We spoke with Jessie States, CMP, CMM, director of the MPI Academy, about the digital event we’re offering as part of the 2020 World Education Congress, Nov. 3-6. So if you can’t attend in-person but don’t want to miss out, read on to learn about some of the risks we’re taking, what type of experience you can expect and how we want to help better prepare you for planning events going forward.

Now that we are closing in on WEC, what can attendees to the virtual experience expect from an overall perspective?

Our digital event is robust—there’s just a lot happening. From digital appointments and our topic-based channel chat to the WEC Mid-Day broadcast, live (not streamed) concurrent sessions and Zumba® workouts, our virtual participants will have great autonomy in designing their own unique experience. And you’re not expected to attend everything! Give yourself the freedom to choose when to take a break, grab a meal or answer email. All of the digital content will be recorded for later viewing, so if participants just want to hang out in the chat channel all day (old-school message board style), that’s OK! Or if they just want to make appointments in the Digital Connection marketplace to find new partners for their now-returning meetings, that’s OK, too. We’ll make sure that all our attendees are armed with the information they need to make informed decisions about the experience they design for themselves.

Highlight a few of the elements you believe are going to define the virtual experience.

The Digital Connection marketplace is critical. It’s where people can go to find new business, connect with existing partners and find the people who will help them recover, together. The WEC Mid-Day live broadcast from the ALHI MPItv Studio will be our anchor. From this talk show-format stream, we’ll offer curated content, exclusive interviews with industry leaders (and our keynotes) and access to our general sessions. We’ve also partnered with Zumba to offer digital workouts in the (local) mornings, so that our digital attendees are active and at it from wherever in the world they are joining.

How bold is MPI being with this aspect of the conference this year?

We’re experimenting, for sure. And taking a lot of risks. We’ve opted to go live with our breakouts—in fact we’ve asked many of our in-person speakers to deliver their sessions twice—once for the in-person audience and once for the digital participants. We want our virtual sessions to be engaging, we want our participants to have direct access to their facilitators and instructors—not a stream from the back of the room, and not a recorded video. That’s risky, but necessary for us to provide the type of educational experience that moves people. We’ve also got a lot going on, which could be overwhelming for some people, so we really have to over-communicate all of the opportunities so that everyone can make the right decisions on how to navigate the experience based on their individual needs.

WEC Grapevine: Reunite for Recovery

What do you hope the industry will learn?

I hope we can show that a virtual event can be engaging and fun, that business can be accomplished, goals can be met, audiences can be activated and learning can occur in the digital space. But it has to be different. It can’t just be a replica of the in-person event.

What is it about WEC that gives you the most optimism for the future?

Live, in-person meetings are coming back online, and I’m proud that we are part of that movement. But we also know that government restrictions and financial and personal decisions will be a barrier to attendance for many people—and hybrid experiences are methods for bringing our business back while accommodating everyone who cannot join in-person. This phenomenon is not going away. Many organizations now see hybrid as the future for meetings and events—expanding reach into the virtual space to embrace those who cannot come in person. I’m looking forward to this laboratory experiment at the WEC.

What scares you the most?

Planning events for people that plan events is terrifying. And we are taking a lot of chances. I’ll bet not everything will happen just as planned, and I’m relying on the grace and strength of my MPI community and friends to support us as we experiment with some new things.

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash