Virtual Events: what to expect on the day of your event

So you’ve talked through what you want, your bourbons, and other event details with our team but want to have a little better idea of how an event will run the day of the event. Hopefully this will help!

Tech check: about 15 minutes before your event starts.

This is before the guests are expected to start arriving. We would like someone from the client end or event planner to be there during this time.

The tech check serves several purposes:

  • we do a quick review and make sure everyone from the client to the presenter are on the same page for that exact event since there are a lot of moving parts to these.
  • we do any last minute mic check and camera angle checks
  • we make sure our moderator is logged in and ready to watch the chat screen and we have all headphones etc hooked up correctly
  • we’ve had a few instances where the client side has sent us the wrong link or didn’t set up the meeting to allow us in and that extra 15 minutes has given us the time to track someone down to get the corrected link so we can start on time.

If we’re using zoom we can turn on the waiting room if we need to keep people out of the tech check and then turn off the waiting room at event start but usually we don’t and anyone who shows up early … it’s just as if they had shown up a bit early to an in-person event.

Event start:
Usually these events run 60-90 minutes on average but we plan to be available for a full 2 hours if people are really engaged and asking a lot of questions. Your precise bourbons and other details are discussed with our team.

If you have presentations at the beginning or end of the event that’s very easy to accommodate. Usually people don’t try to intersperse presentations but please let us know in advance.

As a general rule of thumb we try and keep things as interactive as possible. Our moderators are off-camera typically on a second device but can help the presenter keep up with larger groups and feed the presenter questions or comments that come in via chat. Sometimes they answer questions in chat depending on how the event is going or if it’s a larger sized group as well.

And then wrap-up or social hour:
We typically like to pass things back to the client to wrap up at the end if possible and tell people to enjoy their evening or invite them to stay on for social hour.

If your wish to have a social hour after our presentation and it’s zoom, that’s super simple.

  • If you create the zoom link, we just log off on our end.
  • If we need to set up a Zoom link from our account, all we have to do is make someone at the client end a host on the event. That person will need to stay on until the social hour is wrapped up but we can add a host during the tech check. This allows us to log out and the party to keep going.

Every event is about what you want to get out of it as well as be entertaining & interactive!