Why You Should Still Plan Hybrid Events After the Pandemic

After months of Zoom fatigue, and with some in-person meetings set to resume over the summer, it’s tempting to run full steam back to live meetings and leave virtual events in the dust.

Before you break from the starting blocks, I urge you to pause. As much as we miss the familiarity and face-to-face aspect of in-person events, virtual and hybrid events have a valuable place in your long-term plans for engaging your audience.

Here are three major reasons why you should still plan hybrid events after the pandemic:

1. Hybrid events are more inclusive and accessible than in-person-only events.

There are many barriers people may face to attending an in-person conference, especially if it requires flying or a long drive:

• Physical disabilities and mobility issues: blindness, deafness, using a wheelchair or walker, inability to walk quickly, chronic pain, chronic fatigue
• Health issues that require equipment or a regimented medication schedule to manage
• Caring for children or older relatives at home
• Complex dietary restrictions
  • Tracy Stuckrath at Thrive Meetings creates a lot of great resources to help planners accommodate people with allergies and dietary restrictions. However, some people who have less common restrictions or who have had bad experiences with events not accommodating them properly may find it easier and less stressful to eat at home.
• Lack of access to professional development funding, or insufficient funding to cover event costs plus travel & accommodations

Hybrid events are more accessible to these audiences because they allow attendees to participate from home without travel or overnight stays.

Have you ever navigated your event setup in a wheelchair or blindfold? Rosemarie Rossetti and Mark Valenziano give great talks to event professionals about creating accessible events. I saw Rosemarie speak at MPI’s MidAmerica Conference, and she shared examples of inaccessibility that would be easy for planners to overlook without having experienced the event from her perspective as a wheelchair user, like not being able to reach food on the back side of a buffet and not having tables at the right height for her to sit at. At WEC 2019, Mark, who is blind, shared examples of situations when the staff who had been assigned to help him at an airport or event were unhelpful and didn’t understand how to appropriately meet his needs.

When so many aspects of an event have the potential to be roadblocks due to poor planning, in addition to the stresses of travel and navigating a busy conference schedule, it’s easy to see why some attendees might prefer to participate from an environment that is already familiar and comfortable to them.

I want to emphasize that this is not an excuse to ignore accessibility for your in-person event. Planners still need to follow best practices for asking for accessibility needs on your registration form and providing the appropriate solutions on-site. Every attendee has the right to choose which format of a hybrid event they prefer, in-person or virtual, based on their own preferences and how they weigh inconveniences vs. value.

Even though they remove the barriers of travel and unfamiliar environments, virtual events aren’t automatically perfect in terms of accessibility. Here are some ways to make the virtual attendance option at your event more accessible:

• Closed captions on live and pre-recorded sessions
• Discuss accessibility features for vision- and hearing-impaired attendees with your technology provider. Ensure the interface can be operated with voice commands and screen readers.
• Provide handouts and materials in a format that can be read by a screen-reader (ex: PDF instead of a JPG image)
• Allow registered attendees to access replays of live sessions to allow flexibility with other responsibilities
• Offer scholarships for attendees who may not have access to funding from their employer

Your event shouldn’t only be available to people in perfect health with easy-to-accommodate needs. People with physical accessibility needs or demanding home lives have historically been excluded from many opportunities for personal development and full participation in their industries and communities. By continuing to include a hybrid aspect in your live events, you open up the world of your event to a wider audience that more truly reflects the range of human experience, allowing everyone to participate in the education, decision-making, and networking that may previously have been closed off to them.

2. Hybrid events are a safe option for those who need to continue isolating for health reasons.

When we look forward to the time when the pandemic is “over,” it’s important to realize it may feel “over” for some groups of people long before the threat has passed for other groups.

People who are immunocompromised, or who live with or care for someone who is immunocompromised, may take much longer to feel comfortable attending an in-person event. Imagine if you were the primary caretaker for your 85-year-old mother who recently recovered from pneumonia. You find fulfillment and excitement in your career, and you want to stay involved to remain competitive, but you also realize your mother is at extremely high-risk for suffering a severe case of COVID-19 if infected. As much as you love your career, does attending that industry-wide summit really feel like an option?

Despite the rigorous sanitation and physical distancing measures being adopted by most venues, caterers, and planners, some people with heightened health risks may choose to wait until full vaccination has occurred or reliable treatments have been developed before they attend large group gatherings. Even the most ambitious timelines for these goals put them several months out, if not significantly longer.

With such a prolonged period of uncertainty still to come, people shouldn’t have to choose between caring for their health and participating in their careers and passions. Hybrid events allow these individuals to remain involved in their industries and communities, instead of having to put their careers and interests on hold.

3. Hybrid events are more sustainable than in-person-only events.

Travel is the largest component of the carbon emissions of most in-person national and international meetings. While many people will be eager to travel when restrictions are lifted, the looming climate crisis urges us to think critically about the future of travel and transportation.

Movements to fly less were already popular before the pandemic, especially in academic communities where researchers were beginning to question the necessity of traveling around the world to present their findings or communicate with peers when so many virtual methods were available. These methods have only multiplied and improved during the shutdown.

As the immediate threat of coronavirus winds down over the next year, the threat of climate change continues to increase as we approach the 1.5-degree threshold of warming. Though it feels stressful and unfair for there two be two global crises at once, the atmospheric physics that cause climate change haven’t taken a break due to the pandemic.

By continuing to plan hybrid events, you allow attendees to choose to participate without traveling, thereby eliminating dozens or hundreds of flights or long car trips and the carbon emissions they would have emitted.

Bonus: Greater reach

By making your event more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable through a hybrid approach, you may actually achieve a greater reach for your event, resulting in more registered attendees than would have been possible for an in-person-only event.

In contrast, by not having a hybrid event, you miss out on a significant percentage of your potential attendees who have a great deal to contribute to the community your meeting serves — and you miss out on their registration revenue as well.

Are you currently planning a hybrid event? How is your team planning to incorporate hybrid events in the future? Share your story in the comments!