Virtual Summit Platform

Virtual summits are becoming increasingly popular with event organizers. If you are looking to host one, you have come to the right place. Let's take a look at some important steps you need to take to host an amazing online summit.

What Is a Virtual Summit?

A virtual summit is basically an online event where you invite global industry leaders to discuss the relevant issues and topics related to a certain field. While a physical conference can only have so many attendees, a virtual event will let you access global speakers and audience members. As this involves a lot of organization, you need a virtual summit planning checklist. 

How Does a Virtual Summit Work?

During a virtual summit, you have the opportunity to generate a significant number of digital leads. This is because it involves a digital platform, where people can sign up to attend. You’ll need to have a list of appealing speakers to attract your audience, and get the right amount of registrations.  On the day of the summit, these attendees log into the event, and can explore the lobby, talk with each other through chat features, and attend informative webinars. Many hosts enable Q&A sessions at these webinars to generate more engagement and get more interest. Therefore, if you want to have a successful event with global speakers and a diverse audience, you should go down the virtual route. 

How Do You Plan a Virtual Summit?

Here’s your virtual summit planning checklist for a successful event. 

1. Decide Your Goals

Why are you holding this virtual summit? Figure out what you want to achieve, according to the nature of your industry. Do you want it to be more product-based or communication-based? Focus on the key goals you want to achieve, and make them quantifiable. Virtual events come packaged with a host of statistics and metrics during and after the event for you to use. 

2. Figure Out Your Audience

You need to see what your audience wants and needs from a virtual event. The first step is to determine their level of internet accessibility and tech knowhow. Luckily, a virtual summit does not require a lot of technical expertise, but you still need to make sure your audience can navigate around it easily.  

3. Find Sponsors & Exhibitors

Hosting a virtual event is not an easy job, particularly if you’re a resource-strapped organization. Pitch your plans and goals to potential sponsors, and showcase the benefits your event will bring them. Make sure you pitch the data supporting these events, as companies value them significantly. At this stage, also create exhibitors’ packages, where you can charge for booths, with different levels for different levels of exposure and brand marketing. 

4. Notify Everyone About The Virtual Summit Well In Advance

Just because you’re going virtual with your event, you cannot do everything last minute. There is still a lot of planning involved. Furthermore, your intended audience needs to be available for your event to make it successful. If they’re not aware of it on time, they simply won’t be able to attend. Furthermore, you need to time your event in such a way that it doesn’t clash with any other major industry event or with some holiday. Notify your attendees at least a month or so in advance, so that they can plug your virtual conference into their schedule accordingly. 

5. Market Your Virtual Summit Far & Wide

Your desired audience and your industry needs to be aware of your virtual event. Therefore, you should make a marketing plan well before the day and follow through with it thoroughly. Use a variety of mediums to get the word out, and attract high footfall. Use email invites, social media, and other methods to spread awareness and capture attention. Promoting your event with proper planning in place will help you get an impressive number of relevant attendees. 

6. Give Value To Your Audience

Your virtual summit should offer valuable content to your audience. Your event attendees should feel like they’ve taken away something by attending your summit. Therefore, you need to create engaging and compelling content, and also bring experts on board. Furthermore, you should give your attendees ample networking opportunities with lobbies and networking lounges, so that they know your event is the place to be. As long as you contribute something of value, even if it’s just a piece of information, to participants, you can make them leave satisfied. 

7. Delegate Responsibilities Clearly

Everyone involved needs to know what is expected of them. Therefore, you need to assign duties and allocate responsibilities in a clear, written way. This will prevent chaos on the day of the event, and will leave no aspect unattended. Take event host support when needed, and do a test run of all your event features before your audience really starts showing up. If you delegate tasks clearly, no one will be running around confused.  This checklist will help you run a successful event. If you are looking for more detailed guidelines, check out our Complete Guide to Online Summits.  

