Community (re)Focus, 2020: Chapter Rewind

There’s a tide of virtual summits in today’s tech-driven era, making these an ideal medium for educating the audiences about the changing industry trends.

Virtual summits and conferences empower businesses to attract users by helping them learn from seasoned industry experts. The Community (re)Focus event, hosted by Grazitti Interactive, invited speakers with immense community experience who shared their perspective on the evolution of communities, their future, and many other insightful topics.

There’s a lot that goes into organizing a virtual summit and Team Grazitti loved every bit of it. The planning and execution were just as exciting as the day of the event was. Let’s take a look at some questions and key takeaways from the event that marked its success.

Initial objectives set for the virtual summit

Initially, the Community (re)Focus event was planned as a simple panel discussion with a few community managers. However, the event organically evolved into a full-fledged virtual summit.

In an attempt to invite some speakers, we started by posting on LinkedIn. The initial response that we got was overwhelming. Community experts from different countries expressed their interest in joining the panel discussion for citing their views about the changing community landscape. The speakers wanted to talk about a variety of topics like:

• Community incentivization
• The role of AI in communities
• How to make communities more authentic
• Maintaining community authenticity
• Community megatrends 2030
• SNAP framework and distributed ownership
• Incorporating business data in communities, and more

The response that we received made us realize that a lot of community enthusiasts just want to share their knowledge of online communities and make it more accessible to users.

That’s how Community (re)Focus evolved into a virtual event and, dare we say, a raging success. The goal behind the event was to connect community experts and create a network where knowledge could be easily shared, benefitting the audiences.

The plan of action to make the summit a success

The overwhelming response from community enthusiasts across the globe marked the success of the event.

The number of attendees and the in-flow of sign-ups helped us analyze the event better, taking it as a sign of success.

A simple promotional strategy that was used to garner the interest of the attendees, community managers, and industry experts, was to educate them about the event by creating awareness. This was achieved by promoting the event across multiple social channels and curating email campaigns.

The strategy to get more registrations for the summit

A major strategy that was followed to generate awareness amongst the audiences and the speakers was to promote the event extensively on LinkedIn. LinkedIn helped increase the reach of the summit considering how active most community enthusiasts are on LinkedIn.

The platform helped in reaching out to the attendees and community experts formally, as well as informally. This led to building deeper and valuable relationships that ignited the interest of community enthusiasts and the attendees alike. The topics that were scheduled to be covered in the summit were highlighted constantly in the social media posts that helped build interest in the event and kept the audience hooked.

Our distinguished panelists and speakers also helped in getting the word out, resulting in increased engagement and more awareness about the event. We published live social media posts on our social handles promoting all the community action that was happening at the time. It helped us fetch more attendees in real-time while the event was live.

The post-event takeaways and learnings

The primary goal achieved by the end of the summit was building valuable relationships with the panelists, speakers, sponsors, and community enthusiasts across the globe. These relationships have brought forth a variety of opportunities for us to grow and serve our customers better on numerous fronts. The association also enabled us to devise strong advocacy and partnership programs.

Apart from the fruitful associations, the event had a major impact on our social media engagement metrics. The numbers rose considerably as a result of fluid speaker-attendee interaction. Another highlight of the event was the success of our virtual booths.

The virtual booths helped facilitate live interactions between our speakers and the audience smoothly. The attendees were able to participate in group chats and view live presentations via the virtual booths.

A big takeaway from the event was that strong association with knowledgeable and learned speakers in a virtual summit is of utmost importance. The Community (re)Focus summit was a successful affair because of discussions on all things community and the avid audience’s greed to learn more about the community space. Here’s to building exceptional communities!

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