The Attendee Bill of Rights

If you’re planning and producing a virtual or hybrid event, consider for a moment your virtual attendees’ experience with your virtual presentations.

Is something changing visually every minute or so?  If not, can you blame your virtual attendees for switching over to something more interesting, or for starting to multi-task by checking their email, and their social media, and simply start listening to your event instead of watching it, which in essence your video content has become a podcast?

Unless you want your event to turn into a podcast, that’s usually bad news.

The good news, this can be avoided by having your virtual and hybrid event speakers follow a few simple rules.

𝑹𝒖𝒍𝒆 #1 – 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒂 𝒏𝒆𝒘 𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 30 𝒕𝒐 60 𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒔

Encourage your speakers to break their slides into many slides with less information per slide, and keep one main idea per slide, even if that means many slides. Also, encourage them to make use of a variety of visual elements in their slides – like pictures, graphs, and quotes.

Many slides that switch every so often create the type of interesting distraction that a virtual needs to keep their focus on the screen and not lose interest.

Whenever possible pre-record all elements that DO NOT need to be presented live.

𝑹𝒖𝒍𝒆 #2 – 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝒊𝒕 𝒖𝒑

Change the type of visuals you’re providing throughout the presentation.
Don’t repeat more than three of the same types of visuals in a row.

𝑹𝒖𝒍𝒆 #3 – 𝒀𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒏 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒆

The entire time you’re presenting, the audience is listening to your voice. Don’t include text in your slides that you’re going to say out loud anyway. If the audience is listening, why make them read the same thing?

The slides are visual and complimentary, don’t make them redundant, nor the script. The exception to this rule is quoted that should be written down and name the author of that quote as well.

Use text only when you’re emphasizing something you’re saying, with a word or a phrase, but not a full sentence or paragraph or endless bullet points.

Here is a more in-depth article on how we prepare our virtual speakers technologically to be ready to present themselves in the best light possible, no pun intended.

Additional Resource: 

The Attendee Bill of Rights put together by the Haute Community on LinkedIn is a crowd-sourced attendee’s biggest pet peeve worth perusing through and taking notes on. Download it here.