  In April 2021, the Leaders Summit on Climate 2021 invited 40 world leaders to tackle the pressing climate crisis. Thus, came to be the largest virtual gathering of global leaders the world had ever seen.  From small businesses, all the way up to governments and global leaders, virtual summits have really taken off. Many of us only learned of them after the COVID-19 pandemic. But over the past year, we’ve come to appreciate just how impactful they can be.  In this article, we’ll explore:

• what a virtual summit is.
• why this event type became popular.
• how organizers can design the perfect virtual summit with vFairs.

What is a Virtual Summit?

A virtual summit is an event hosted online that brings people together to solve a problem. For instance, global leaders discussing the climate crisis or employees solving organizational challenges. Several people will also consider virtual summits synonymous with virtual conferences and that’s fine too! However, we like to stick with the above definition.

Why Virtual? 

As a life-threatening disease loomed over us for most of 2020, people didn’t have the option to host on-site events. Event organizers had to explore remote options and that’s how virtual events finally got global attention.  Companies of various sizes and verticals tried various virtual event platforms out. But by way of accident, they noticed that well-organized virtual events offered the same level of engagement as on-site events. Not only that, they were much easier to host and attend.  Here’s why summits went virtual as well.

1. Greater reach: On-site events have logistical limitations like auditorium caps and fixed lobby space. Virtual summits don’t. Anyone from around the world can attend virtual events, making them available to limitless global audiences.
2. Ease of attendance: People no longer had to drive to far-off venues or fly in from different cities to be a part of the discussions. They could simply use their laptop and attend a virtual summit from the comfort of their home offices. 
3. No travel/catering costs: With people attending virtually, event organizers were able to eliminate traveling, catering, and accommodation costs with virtual summits.
4. Longer availability period: Hosts could keep the sessions live for as long as a year for their attendees to revisit if they so wished. 
5. Inclusivity: Virtual summits were also much easier for people with disabilities to attend. People restricted to their homes or struggling with mobility issues could easily participate in the talks. Those with hearing and visual impairments could also partake in the activities with accessibility features.

Why vFairs Virtual Summits? 

Video calling and online meeting apps have existed for a long time. Why was there ever a need for a dedicated virtual event platform?  Well, online meeting tools like Skype and Zoom offer platforms for office meetings and group chats. But a summit needs much more than that. This event type requires advanced features like webinars, live Q&As, networking options, and resource hubs. The summit experience goes beyond just meeting someone online.  After organizing a score of virtual events for the past few years, vFairs understands the needs of a virtual summit well and offers a dedicated solution. Here’s a breakdown of how the vFairs virtual summit offers an unmatched virtual summit experience. 

1. Realistic 3D Environments That Enable an Immersive Experience 

vFairs puts special emphasis on an immersive virtual environment. This helps attendees engage with the event better and just generally enjoy it more. Visually rich environments also make it easier for attendees to ease the application. They’re better able to get a sense of their surroundings in a setting that matches their past event experiences. This lowers the learning curve, making navigation easy. vFairs offers several different layouts for your virtual summits, with multiple branding options so your event truly represents your identity. You can also match backgrounds with your office or your usual convention center so attendees feel right at home. 

2. Engaging Webinars with Q&As and Live Polls

Next up is the most important aspect of any virtual summit: the webinar. People attend summits primarily to listen to the speaker sessions and interact with experts. This is why the webinars need to be highly engaging and interactive.  vFairs offers multiple webinar hosting options: 

• Host live sessions with real-time speaker-attendee interactions.
• Host semi-live sessions that are pre-recorded but accept comments in real-time.
• Upload pre-recorded sessions for attendees to view at their convenience.
• Make your sessions available on-demand for as long as you’d like.*(((((((((

Virtual summits with vFairs offer live Q&As and polls. You can even moderate these and address questions that pop up more often. 

