for these courses. In a separate, but related study, VEI found that 80 percent of event attendees report that having event content available online is both an incentive and a justification for attending in person.
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Online Attendance: Two-thirds of survey respondents report their online attendance is up, while about 10 percent report online attendance down. There is noticeable overlap in those reporting physical event attendance down as well as lower online attendance. Just over half of all respondents report attendance at their online events at less than 500 attendees. As might be expected, those events with larger in-person attendance also report higher online attendance. Thirty-five percent of survey respondents indicate their average length of attendance at more than five hours, while nearly two-thirds report attendance at two hours or more. By comparison, a recent webinar benchmarking study reported average attendance at less than one hour per webinar, indicating that events with multiple hours of content create longer viewing experiences.
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Business Objectives: The vast majority of survey respondents have multiple goals and objectives for their digital events, with the most reported goal being the ability for digital events to expand the organization’s reach and audience. Making greater use of educational assets is clearly another strong objective for respondents, with nearly 60 percent indicating their goal is to serve their constituents by providing education to those who cannot attend the physical event, and an equal number indicating their desire to “make better use of event education by making it available online. Half of respondents list generating revenue as a goal or objective, with nearly as many interested in establishing their organization as an industry leader, driving more international attendance and providing more value to physical event attendees by providing them access to event content, postevent. Interestingly, while only 49 percent say their goal is to provide this additional value to physical event attendees, a 2013 physical event attendee survey conducted by VEI, found that 80 percent of attendees would actually use the fact that they had access to such content after the event as justification for their physical attendance. While slightly more than 40 percent of respondents indicate that driving attendance to their physical events is a goal, nearly two-thirds of them are, in fact, seeing varying degrees of success in this area, as seen on the subsequent chart.
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Monetization through Sponsorships: Of those survey respondents who try to monetize their online events, the top three successful techniques are overall event sponsorships, followed by advertising and sponsorships tied to in-person event sponsorships. Online booths are reported as the least successful. Content syndication sponsorships ranked as the highest technique “not yet tried,� but will be watched carefully in future similar surveys for evidence of significant movement as this is a trend VEI expects to see increase. As evidenced by the second chart below, most future monetization strategies will no doubt crystallize around content in a variety of ways. One survey write-in comment by an experienced online event producer indicates that their organization only captures physical event content if there is a plan to monetize it at least three ways.
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Attendance Fees: At this point in the evolution of digital events, the majority of survey respondents are not charging attendees for access to either live or on-demand content. It’s interesting to juxtapose this result against earlier VEI survey results wherein potential attendees indicated, by a margin of two-thirds, that they would, in fact, be willing to pay to attend and consume online meeting content, with the majority willing to pay to access select content versus the entire meeting. (Not surprisingly, the majority of those willing to pay for said online event content would like to pay less for online access than for the in-person experience.) For those survey respondents who do charge attendees for access to the online event, 50 percent of them charge 25 percent or less than the in-person registration fee.
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Streaming, Capture and Engagement: The majority of survey respondents are both streaming their content live and capturing for future ondemand access. Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents are streaming and capturing keynote/plenary sessions, with just over 40 percent doing the same with breakouts, interviews and sponsor-oriented content. Of those respondents capturing but not streaming content, sponsor material garners the highest percentage of content captured at 41 percent. Poster sessions appear to be the least captured or streamed form of content. The most successful engagement techniques noted by survey respondents are attendee chat, social media and polling/Q&A. Online moderators and emcees are also noted as successful engagement elements. Not surprisingly, gamification, still in its infancy for even most physical event producers, is highlighted by survey respondents as the least successful of all engagement techniques.
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Marketing Clearly, there is little industry consensus in terms of time spent marketing digital events. While nearly one-quarter of survey respondents indicate they continuously market their online events, an equal number start just one month prior to the event, while another 23 percent begin two months out. Studies have shown that while the bulk of registrations come in within the last seven days of a digital event marketing campaign, the earlier the promotion begins, the higher final registration numbers will be. Email marketing is by far the most significant registration driver for digital events, with advertising, search engine marketing and social media the least effective. Dedicated email messages are most widely used by survey respondents, with more than 60 percent sending them at least twice per month. Enewsletters are the next most utilized tool, with 55 percent delivering a newsletter once or twice per month. While 60 percent of survey respondents report continuously marketing their captured, on-demand content availability, the fact that more than one-third of respondents are not marketing said content is worrisome given that they are failing to leverage an asset whose cost has already been realized.
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