How To Leave People Feeling Good About Your Event

Today’s guest post is from Tony Gnau, a three-time Emmy-winning journalist. He is also the founder and chief storytelling officer at T60 Productions.  T60 has won 12 Telly Awards for its work over the last eight years.

There is more to throwing a successful event than setting everything up and executing a plan. All that coordination is for nothing if you don’t get people to attend and make sure they leave happy. Which is why more and more meeting planners are producing event videos.

There are different types of event videos that serve different purposes. You can produce something for the express purpose of promoting the event. Videos can be created to show during the event itself. But in this case, I’d like to focus on a video that can take any event to the next level.

Expanding Your Reach

How many people are attending your event… five, 20, 100, more than a 1,000? Why not turn all of them into your ambassadors? Producing a video during your event gives you that opportunity.

It can be a simple process. You have someone shoot video at your event or meeting, put together a video that captures the experience, then let today’s social world take over by sharing it with everyone who attended.

Think about what that might mean for the success of your event. Not only are you spreading your message to the people who attended, but you’re also allowing them to spread it for you through their networks.

Don’t stop there. Send the video to everyone who was invited but couldn’t attend. Push it out through your social media networks. Include a link to the video in your related email campaigns.

Doing all of these things allows you to share the experience with countless others. Your event might have ended, but it now has life beyond the date it takes place.

Be A Storyteller

Sounds great, right? The trick is producing something people will want to share. You can’t just record speakers at a podium or have the event promoter talk on-camera for 5-minutes. That’s not good enough. Viewers demand more. They know the difference between a boring unprofessional video and one that’s compelling and will hold their attention. So, you need to ask yourself some questions.

What’s your event’s story? Identifying your story, and using video to tell it puts you on the path to a shareable video.

What’s the theme of your event? What do you hope people take away? What’s the energy like? These are all things that can help you tell your story.

You need to shoot raw video of the speakers and the attendees. Interview people and get their impressions. Keep in mind video isn’t about facts and figures. It’s about emotion.

Leave People With A Feeling

What you’re trying to do here is capture the spirit of your event. You want attendees to feel great about what they were a part of. You want to give people who couldn’t attend a sense of what it was like to be there. This is your opportunity to sum it up for all of them and allow them to relive the energy they felt during the event. It’s a way to put your brand in a good light.

Additional Benefits

A video like this is a great way to put a cherry on top of your event, but there’s an added benefit as well. If it’s an annual event, you now have a promotional video to share next year or raw video you can use to create one. Not to mention, if you are a professional meeting planner, you now have something you can show to future clients.

What’s it going to cost?

Budget is always a concern and video is like anything else. You typically get what you pay for. You can try to do it in-house, but if you don’t have a video pro working for you it might come off like an amateur attempt. Another alternative is hiring someone to produce it for you. Hiring someone off Craigslist will only cost you a few hundred bucks, but the quality might be an issue. Seasoned video pros will range greatly in price. Look for recommendations and check out their websites.  Call them in advance to get an idea of cost so you can include it in your budget. You should be able to get a great video for anywhere between $3,500-$7,000 depending on the size and scope of your event.

Wrapping It Up

You put a lot of time and effort into throwing an event that lasts a matter of hours or days. An event video changes that. It allows your event to live on even after the lights have been turned off.

If you enjoyed this post, you should also check out 15 Awesome Time-lapse Videos Of Events and The Expert Guide to Capturing Conference Videos.