3. Breakout Sessions

After the speaking sessions conclude, organizers might want attendees to attend breakout sessions. These bring people together for problem-solving and work great for summits. vFairs features breakout sessions for attendees to split into smaller groups and collaborate in a more intimate setting. The platform helps bring the best ideas to the table. 

4. Networking Features 

No virtual event can be successful with dependable and intuitive networking features. vFairs goes one step ahead to offer multiple networking options: chat, audio, and video. Choose to engage in one-on-one conversations or catch up with your colleagues in a group chat.  Moreover, auto-matching also helps people meet others that share their interests for new meaningful connections and an overall memorable virtual summit experience.  

5. Resource Center and Video Vault

Most virtual summits also have a bunch of helpful resources to offer their attendees. These could be agenda documents, briefs about the summit, or even awareness documents. You can host these on vFairs and even let attendees save them to their virtual swag bags. The video vault lets you upload videos to your vFairs virtual summit so attendees can view them at their own convenience.

6. Navigational Videos and Maps

Upon entering the virtual summit, you can even greet attendees with introductory videos or navigation instructions. These help visitors feel more comfortable with new platforms and get better attuned to the upcoming activities. 

7. Exhibit halls (optional)

While many summits don’t really need an exhibition floor, some organizers still like to provide their sponsors some real-estate at the event. They might also want to give attendees another way to speak to organizational representatives.  For this reason, vFairs has one of the most functional and immersive exhibit halls you’ll ever see. With custom booths and animated avatars, you can create a floor that imitates. You can also choose from a scroll-through view and an aerial view.  For a complete overview of the features, visit the vFairs virtual summit solution page.

How to Design the Ultimate Virtual Summit with Vfairs

The vFairs virtual event platform offers a range of summit features that help organizers design a power-packed convention. Let’s see how you can design the ultimate virtual summit with vFairs. 

1. Get in Touch with Your Dedicated Project Manager

Every virtual event at vFairs starts with the kick-off call with your project manager. This is where they assess your virtual summit’s needs and gauge the best features and add-ons for you. Depending on this call, they’ll also tell you about any integrations that will improve your virtual summit offering.  The representatives at vFairs understand the importance of making your event your own so they’ll ask you about the event visuals as well. You’ll have the option of choosing from various layouts, diverse avatars, and much more. 

2. Configure the Landing Page 

Get the registration page up as early as possible so you can start your marketing efforts in time. This will help you collect more registrations, in case people have to sign-up for the event. You can prefer to keep a short and sweet landing page or you can go for an in-depth guide to the event with speaker bios, benefits of attending, the event agenda, FAQs - basically, anything that convinces more people to attend.  To see what types of data you can make available on your landing page, check out these massive spreads:

• OECS virtual summit
• Governance & Quality Conference 2021 

We recommend shorter landing pages that cover the event basics with highly visible calls-to-action, as these make for convincing pitches that aren’t too overwhelming for readers.

3. Set up the Webinars

Next, you’ll want to set up your webinars. You can either do this yourself from the webinar module or ask your project management team to set them up for you.  For each of your sessions, choose from the following types of webinars available:

• Zoom Webinar: This is your standard Zoom webinar that starts in the Zoom application and allows for breakout sessions.
• Automated Zoom Webinar: This webinar automatically starts at the stipulated time.
• Embedded Zoom Webinar: embedded within your event so attendees don’t have to navigate away from it. This also offers more branding options. 
• Pre-recorded Video: This is the semi-live webinar option where you can upload a pre-recorded session. 
• On-demand Video: You can choose to offer sessions on-demand so attendees can view them whenever and however many times they’d like.
• Click Meeting Webinar: This session type lets attendees interact via video and audio with the speaker. It offers the most interaction options with the attendees.
• Kudo Webinar: This type features our Kudoway integration that lets attendees view the sessions with real-time translations into a language of their choice.

The most popular webinar types for vFairs virtual summits are Meetings and Zoom Webinars.  In addition to these, you can also add posters to your auditorium as PDFs or include message titles such as ‘Break’. Next, specify the time and details for each of your sessions. You can also use other integrations such as Wordly or Slido to add live Q&As and polls to your sessions. 

