With the pandemic came surges. The hype for community and virtual events has gone.
Registrations are way down. And the percentage of people actually showing up is even lower. Virtual events use to be an easy way to pull people in, not anymore.
People are tired, busy and have more important priorities. Listening to people talk or having breakout sessions simply isn’t enough value, or enough of a pull.
We are in event burnout. As community managers and as attendees. The value of the pull is often not enough for people to attend. This is top of mind for me. There is so much fluff out there and I personally don’t want to be responsible for wasting anyone’s time.
In the Rosieland community and Timothy J Maggio said:
"Why would I go to that event for an hour when I can probably read the same in something like Rosie's newsletter in under 5 minutes?”
This is so important and it highlights that events are competing with more efficient ways of learning.
Ask important questions of your events:
why are we doing this?
is event attendance trending upwards?
is the event help our community grow?
how is this part of our community flywheel?
is this better off as a 2 way conversation?
how will this add value to the community?
are we confident people will sign up?
is this wasting anyone’s time?
how can we create a 5 minute version of the event?
can we use AI to summarise the conversation?
what other ways will we share insights with the community?
🌈 Continuous Community Clues are brought to you by Rosieland.
This resonates with me and my experience, Rosie. Great set of prompts for consideration! Thanks for sharing. I'm wondering if you get the feeling that community managers are also burned out, and rather than innovating new experiences, are caught in a bit of a post-pandemic zombie mode, replicating the playbook that worked for the last x years, but struggling to pull together a set of new plays.