We’re back with our final EventHack recap!
This week we’ll dive into the presentation by EventHack 2020 Audience Choice Winner – Cool Cats and Kittens. Shawna Suckow, Lindsay Martin-Bilbrey, Lindsey Hunt, and Erin Cole designed FURcon, a virtual event that celebrates the anthropomorphic genre.
The Event
The Focus Areas
Cool Cats and Kittens chose to focus on three main points for Furcon 2020: interaction, connection, and sponsor ROI.
I love how they mentioned that, “Virtual is a gift.” This is so true, and they embraced that philosophy while they planned the event. They truly came up with some amazing ideas to hit each point.
The Ideas
Oftentimes, organizers focus on purely marketing the event or getting prepared in-house. But if that’s all that’s happening, you’ll miss out on amazing opportunities to build excitement and engage attendees before the main event. I especially love the idea of having categories available during registration so attendees can choose their personas and be matched before the meeting. Great way to up attendance rates!
We were able to have a bit of our own dance party during EventHack 2020 — it was super fun. And I can’t imagine how amazing it would be to take a costume design class virtually, sign me up, please. I’m ready.
The expo floor is definitely something that’s proven to be a challenge when moving into the virtual space, so I’m glad to see it tackled here. Just because there isn’t a physical floor doesn’t mean there can’t still be floor activities!
One of the coolest things I’ve noticed about virtual events is that they can easily expand beyond the official dates of the event. Having meetups or setting up chat rooms in the event app is a great way to keep the energy going. And it helps in creating a true sense of community that attendees will love.
We’re all looking for new ideas and ways to continuously evolve as the event industry tackles new challenges. Cool Cats and Kittens made a great point here, challenging those offering virtual solutions for ideas. We’ve seen a lot of different events and we’re happy to help you hit the ground running.
A huge thank you to the Cool Cats and Kittens for also providing some CASE files. Here’s that link if you need it.
And with that, we’ve finished all the recaps from Eventhack 2020. Thanks for joining us!
