Five Tips for Creating Powerful Hybrid Experiences

Insights
July 7, 2023

Event professionals from many different industries are embracing the hybrid approach.

When done right it creates exciting opportunities to deliver more creative and powerful experiences.

We’ve worked with world-leading organizations throughout the transition to hybrid, and we’ve seen first-hand what it takes to make it a success.

In this article, we share our top five tips for delivering hybrid events that make a big impact.


1. Add a new dimension to the live event experience

One of the biggest challenges in delivering hybrid events is successfully engaging two different audiences while still making it feel like ‘one’ event. In-person participants want the full experience, but virtual attendees shouldn’t feel like they’re simply watching a livestream.

With new digital technology, it’s possible to create an immersive experience for both audiences. Use a tailored event app to give all participants access to agendas, resources, community features, and livestreams to bring your event to life.


2. Create a collaborative experience

Building collaborative activities into the structure of a hybrid event will keep your audience engaged and interested, wherever they are. With the right ecosystem of apps collaboration is easy. The best collaboration apps for hybrid events will allow participants to come together to design strategies, and share, map and vote on ideas..


3. Nurture a hybrid community

Events are as much about networking and relationship-building as they are keynotes and panel discussions. By incorporating online discussion boards into your hybrid experience, people can share knowledge and discuss the event with each other in real-time. With direct messaging people can network and communicate in a meaningful way, even if they’re not in the same room.

4. Think global

Going hybrid with your events means that you can deliver on a larger scale than before, with less logistical complexity and cost.

Not only can you give participants access from anywhere in the world, you can also overcome geographic scheduling barriers and invite world-leading experts and speakers to contribute.

Through hybrid, you can widen your reach and operate globally.

5. Simplify

The key to hosting a successful hybrid event lies in using a tailored event platform that houses everything in one place and works across the many different devices your participants will be using.

Production has to be streamlined and all the different elements need to flow, so the last thing you want to do is send participants to multiple third–party tools for each aspect of the event—Zoom for video conferencing, YouTube for videos and Google Forms for polling. The best experience management platforms not only come with a robust suite of features for hosting hybrid experiences, they also allow the seamless integration of third-party tools–whether it’s documents hosted on the cloud, multimedia resources, live streams or video conferencing.

Carefully vet different event platforms to make sure the one you choose is easy to use. It should complement and enhance the event experience for organizers - not distract from it by requiring lots of training.

SmartLab was designed with hybrid events in mind. Trusted by the world’s largest organizations, SmartLab has everything you need to host powerful experiences that bring people together across time and distance, helping organizations streamline their production so they can focus on the things that matter most–keeping participants engaged right until the very end.

We’d love to discuss how we can help you get started with SmartLab and help you take your hybrid events to the next level. Request a demo.