How to make your next brand experience tick all three.
With research showing top businesses priorities include environmental sustainability (a top 10 CEO priority – ITBrief Australia), inclusivity (90% of top companies surveyed by Seramount prioritise diversity, equity and inclusion), and cost-effective (PwC CEO Survey), it has never been more important to seek innovative ways to build culture, ignite your brand and strategy, unite your people and maximise business results.
Brand experiences – such as events and conferences – which bring ALL your people together to recognise their work, engage their heads and hearts with business purpose, celebrate success and future vision – within a space that promotes 360-degree communication, can achieve this and more.
At Synergy Effect, we’re thrilled to have been recognised among the top 3% of event companies worldwide for sustainability, encompassing environmental, labour, human rights, ethics and culture – being awarded a Gold Medal by Ecovadis. Here we wanted to share some of our top tips to make your next event more sustainable, inclusive and cost-effective.
- Go hybrid multi-site
Online events can reduce the carbon footprint of events by 95%, PLUS online events – which can be attended from anywhere with internet connection – are far more inclusive and cost-effective. However, we’re all familiar with digital event fatigue, and when it comes to networking and building culture, nothing beats in-person. The solution? incorporate both live and online to make your event hybrid multi-site.
Hybrid multi-site events have multiple live sites in the cities where your people are based – all connected by technology so they are simultaneously engaged in the same activations, presentations and experiences.
From an environmental sustainability viewpoint, this drastically cuts down on the carbon footprint and costs for flights or transport, and is much more cost-effective in terms of the per-guest cost of your event.
For example, you could look at spending $2000 per guest (or more) to fly everyone in to one single flagship event, versus $800 per-guest for multi-site events, or $180 per guest for online attendees.
2. Beam speakers in from where they are
Alleviate carbon-footprint from flights, plus expensive travel costs and time demands, by beaming remote presenters in live from anywhere in the world. At Synergy Effect, we have created 3D 260-degree digital sets that blend digital presentation components with live, so remote presenters can join in-person presenters live on the same stage – a great example of this is the Galderma First Impressions event we put together last year, which won the Best National Live or Hybrid Brand Event at the 2022 Australian Event Awards. This also allows you to use a mix of live and pre-recorded content for presentations.
3. Present a wide range of voices to increase inclusivity
When planning content, include a wide range of voices from your industry or organisation. Pre-filming sections allows you to ensure you include people from the factory floor and manufacturing plant to mid-level management, C-suite and more. Panel discussions, video compilations with vox pops, behind the scenes dive ins, are great ways to do this.
4. Invite ALL your people
By making your event hybrid multisite you will provide your people with more flexibility and opportunity to attend at a live venue that is close to them, or through the online event portal – both of which also significantly reduce the per head cost of event attendance. By including online attendance as an option, you can reach 10x or more the audience with little extra cost.
5. Engagement at the centre
When creating your event, start by considering the guest experience and build engagement into all elements. Design fun, interactive activations that everyone can contribute to – community building social walls where everyone is invited to upload their photo and name to be projected to create a branded message are excellent, as are digitally projected question and comment walls. Incorporate polling, quizzes, and guest feedback into all presentations to make these more inclusive.
6. Opt for an event app, plus zero paper policy
We often get asked by our clients what the best way to run activations and presentation interactivity is – our answer: our purpose-built event app. This is the portal to event engagement and can be accessed simultaneously by all guests and presenters no matter where or how they attend. Your event app can house all communications and conversations – meaning you can do away with brochures, flyers and hand-outs which create a huge amount of paper waste, PLUS promote 360-degree ongoing discussion boosting inclusivity and engagement.
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We have been crafting captivating, meetings, incentives, conferences and events – designed to awake, ignite, connect and reward – for over 30 years.
by Ruth Hirst
Director at Synergy Effect
