Are you considering hosting a large-scale virtual event in 2021?

More and more Civic Dinners customers are leveraging these large events to generate excitement and momentum for their conversations, and to encourage community members to host small events of their own. In this blog post, we’ve compiled best practices for large virtual events, so you have everything you need to make your event a success.

Set the Stage

Premium Events

Upgrading your event to a “Premium Event” gives you more control over the event page, including space to outline the schedule and provide guests with an idea of what to expect. Premium Events also come with enhanced functionality, such as the ability to override email communications that go out during and after the event.

Looking to upgrade to a Premium Event? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information.

Featured Guests

Most Civic Dinners customers find that large events are the perfect opportunities to highlight a high-profile member of the organization or to feature a special guest who can speak to the conversation topic and get folks excited.

When Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) kicked off their Inclusive Community conversation, for example, they brought in their Vice President of External Affairs and GPB Chief Development Officer Bert Wesley Huffman to welcome guests and introduce the event by showcasing PBS American Portrait, a national storytelling project.

Similarly, Coca-Cola invited NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace and Jill Savitt, President and CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, to launch their Inclusive Culture conversation series back in October 2020.

Plan Ahead

Allow Sufficient Time for Promotion & Planning

Scheduling and preparing guest speakers requires an upfront investment of time and resources, and the best way to fully leverage their attendance and make the most of your event is to allow plenty of time for promotion and general planning.

Most Civic Dinners customers prefer to have a minimum of 4 weeks to plan for and promote a large virtual events. Be sure to leverage your existing marketing channels (email newsletters, social media, PR spots, etc.) to spread the word and drive registrations.

Allowing extra time for promotion and planning also ensures you’re able to find enough breakout room hosts for the conversation portion of your event. Breakout rooms should ideally consist of no more than 8 people; depending on the size of your guest list, you’ll be able to determine how many hosts to recruit.

Keep in mind that hosts don’t need any particular training ahead of the conversations — they just need to review the brief Host Guides provided by Civic Dinners and follow the prompts in the guide.

Get Questions & Prompts Ready to Share

Before your event starts, be sure all breakout room hosts have a copy of their Host Guides, specifically the questions and prompts, accessible during the event. We recommend hosts copy and paste questions and prompts into the virtual meeting chat, so that guests have the opportunity to read the questions to themselves while the host reads them aloud.

Breakout Rooms

Hosts Set the Tone

Another strategy that has worked well for many customers is instructing hosts to answer the first question. This allows hosts to set the tone for the amount of vulnerability and depth they hope to invite from guests. From there, hosts can call on someone by name to go next, and encourage that person to call on someone else after answering the question.

Running Out of Time? Focus on the Most Important Questions

During large virtual events, individual breakout groups may sometimes run short on time — that's OK!

Question 2 of any conversation typically takes the longest for people to answer, and they may even start to touch on answering Question 3 in their response to Question 2. We recommend ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to complete Question 2, even if that means there isn’t sufficient time for everyone to get to Question 3.

Ready to host your own large-scale virtual event this year? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to get started!