4. Set up Chat Rooms and Your Networking Lounge 

Since networking is also a major part of the virtual summit experience, you’ll want to set up networking rooms with a lot of care. Try to make as many options available for attendees to interact. You can set up multiple types of rooms. These can range from community chatrooms where you can connect with attendees or a ‘Meet the Experts’ room where you can reach out to speakers or experts from the event.

5. Enable the Meeting Scheduler

The meeting scheduler is another popular feature at vFairs virtual summits. This helps attendees connect with representatives without having to waste their time for the representative to get free. It also works for speakers who don’t want to be in a public chat room being bombarded with multiple attendee questions at once.  To set this up, head to Chat Slots from the navigation bar at your event’s backend. You can create chat listings and set up reserved slots from here. 

6. Get in Touch with Your Partners for the Exhibit Hall

If your summit is going to feature an exhibit hall, you’ll have to connect with your partners for booth customizations. The vFairs exhibit halls offer exceptional customization options, allowing organizers to put branding at the forefront of the exhibition.  Collect the booth collateral such as standees, logos, videos, and documents from your partners or give them access to the platform. They have the option to set up their stalls however they like. You can also let our project management team set up the floor based on your requirements.  The booths are also where all the resources for your event are hosted so attendees can add them to their virtual swag bags.

7. Other Features You Can Use

There are tons of other features that the platform offers if you’d like to further upscale your vFairs virtual summit. Here’s a quick summary of those:

• Help desk: Offer attendees a centralized place to ask for directions and technical assistance. 
• Notifications: Update attendees and let attendees know what’s about to start as the day progresses.
• Live-attendee stats: Gauge current engagement by viewing how many people are online at any given time.
• Scavenger hunt: Add excitement to the event by hiding objects around the venue and doing giveaways.
• Miro integration: Collaborate with the attendees using Miro’s collaborative whiteboard. 
• Photo booth: Make the summit more fun and engaging with an in-event photo booth.
• Leaderboard: Boost engagement with a scavenger hunt and a leaderboard that tracks scores.

For a complete list of features, head to the vFairs features page. We also recommend checking out our virtual summit guide. 

Conclusion

With years of virtual summit experience, vFairs has been able to optimize its offering based on the smallest needs of event organizers. Because of this, our event specialists have also been able to understand what features work best for this event type.  With their expertise, setting up a vFairs virtual summit is incredibly easy! All you have to do is have clear goals in place and we’ll take care of everything else.  

Summits are an essential part of any organization's growth strategy. But organizing and hosting an in-person summit can be quite daunting. You have to send invites, book halls, print collateral, and arrange for catering and accommodation. And that's a lot of money and materials down the drain.  These costs and geographical limitations have encouraged organizers to up-skill their summits through a virtual environment not only to increase networking opportunities but also to bring people together irrespective of their physical location - hence forming virtual summits. 

What is a Virtual Summit?

A virtual summit brings together industry experts, business leaders, and speakers together online. All these experts talk on or discuss a specific topic. Attendees also register online to attend these summits. The main difference between physical and virtual summits is that physical events use an actual auditorium whereas in virtual summits a virtual auditorium is available for the attendees. Online presentations are leveraged to communicate ideas. Virtual summits are considered very useful for sparking discussions and problem-solving. 

Benefits of Hosting a Virtual Summit

1. Expand Your Reach

Looking to attract attendees without geographical limitations? One of the easiest and most effective ways is through virtual events.  Potential audiences are always spread around the globe, and it becomes challenging to reach every one of them. 

2. Keep Your Event Cost in Check 

In-person events cost twice as much as virtual events - well if you can avail yourself of the same benefits or more within the budget how can you refuse? Through virtual summits, the overhead costs are drastically reduced. As a result, you don’t need to charge high registration fees or ticket prices to break even. Lower prices make your event more accessible, which means more registrations.  

