Broadcast Your Event

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Go live on the day of the event.
• Have your contingency plans ready.
• Wrap up after the broadcast.

It’s Go Time!

Whether you’re pressing broadcast and watching pre-recorded content play, or doing a fully live experience, it’s event time!

If everything has been pre-recorded, then your video is locked and ready for broadcast and you’re standing by in case of any issues that arise, or to interact with any live Q&A or social media posts. If, however, you need to present some or all of your pieces live, then it’s a pretty big day ahead.

You previously covered the roles and responsibilities, and it’s all hands on deck today. The event lead is calling the shots. Production is making sure everything runs smoothly. The tech team is standing by for the broadcast. And the social media and communications team has a very busy day ahead keeping the audience engaged and capturing the event highlights. Your presenters are camera-ready and event moderators are poised to answer any audience questions. 

Speaking of which, how are you interacting with the audience? This might depend on the platform you’ve chosen and whether there is the capability to type or ask questions. Or maybe you decide to handle questions and interactions through your social media handles for the event. This can really help with your reach and visibility if you get enough interaction. If nothing else, even though this is a digital event, your audience needs a way to interact with you and connect after the event. Create a simple CTA. Use an event hashtag to track social engagement across platforms—this also gives people who want to praise your event a way to tag you and show you their support.

When it comes to hashtags, an accessibility tip is to capitalize the beginning letter in each word. Hashtags are often a combination of multiple words, and they must be constructed without spaces. Most people lowercase all the letters of each word, something like #trailblazersinnovate. This can make it difficult to decipher the phrase. Therefore, to make your hashtags more accessible, capitalize the first letter of each word to differentiate between the words in your hashtag, like #TrailblazersInnovate.

Contingency Plans

Have you met Murphy? Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. So what do you do if all goes wrong? Have a plan, and plan for the worst. What if your lead presenter comes down with laryngitis overnight and can’t talk? Have you got a recording you can play instead? Is there someone else that’s prepared to step in? Have a plan!

You’ve tested and the team is ready to handle anything that’s thrown at you. Don’t panic and if Plan A is failing, go to your contingency plan.

Exit Stage Left

And with that, you end the call, end the stream, close your laptops, and celebrate an event well executed. This is usually the moment when you start looking at your engagement numbers and drafting a post with key highlights for your internal team. In your event wrap-up, include all your metrics you previously decided on. This generally includes how many attendees you had and how many registrations. It’s a great idea to include any awesome quotes or sound bites from your viewers either through their questions or their social engagement. Also include visuals of your events so anyone that missed it can see your hard work.

You’re almost done, but don’t forget to make the content or recording accessible after the fact. Direct anyone who didn’t catch the event live to catch up here and add to your metrics to show how many people consume your content on demand after the big day.

It’s Not Over Until the Debrief

While the event is over, this is likely not the last time you will run an event. So capture feedback about this event and the planning process to make sure the next event runs even better.

Have each team or person involved share what worked, what didn’t work, and any learnings or improvements for next time. If you create this as a slide, then it’s easily referenced.

Now there is just one thing left for you to do...

Take a week off and enjoy some time to yourself!