Attendee Cohorts at Virtual Events
Innovating the Virtual Conference Experience
In newish, people-oriented fields like User Experience (UX), we adore our conferences. There’s the obvious stuff—the learning and networking. There’s also the opportunity to announce ourselves publicly—to put ourselves on the professional map by making an impactful presentation. And there‘s the annual hit we get from seeing and being with people who like us and who get us.
But we struggle to replicate those benefits at virtual conferences. Zoom Fatigue aside, virtual conferences lack the social serendipity of making a new friend while waiting in the coffee line or falling head over heels in love at the evening reception. (Seriously. Two folks I introduced at one conference returned a year later happily married.)
Still, virtual conferences aren’t going away. Nor should they: virtual is far more accessible than in-person. Not just cheaper, but much easier for people who can’t travel for such reasons as constrained time and travel budgets or mobility challenges. From now on, many—if not most—conferences will broaden their reach by offering both in-person and virtual experiences.
So: virtual conferences are here to stay, and we don’t like them. Can anything be done to make the virtual experience better? Or maybe even great?
I’ll let you in on a little secret that’s made a huge difference for us at Rosenfeld Media: offering attendee cohorts.
We host four conferences annually and, like most event producers, the pandemic’s arrival presented us with an existential crisis. But it also presented some interesting opportunities—no, requirements—to innovate.
Developing attendee cohorts has been our salvation. They’ve brought social serendipity to our virtual experience that’s at least comparable to in-person networking—and they’ve created new ways to to learn together that we’ve never seen offered at in-person events.
What’s an attendee cohort?
The answer is deceptively simple: an attendee cohort is a small group—say, 6–10 people—that attends a virtual conference together. Rosenfeld’s cohorts are led by two volunteer co-facilitators who organize cohort get-togethers, make sure participants are introduced to each other, and keep the conversation flowing within each cohort throughout the conference.
Cohorts meet in two ways: on Zoom for kick-offs and daily check-ins, and via private Slack channels for ongoing discussion over the course of the conference.
How are cohorts created?
We offer attendees the opportunity to join a cohort when they register, and do so at no additional cost. Typically the portion of attendees that does so runs from 25–50%. There’s always attrition—people understandably sign up and then realize later that they can’t attend each day—so we create our cohorts with the goal of having at least six or seven participants in each.
While we’ve experimented with creating cohorts around common interests (e.g., content strategy), roles (first-time managers), and industries (healthcare, finance), we’ve found that cohort composition is best left to the serendipity of assembling groups randomly and seeing what happens. After all, they’re already pre-qualified by their interest in the conference itself. That said, we do try to arrange cohorts by time zones, which does make participation much more convenient.
We also encourage speakers to participate in cohorts. This is truly a win-win arrangement: speakers get to know the audience first-hand—something not entirely common in most events—and are treated like celebrities within their respective cohorts. Participants feel pride and root hard when “their speaker” joins the virtual stage.
What makes a cohort successful?
The difference between an attendee cohort and a watch party is the presence of active facilitators.
We offer our volunteer facilitators a complimentary ticket to the conference, list them on the conference website, and acknowledge them from the virtual stage and via LinkedIn recommendations. But if we offered none of these things, our facilitators would be there nonetheless: they absolutely love the opportunity to meet colleagues, attend the conference, and develop their own remote facilitation skills while working in a “real life” situation with industry peers. In fact, many of our facilitators are veterans of four or five of our conferences—which allows us to pair them with less experienced facilitators who can use the mentorship.
Our facilitators are usually already participating in the broader Rosenfeld community, or are referred to us by other facilitators or past speakers, who see value in their colleagues gaining remote facilitation experience. If a prospective facilitator isn’t very experienced, we welcome them nonetheless: all Rosenfeld facilitators are required to attend an orientation session and review our facilitation documentation. And much of the program is expertly run by a volunteer coordinator who is a past facilitator (speaking of whom, kudos and hats off to Melissa Burnett and Fabian Boehm!).
Facilitators get things started by scheduling a kick-off meeting with their cohort attendees a day or two before the conference starts, running Zoom-based ice-breaker activities with the goal of helping attendees establish their individual and shared goals for both learning and networking. They often capture these goals and other ideas using a digital canvas (typically Miro or MURAL):
Canvases are often used throughout each conference to document learning goals, questions, lessons, and take-aways:
Facilitators have been uncommonly generous in helping each other, as well as their cohort participants. For example, master facilitator Changying Zheng (aka ‘Z’) recorded an instructive short video on why she became a facilitator and how she uses digital canvases during and after the conferences.
Do cohorts work?
The goals of attendee cohorts are two-fold: better learning and better networking. These aren’t easy things to measure, and I’ll confess that we’ve been so busy producing virtual conferences that we’ve not had the opportunity to formally evaluate the results. That said, cohorts seem to be more than passing the eye test:
“Cohorts connected me with folks who are in a similar position at work, looking to learn similar things, and with more senior folks who could provide guidance and perspective.”
— Isabel F., Senior User Experience Designer, Motorola Solutions
The cohort experience was great — it created a human connection that usually lacks in conferences, virtual or not.”
— Inayaili L., Design Producer, GitHub
“I’ve participated in cohorts since they’ve been offered and have found them invaluable. It’s nice having a smaller tribe to discuss what’s going on at a conference. We also get to talk about what our experiences are like and get feedback on how we might approach current challenges we’re facing. Hearing everyone’s roles and journeys was also helpful for me…”
— Michelle C., Principal DesignOps Manager, Citrix
“Being part of a cohort enhanced my DesignOps Summit experience ten-fold. As a “team of one,” meeting people who do what I do in other companies, learning more about how they approach the same problems I have, and sharing our experiences was incredibly valuable.”
— Kristine B., DesignOps Program Director, IBM
Really, there haven’t been any downsides to offering attendee cohorts. If anything, they present a new challenge: as the pandemic settles down and the world opens back up, how might we use attendee cohorts to innovate the in-person conference experience?
Our next conference—DesignOps Summit 2022 (September 7–9)—will take place both in-person and virtually, and we’re looking forward to figuring out how attendee cohorts will be integral to both experiences.
I’ll let you know how it goes later this year!
