Do you ever come across people who have the kind of “Yes and?!” energy that makes you go, “we MUST find a way to collaborate!”
That was exactly my reaction when meeting the CEO and Founder of Snöball, Rachel Stephan. Snöball is a technology designed to make it really easy for micro-influencers to spread the word about upcoming events.
When I met Rachel, she had just launched the tool, and together we worked on a marketing campaign for my first ever virtual conference way back in the day. The premise was elegant: Snöball empowers your audience to work as influencer-marketers for us by creating a scalable, ready-to-share and personalized event marketing toolkit.
It goes a little somethin’ like this:
Given that our most compelling virtual events are about bringing together a community so they can co-create knowledge, you can see why their chocolate went so well with our peanut butter.
And that is why Rachel and I made a habit of connecting over the years to talk about different approaches, and ideate about ways to forge meaningful connections in the online space. We were recently talking about the current unanimous shift to marketing virtual events, and Rachel brought up a really good point:
Pricing strategy is such an important concern, and there seems to be an emerging debate around whether or not to charge for virtual events.
That’s when the eureka hit. We found the perfect way to collaborate once again: right then and there we decided we’d work together on building a virtual event designed to bring together a community that could think deeply about this question, and create the conversational space to share ideas, thoughts, and approaches.
And there was born: The Great Debate: Paid vs. Free Virtual Events
Though every step of the way was a collaboration among our respective teams, Matchbox’s main focus was on the event design and production, and Snöball’s main focus was on putting together a pre-to-post event marketing plan, as well as building a curated resource that attendees could walk away with.
Without further ado, I give you a behind the scenes look at the whole process, as we hope it’ll inspire some fun new ideas. If the first round in 2020 was about bringing events online, we very much see the second round as being about upping the game. The good news is that there are so many ways to get really creative virtually.
So why a debate?
If I’m being honest, I had been dying for an excuse to try out a debate style session for a few years now. It’s an over-the-top way to get people thinking and talking about different sides of the same coin. When Rachel first used the word “debate” to describe this free vs. paid discussion, I jumped on the opportunity. Given that our mail goal in the session design was to spark meaningful attendee chat discussion, it seemed like the perfect way to get attendees thinking critically about the question at hand.
How we marketed the event
And this is where showing may be easier than telling:
There is some elegant brilliance that was baked into the approach. Snöball designed the campaign so that attendees were asked to share their side of the debate in advance, and then categorized attendees at the bottom of the event page based on their side. This had the added bonus of giving attendees a sense of the participating community.
Part of Snöball’s influencer marketing approach is to email out registrants to encourage them to share the event they’ve already signed up for, thereby expanding through the networks of attendees, and also activating the IKEA effect. What we found is that people sharing the event were adding thought-provoking commentary on whether or not they were #TeamPaid, #TeamFree, or #TeamUndecided – thereby stimulating conversation in advance, but also encouraging even further participation.
The numbers really spoke for themselves. We had 629 registrants for the event, which was literally double any other “Matchbox Original’ event we had held in the past (though we are mostly hired to help produce other people’s events, every so often we give our own a go so we can experiment with different session styles and approaches.)
So that rocked. Now we had to make sure that we were putting on a great freakin’ show for everybody:
What went down on Event Day
We went 2 vs 2 with our wonderful and capable referee, Rachel. We invited three great thinkers in the space (their names are Dahlia, Nick, and Garth, for future reference…) who were fightin’ for the crown. When Garth and Nick formed a rivalry that started to extend outside the normal debate boundaries, we couldn’t resist having a little fun with it… (if you want a good laugh, it’s worth watching the video below.) We shared this video as part of the marketing, but also aired it as the pre-roll video to get people excited as they were logging in.
We kept the debate format quite simple: each debater opened with a brief two-minute long speech, followed by two minute long rebuttals from each team member. The time constraint sustained a level of urgency which heightened the tension, while keeping each argument fruitful. To watch the session, we have it available on demand here.
It didn’t take long for attendees to realize that the debaters weren’t entirely arguing the sides that were true in their hearts. As an attendee pointed out early enough:
“So, it seems like we’ll need a more nuanced conversation around purpose and desired outcomes…”
And right they were, because the second half of the session intentionally switched entirely into a panel conversation among the speakers, where we all debriefed on why the debate, in fact, shouldn’t be so black and white.
The best part of the event? Attendees shared their input throughout the chat. In agreement with #TeamFree, an attendee noted:
“I came to this event because it was free. I think this is a good way to expand your audience.”
While on the side of #TeamPaid, another attendee pointed out:
“Everyone wants things for free, but free is not sustainable. I think there is an expectation and/or assumption that virtual events do not cost much to produce, which most of us know is not the case.”
And so, with a vibrant attendee chat of over 500 messages in the span of the hour-long event, attendee contribution became the bulk of the event’s takeaways.
And what exactly were some of those takeaways? Snöball curated the best arguments, along with attendee contributions, into an actionable eBook that was shared out with attendees after the event, which can be found here. This meant that the conversation could continue, and we all had a tangible learning document to return back to.
Do we recommend a debate style session? Absolutely! Do we recommend marketing campaigns and event designs that invite attendees to be part of the co-creative process? Absafreakinlutely!