Is a great virtual conference possible?
It was Summer 2020 and a decision had to be made. Would InterVarsity’s conference on planting campus ministry (called Ambition) be virtual or be delayed for two years?
It would have been easy, and understandable to delay. But, the Lord doesn’t often call us into easy. The Conference Core team listened and asked the Lord, who gave them a clear “Yes!”.
But there was a harder question that they had no idea how to answer: “How?”
Define
Conference “feel”
Shawn Young, Director of Planting, gathered his Conference Core team to help determine what a successful Ambition would be.
Whether it was in person or online: participants should be equipped to plant witnessing communities, inspired by others who plant, and connected to God and to each other.
But as discussions started to unfold, “connecting in community” would be the trickiest one. There’s an energy when you have over a thousand people around you, energy that’s not there when you’re alone starting at a computer screen. This was where we made the first pivot that we would measure decisions against:
Old → A crazy, high-energy, innovative conference
New → An intimate, restorative, innovative conference.
Periodically we would ask ourselves — will this program element make for an intimate, restorative, and innovative experience?
Conference experience
Physical conferences, for all their pros, also have one major implication — they require travel and all the expenses that come with that.
If we were running an online conference, why not run the conference according to timezones? And in fact — knowing certain geographies struggle with certain planting elements, we could tailor their sessions, and have it all happen simultaneously.
Old → The same program for everyone
New → A mix of experiences of sessions that everyone attends together and personalized program elements
Design
User Journeys
We had “Ambie” who was the target audience registrant. She was a college student that was part of InterVarsity. She had a heart for the unreached, but wasn’t entirely sure what to do to reach new campuses. Ambition would inspire her and equip her.
She would go through these steps:
Awareness the conference existed → her InterVarsity leadership would tell her about it.
Ask questions about the conference → the conference landing page would answer these questions.
Registering for the conference → She would register via RegFox.
Being prepared for the conference → She’d get a series of emails, one a week, to prep for things to know in advance.
Getting into the conference platform (undecided) → Her sign-up would automatically put her in it.
Experiencing a main session → She’d go to the conference platform and join the event.
Filling out the Planting Canvas → She’d join a meeting space with her and fill out the planting canvas digitally.
Go to any workshops or panels she was interested in → RSVP to these events in advance, and join the event through the conference platform.
Get away from the keyboard → use items mailed to her in advance for debrief and journaling activities.
There were more types of conference participants to take into account — InterVarsity staff, Conference leaders, InterVarsity volunteers, but this was the core against which we designed the conference.
Choosing the Conference Platform
Many of these steps are also effectively true for an in-person conference, we were just attaching new technology platforms to them. I had never experienced an Ambition before, and so the Ambition program team was very patient with me as I worked through understanding what it had looked like before, which gave me a set of requirements for what we were looking for in a conference platform.
As I worked with the program team, I cautioned that, especially since we had never done this before, we needed to be flexible. There would be push and pull on platforms & content — some platform choices we would make would influence the content, and vice versa, the content and goals we had should influence the platform choices.
Requirements
We had these needs identified:
Email marketing
Marketing site
During conference communications
Segmented community groups
Group video watching
RSVP to events
Something to hold content for participants to work through prior to the conference
Figuring things out
Up until now, the process had felt uphill —
There were a lot of unknowns, a lot of discussions, and a lot of diagrams as we tried to feel our way through what this could be.
Make it Happen
Landing these user journeys + the conference platform put us at the top where we had enough decisions in place that what we were making started becoming evident, and we just needed to do it.
This remains my favorite project to date because it’s remarkable what happens when you have an aligned and highly talented team go out and do their thing. We assembled smaller teams to go out and make it happen:
Create pre-recorded main session videos, upload to YT Live and set to go live at a certain tiem for each timezone.
Create timezone groups with relevant communication prompts in their zone
Creating all the events for the workshops and fireside chats
Sort students into small groups and assign them leaders
Train the Small Group leaders prior to Ambition
Create a Coaches group in MN and train them through their own MN Course.
Create Conference Handbook “Course” to orient everyone to the conference and to the MN platform
Order items for the boxes, assembling the boxes and mailing them out
the list went on. For several months :)
Testing
As we built out different parts and pieces, I wanted to get feedback along the way, and so we asked staff and students to test out the different parts of Mighty Networks.
“Wow, the scheduling, RSVPing in advance, is SO customizable! I’m excited to attend these sessions! I wasn’t all that excited before, but now I am!”
““I was able to do all the tasks you asked me to do, and I browsed around a little more beyond that too. I’m very impressed by how Ambition is being run this year!””
Overall, the feedback was really positive and with a few tweaks, we were pretty confident in the platform and the conference handbook.
Deliver
Later, the team would remark what a surreal experience it is to “run” a conference that basically runs itself.
Between Mighty Networks, YouTube Live, and pre-set email communications, we watched the technology prompt our participants at the right time to go the events they had RSVP’d to in advance.
With this being our view, it was honestly hard to tell how it was going.
Feedback
Why the increase in registrations?
Clearly, a virtual conference made the conference much more accessible.
Was the technology onboarding successful?
For the most part, yes!
Over the 3 days, we only had 7 Tech Help conversations. Our communications and Conference Handbook really underpinned the success of the conference.
Was the technology valuable?
For the most part, yes!
The technology wasn’t a total slam dunk for every participant — but it seemed for the majority of the participants it created the innovative feel we were going for.
“Such an amazing job! I was able to connect with like-minded people in our group. Though it was virtual, it felt very personal.”
“It was nice using Miro boards and Mighty Networks! It took some time to get used to but it was more interactive than just sitting on a Zoom call and watching a video!”
“I think you all did a great job putting together something so *ambitious* ;)”
It mattered.
As I was sitting in my seat at Urbana 22, I saw the first testimony go up on stage. It was a student who attended Ambition almost 2 years prior, and what the Lord had done in him after that experience.
Final Thoughts
It was not perfect.
It was not nearly as “linear feeling” as the timeline makes it out to be, and we did have a few failure points, particularly not preparing our small group leaders well enough and waffling on how InterVarsity Staff would be involved. Some late decisions caused stress and anxiety on their part, and I deeply regret that.
I loved the work that I got to do, which prompted my move to experience design:
I helped match program with technology and to help with informing program what we could do with tech and how the tech would affect program.
It morphed into also being responsible for implementing the technology and most of the content that came along with that.
I also worked with connecting everything together — orchestrating the “Ambition system.”