3. Broaden Your Professional Network 

Additionally, you and your attendees can build strong relationships with industry leaders and experts based around the world. Through virtual summits, you not only get to build your brand and solve real world problems, but also get an opportunity to build influencing networks and global communities.

4. Brand Awareness

If you are looking to sell a product or service, one of the most important aspects is to make sure that your potential customers trust your brand. For this purpose, you may want to speed up your brand awareness activities. Because if people haven’t heard about you or your brand, chances are they may not buy from you and may take a long time before they can decide whether to trust you or not.  Virtual events give you a chance to make some noise about your offerings. And when the noise is combined with word of mouth from industry experts - the success is immediate. Moreover, a virtual summit organized around your brand and the problem that it is solving can help you position yourself as a market leader in the industry and that too on a budget. 

5. Increase Your ROI

Virtual summit hosting platforms come with many in-built features and one of those features is the ability to make sales during the event through exhibit booths. For example, vFairs offer cart options with the custom booth environment, through which organizers can close sales faster by processing orders right through the virtual summit. These shopping carts help you see an instant ROI.

How Do I Create an Online Summit?

If you are looking to host a successful summit online, and excited about it, then you should know some of the basic yet important steps about how it works. 

Step 1: Identify Your Goals

The first thing you need to do is identify your goals.  why are you hosting a virtual summit? What do you intend to get out of it? Maybe you are looking to generate more email subscribers or secure leads - it can be anything. But at the end of the day, you have to be clear about what you are looking to achieve. You should be able to answer the what and the why. Some common goals of virtual summits are:

• Build company reputation in the industry
• Increase brand awareness
• Solve a real world problem
• Build relationships with industry experts, prospects, and potential partners
• Generate sales leads 
• Grow your email list
• Build a community

Step 2: Plan Your Virtual Summit

You need to make sure that your plan aligns with your event purpose and goals. Some important things to consider while planning is:

• What is your event budget?
• What will be the date of the virtual summit?
• How long will it be available on-demand after the live days? 
• Who is your target audience?
• What is the problem that you will be addressing?
• How many guest speakers will be invited?

Step 3: Choose Your Virtual Summit Hosting Platform 

Anyone can arrange a zoom meeting or a webinar and call it a day, but hosting a virtual event that looks and feels like a physical event is the real deal. In order to ensure high engagement rates, you require a hosting platform that offers all the features you need to stand out. Look for a platform that offers the following features:

• 3D interfaces to enhance customer experience
• Live, semi-live and pre-recorded webinar sessions, 
• On-demand availability even after the event has concluded, 
• Easy platform set up for organizers,
• In-built event marketing options, 
• Networking features such as audio and video meetings

For a better understanding of our offerings, browse the vFairs virtual summit.

Step 4: Decide Your Virtual Summit Format

Now that you have decided on the virtual event hosting platform and familiarized yourself with the features that it offers - planning your summit’s format becomes a lot easier. In this step you will decide if you want to run a sole virtual event or a mix of both - live and virtual also known as a hybrid. Do you want to go with live event sessions or pre-recorded? If you choose to go with live events, your attendees can network with other industry professionals and experts in real-time through live Q&A but if you decide to go with pre-recorded on-demand sessions, catering to different time zones becomes a lot easier. The choice is yours!

Step 5: Invite Guest Speakers

No virtual summit or event is complete without speakers. That is why speaker outreach should be a top priority for you. Invite influencers and industry experts that best fit the goal of your virtual summit. You can also utilize LinkedIn to connect with industry leaders, build relationships and invite speakers to your summit. Remember to highlight the benefits of mutual collaboration such as more exposure, high authority in the market, and more email list subscribers.

