If your company is considering hosting a virtual event on Zoom, it’s essential to explore all the available options to optimize the experience for attendees. Your virtual event is highly visible and crucial to your company’s success—whether it’s a company meeting, quarterly wrap-up, online seminar, or town hall. Therefore, careful planning is essential.
For those in charge of putting these virtual events together, meetings can be career-accelerating or limiting, pending on how well they go. Through planning, dry runs, and tech checks, we can help you look and sound professional on camera and ensure these events go smoothly.
Hosting a Virtual Event on Zoom: Small vs. Large
As part of your planning, you’ll need to decide whether to use Zoom Meetings or Zoom Webinars. With the right platform, you can create an event that meets your objectives. Zoom Webinars is primarily for attendees who will be listening to a presentation, lecture, or panel discussion.
| Zoom Meetings | Zoom Webinars | |
| Attendee Size | up to 1,000 attendees | up to 50,000 attendees |
| Virtual Event Type |
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Zoom Meetings is likely the best choice for small events because it enables interaction among attendees. Zoom Meetings allows you to set up breakout rooms so you can have discussions and collaboration among smaller groups. The platform can accommodate up to 1,000 attendees, although to benefit from the interactive features, it’s better to have fewer.
For larger events, Zoom Webinars might be a better bet. It is designed for presentations or panels with large audiences with limited interaction from audience members. However,
he platform does offer audience members the ability to ask
questions, communicate with thumbs up or clapping hands, and answer poll questions and surveys. The platform can accommodate up to 50,000 attendees in view-only.
How To Script a Virtual Event
Once you’ve selected the best option for hosting your virtual event on Zoom, it’s time to develop a script so your virtual event will run smoothly. Here are some tips for scripting a virtual event:
Write As You Talk
You should write your script how you speak for a successful virtual event. Use the style you’d use if you were talking to someone you know. Keep points concise and use simpler versions of words. Speak directly to attendees by using “you”
and “your.”
Include an Introduction
The proper greeting welcomes attendees and sets expectations for the whole meeting. The introduction should include your name, background, and information for the audience, such as the availability of the recorded meeting and the logistics of the Q&A session. Ensure the intro doesn’t exceed two minutes of the speaking time.
Outline the Event
Following the introduction is the agenda. You usually present it as a bullet point list, so it’s clear what the event is about. When you introduce the agenda for the first time, keep it short. Announce the main points from the topic in a bullet point list.
Relate a Personal Story
Make the meeting more memorable by telling an impactful personal story. Try telling a story that’s relevant to the topic and has a message from which attendees can receive. Personal stories from your experience make the best, so brainstorm when planning your virtual meeting.
Don’t Read the Script
Referring to the script is fine, but don’t read it word-for-word because you lose eye contact with the audience. Get as much practice as you can with your script. Using this simple strategy, you can memorize more points and avoid losing crowd engagement.
Troubleshooting During Your Virtual Event
There’s no guarantee that everything will go as planned while hosting a Zoom event. Problems include attendees having trouble with the audio and/or the video, sharing their screen, logging in, using a mobile device, or technical issues with Zoom like breakout sessions potentially breaking your room attendance.
If you don’t want technical issues to ruin your virtual event, let Meet Me In The Cloud help with our on-demand technical support for your attendees, presenters, and staff before and during your live event—no matter how many attendees you have. By eliminating technical hiccups during meetings, live seminars, town halls, and other highly visible virtual events, we help you run your event smoothly with our virtual event production services.
Besides troubleshooting, we provide support throughout your virtual event hosting journey. We can help you choose the right platform based on the objectives you have and how many attendees you expect. Our team can develop a Run of Show for your virtual event and moderate if you desire. We have produced thousands of events for higher education, K-12, state and local government, large and small businesses, and nonprofits. Our production team has over 30 years of combined experience in virtual events. Using virtual event hosting best practices, we produce events that align with your business objectives.
Meet Me In The Cloud can turn your digital collaboration tools into productivity engines. As you’re hosting a virtual event on Zoom, we partner with you to fully adopt your preferred technology tools. To get started, contact our experts today. tel:1-866-221-3221
