All year long, dread and cautious optimism have flip-flopped along with variable waves of viral spread and the latest, sometimes seemingly contradictory, pre-print scientific hypotheses. The meeting and event world has also fluctuated, going from a dead stop to embracing virtual events to precaution-laden, smaller face-to-face and hybrid gatherings, including MPI’s own World Education Congress (WEC) last month, which gave 1,100 online participants a robust, all-live digital WEC experience for the first time ever, along with more than 600 attendees learning and networking onsite with stringent safety precautions.

So, what will meetings and events look like in 2021? That’s the billion-dollar question. The world continues to deal with a surging pandemic while the Northern Hemisphere is moving into the winter flu season—yet simultaneously, the coronavirus clouds are thinning and increasingly transparent with each headline heralding a seemingly successful and safe vaccine. That’s the end-game hope, but it won’t come overnight. Until then, meeting professionals will have to adapt—easier said than done, of course—as virtual and hybrid formats take center stage.

“Screen-glued plucks of participants wondering why 2020 was such a shift and to some such a big deal.” That’s a 2021 potentiality that Switzerland-based Rudd Janssen, CMM, DES, CED (MPI France-Switzerland Chapter), co-founder and managing partner of the Event Design Collective, expects, along with a winter that will be tougher than the virus’ initial run in the spring. “We’ll also see further buildout of home studio setups and venues scrambling to get their hybrid act together.”

Pre-pandemic, Janssen was no stranger to meeting online, utilizing Zoom for digital classroom discussions with globally dispersed event design students.

Most industry pros appear to be expecting a meetings landscape that’s increasingly virtual, hybrid, outdoor and/or smaller.

“We have started to see meetings taking place with new protocols to ensure distancing. I would expect this to continue to slowly ramp up through first quarter and am hopeful with recent vaccine announcements that we will see even more in Q2,” says Michael Dominguez (MPI Southern California Chapter), president and CEO of Associated Luxury Hotels International. “Hybrid will be a component of most meetings taking place.”

Despite that meeting professional urge and need to meet face to face, the greater population—all of our attendees and partners—may well be slower to embrace IRL gathering. In the summer Meetings Outlook survey, most meeting professional respondents reported being uncomfortable with any form of air travel and 84 percent felt the same about attending a large indoor conference. If internal stakeholders don’t feel safe at face-to-face events, it’ll be difficult to convince attendees to show up. According to a November MPI poll, the majority of respondents don’t expect to offer face-to-face meetings until at least the second half of 2021. Certainly, there’ll be a healthy uptick in this level of comfort as vaccines and therapeutics fend off the devastating effects of the virus, but the extent to and speed with which that change in the zeitgeist will happen remains to be seen.

“Even if we were to have a vaccine, I don’t see people getting on planes in droves or being super comfortable sitting with one another in a ballroom,” says Andrea Driessen, chief boredom buster for No More Boring Meetings. “So, the future I see is hybrid at best. I think we’re still going to see a ton of online events. If there’s any hybrid component, it will be slight. Hopefully, a year from now, we’ll see an increase in hybrid, but there’s much anxiety about being around other people—I think we’re only beginning to see what the impact is going to be on us, psychologically, being physically next to each other.”

Embracing virtual is neither organic nor without concern for many in our industry. In fact, 63 percent of respondents to MPI’s fall 2020 Meetings Outlook survey expressed concern that face-to-face events will suffer, even post-pandemic, because so many have become comfortable with and/or realized benefits with going virtual.

“For some, the opportunities of the omnichannel approach to live online events can seem overwhelming to consider,” Janssen says, anticipating less resistance to digital meetings in 2021 as organizers and participants become more experienced. “To others who have been at this for a while, this all evolves quite naturally.”

Driessen, an industry veteran who runs a successful speakers bureau and has become a professional speaker and facilitator in her own right as well as writing The Non-Obvious Guide to Event Planning (For Kick-Ass Gatherings That Inspire People), believes industry pros may find themselves surprised with their own tech adoption next year.

“This will be through a combination of how we get used to virtual and also how we get better at it—and perhaps to the extent that we can’t even imagine what life was like before,” she says, expecting there will be realizations as to how virtual or hybrid help check a lot of boxes, can broaden registration and even boost revenues. “It’s great if we can get better at this and find a way to build more value into the virtual experience in a way that is compelling enough for people to pay more for.”

Until COVID-safe meeting and event best practices are widespread, expect “virtual, virtual, virtual,” according to Anne Thornley-Brown, MBA, president of Toronto-based Executive Oasis International.

“We’re going to be in and out of lockdowns, but there will be some hybrid meetings with a small group, face to face but socially distanced,” she says.

It’s being able to provide value to your organization and participants through virtual or hybrid that’s holding some back.