Step 6: Content Creation for Your Summit

The last step before launching your event is to create exciting and meaningful content. Pro-tip is to plan and design content way ahead of time to avoid missing out on anything and avoid delays. You would need:

• Announcement/press release 
• Blog posts
• Email marketing to build curiosity 
• Social media promotion 
• Beautiful landing pages

How Much Does it Cost to Host a Virtual Summit?

To host a successful summit, you need a service provider to help and guide you throughout the process. The service provider in your case is the virtual event hosting platform - The pricing of your event depends on the kind of features you need, the numbers of attendees, and the level of service. For example, hosting a simple webinar with few attendees and chat options will cost much less than one with the 3D interface, gamification features, and dedicated support. But generally speaking, you can expect to spend somewhere around $10,000 to up to $50,000 or more.

How Long Should a Virtual Summit Be?

The normal duration of a virtual summit can fall somewhere between three and 10 days. This duration helps enhance attendee knowledge on important topics and solve the main problem statement. But the right duration always depends on the scale of your event. If it’s a small-scale event with 30 to 50 attendees, the summit can span from one to three days. However, if you're reaching a global audience with more than 10 speakers, the summit may take more than five days to

Virtual Summit Ideas

1. Add gamification

Games such as spin the wheel, trivias, and quizzes excite attendees and keep them engaged. Speaking of, vFairs offers amazing opportunities to enhance attendee interest and spark curiosity throughout the event through activities like leaderboards, scavenger hunts and trivia to incite a little competition among your event attendees within your virtual event. 

2. Q&As

Give your attendees a chance to understand your brand even better through two-way communication during a Q&A session and offer an interactive summit experience through live polls.

3. 1:1 chat options

Give a chance to your sponsor and exhibitors to network with attendees through one-on-one chat options using video, audio, or text chat features. Allow attendees to schedule meetings with sponsors and exhibitors during the summit through meeting schedulers to reserve their spots. 

4. Landing pages

Your virtual summit needs an enticing event page with eye-catching and engaging images. Plus, it should have all the essential details to create pre-event hype such as information on your speakers, your event agenda, and list of sponsors.  Among other things, vFairs also designs attention-grabbing event landing pages to drive sign-ups. 

5. Branded virtual booths

Branded booths are a game-changer, be it an online conference, webinar, or summit. Through an immersive virtual booth, exhibitors can boost their visibility. Additionally, vFairs lets exhibitors insert their videos and upload all their content including marketing collateral to the booth for maximum reach., attendees can download the content into their virtual briefcase and email it to themselves for future reference. 

6. Interactive webinars

You can host live, semi-live, or on-demand webinars with live Q&As. This will give your speakers more flexibility. You can also make the webinars available on-demand after the live event days.

7. Integrate social media

The impact of social media is huge when used the right way. Plus, social media is considered crucial for marketing and running promotional campaigns. Therefore, consider adding a social media integration to your event to boost audience engagement. 

Some Virtual Summit Examples from vFairs 

vFairs has been helping global businesses organize striking virtual summits and conferences over the past few years. They're fulfilling their marketing, sales, training, and corporate communication needs with the platform. And the responses have been amazing. Following are some insightful client success stories of virtual summits to help you narrow down your research: 

• Numotion goes virtual to educate their employees while upholding their event standard
• Fair Institute’s first ever virtual conference became a smashing success with vFairs
• The Arizona Imaging & Microanalysis Society attracted a global audience through a virtual meeting

Want to know how to get your virtual summits right with vFairs? We've put together a vFairs online summit tutorial for you.

Virtual Summit Checklist 

• Set your goals
• Choose your topic
• Decide on the summit's date
• Make a list of potential speakers
• Create a speaker checklist 
• Book interview ties with them
• If you want to do pre-recorded sessions, record an interview with them,
• Create content such as graphics and banners for social media
• Create a striking branded landing page with Summit’s name and dates, speaker profiles, explainer videos, summit agenda, FAQs, and sign up for registration
• Promote your event through PPC, and other social platforms 
• Launch the event 
• Send thank-you notes to each of your speakers