Virtual Award Ceremony: With the social distancing events going on at full pace across the world, the companies made their employees to work from home for some time. The work from home keeps extending without any updates from both companies and government. Companies need to appreciate the time and hard work put across by the employees who are striving hard to make this time better. Whereas everything appears to have stopped, there is so much to be done virtually, like virtual awards ceremony.
Hosting the virtual awards ceremony will present significant challenges. Even though you have many years of planning experience, the current shift to digital will be challenging. Let us check out some top tips for the successful virtual award ceremony. Suppose you are still not much convinced and are not much sure of running the virtual awards ceremony, these tips will help you out:
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1. Consider Giving Awards
Awards are always very important. The winners will appreciate the awards and recognition that you offer them more now since you took an effort of sending their awards to their home. This will make them happy to know that you are still thinking about them and their achievements in such a crazy time!
2. Select the Right Platform
There’re a lot of virtual event vendors to select from hence you have to do your research. Select the right virtual platform that suits your requirements, and to prepare for the technology glitches, do not lock in the platform till you know if this works with the audience, mainly if it has government attendees.
Make sure you check that you are on stable internet connections before the event starts, and let the speakers do the same during the speaker rehearsal calls. You need to prepare the backups of the presentations if any file problems happen during an event. You must anticipate problems with your attendees who aren’t tech-savvy or have staff available for handling the presenter or viewer issues.
3. Practice the Event
Like with personal events, you have to do as much practice as possible when doing the virtual awards ceremony. Before an event, you must go through the entire ceremony schedule once with the full team. For any problem areas, you need to consider extra practice with the smaller groups.
4. Select judges
No matter whether you’re organizing the virtual award ceremony or real-time event, you may need to have a panel of judges that will decide & announce the winner. These judges can be from your organization like personnel from higher management or go for a voting system that whoever gets maximum votes wins the award.
5. Include sponsors
When you plan to promote the virtual awards ceremony for your invited attendees, do not forget to include the sponsors too, just thinking you have them. Allowing them to know about is a way to finance an affair. This affords them the opportunity of promoting themselves, no matter whether it is to your team specifically, family members, or anybody who gets through the word of mouth.
6. Social media streaming
Social media live-streaming event is the best way of creating excitement as well as build your brand online during the live event. You may select any social media platform like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter as these are popular live-streaming networks to consider. Or, you may “simulcast,” and live-stream on different social channels, with the tool like Vimeo or Switchboard. And do not forget to promote the live event in advance, so that your community is aware of where to follow in real-time.
Ending Your Virtual Event
Your awards event and its talented participants or employees deserve a big celebration – and the virtual gala provides them this opportunity. You can engage your entire community, celebrate the winners and finalists, and display your sponsors & behind-the-scenes actors like judges & program managers.
At an end of the day, the best virtual event platform, engaging host, memorable and pre-recorded videos, a bit of creativity and interactivity, good acceptance speeches as well as a spot of entertainment can go a very long way in entertaining the virtual crowd as well as get them to come back for the next year’s awards with a lot of enthusiasm!
Not just you will have the new data of what your audience or attendees found highly engaging in the event, but you will have the library of video that will power your marketing for many years to come.