“The industry is at a crossroads in my opinion; what I have seen migrate to the virtual and hybrid space has been something that I was concerned about in face to face: a sea of talking heads with shorter and shorter sessions, and no depth,” Thornley-Brown says. “We need to get back to the drawing board, figure out what value we provide, and we need to deliver interactive content that’s engaging and that has more depth. Give people value and relevance—if we can do that, we can be partners with our clients and we can survive. If we don’t do that, we’re in deep trouble.”

Dominguez agrees that this tech shift will require a slight change in strategic focus.

“We are understanding how technology can expand an audience and ensure that we are inclusive with participation,” he says. “The ability to use technology will put a greater emphasis on identifying the objective of a meeting and whether face to face is necessary or the best option.”

Hearing the variable perceptions of delivering virtual and hybrid events from a cross-section of individuals in various roles and niches may make it seem as though there’s a disconnect. Don’t think of it like that. Instead, meeting pros should be leveraging this diversity in thought to learn from their peers as well as non-industry minds that could shed light on creative solutions going forward.

Sourcing the Skills

“I design and facilitate executive retreats, team building and meetings to help teams perform more effectively and generate solutions to deliver bottom line results. That’s what I do. All of that was face to face over the last 20 years,” Thornley-Brown says. “I had been avoiding virtual meetings—I was terrified of them, because my worst nightmare is a client pays me to deliver virtually, and then there are technical problems. I have been forced to go virtual. I have also been forced to compress my sessions and make them shorter. And that is a complete re-engineering of my face-to-face programs.”

That shift to a digital-first approach—building an experience that can perhaps only be had online—may well be the greatest challenge for professionals in the strategic execution of events in 2021.

“We can’t try to shove the square peg of real life into the round hole of virtual—we’ll have to do something uniquely digital that is so compelling people will pay admission for it,” Driessen says. “And I just think event professionals who are willing to step up and really go all out with something creative are going to win.”

To that end, Thornley-Brown’s tech-skills growth has been a baptism by fire. This summer, she did a Mastermind program with Paul Carrick Brunson during which she learned countless digital platforms.

“I was going nuts and Zoomed out, but I had no choice,” she says. “It was either learn or don’t have a business.”

Following that, she and some of her program cohorts continue to meet online and help educate each other.

“I’ve coached them on things like MailChimp or editing with Movie Maker, and they’ve coached me on Zoom, Canva and Slack,” Thornley-Brown says, noting that peer coaching thrives in the meeting industry, and giving a shout out to Geocaching CEO John Chen, who has been holding Zoom sessions for peers to practice with the platform. “If we don’t coach and help each other through all of these challenges, we’re going to have a really rough time. I wouldn’t have learned to do all of this stuff on my own. Not a chance.”

For the technical aspects, she also recommends reaching out to local students who are also struggling in the pandemic economy—they need work and opportunities in the real world, too. Her son recently returned home and has been able to school her on some tech issues (“He’s a young person, he can learn this stuff more easily than me”). She says smart planners and organizations will also investigate leveraging instructional design professionals to help provide engaging experiences.

Another view on the changing skills needed by meeting pros in 2021 and beyond comes from Driessen.

“I think that some meeting professionals will, in our unemployment, go to film school,” she explains. “I think that that could be a really good pivot, because it’s going to require more skills to effectively build and tell a story online—whether all digital or hybrid.”

There’s a lot that can be borrowed from digital production and even screenwriting to this end.

Gems from a Garbage Year

It’s too simple to just label 2020 a nightmare. Logically, with everything bad, some good arises. Through what is likely to be the most destructive time we’ll ever experience in the meeting and event industry, we’re still learning and growing. That growth may be different than it was in 2019, but with such a flexible and creative group of professionals, it’s happening.

“Think about the ability to collaborate and design creatively and consciously with new and added restrictions of health and safety,” Janssen says, pointing out strengths in our community. “Or the eagerness to explore and exploit and relentlessly experiment every day to learn and improve.”

Driessen has experienced the awe of her own adaptability this year, thinking, “Wow, I’m so much better at handling uncertainty than I thought.” We’re all capable of a lot more than we realize, she says. “Life is really precious. It sounds so cheesy but, you know, it can be over in an instant. We are all learning that every day.”

Echoing the intent of 2nd-century Green philosopher and skeptic Sextus Empiricus—“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—Dominguez is hopeful that in 2021 we’ll all have a renewed appreciation of the value of meeting in person.

“There is an aching need to connect in a face-to-face environment—it is in our DNA as fellow human beings,” he says. “I am hopeful that we will all show a bit more grace and we will appreciate all face-to-face engagement even more. We truly don’t appreciate something we love until it has been taken away from us.”

If we can learn from the lessons of 2020, we can emerge as richer individuals and organizations while executing better events.

“It doesn’t have to kill us or beat us down,” Thornley-Brown says.