Can only GoVirtual Facilitators facilitate GoVirtual Events?

Category: GoVirtual

Unfortunately, yes.

And two things are important to understand this:
One: Please believe us, we’re constantly thinking how to change this, but we haven’t come up with a solution so far.
Two: This does NOT mean, your people (be it facilitators or subject experts) are not VISIBLE. It’s not about visibility. Your people can become visible in all sorts of diffent ways, just not as the facilitator
Three: It’s also not about subject knowledge. We’ll make absolutely watertight sure that information is always on the spot correct and even use your poeple for this.

It’ purely and solely about leadership and making sure there is great leadership through the conderence, because leadership is so much more crucial online than it is offline.

So, here are five reasons why, at the end of our thinking, we come to the conlusion that within a GoVirtual package having one of us as the facilitator is, simply, the best option, not because of the persona of that facilitator but because of the special circumstances of live online events:

  1. the effort to brief and/or guide other moderators would be extremely high
  2. the benefit of using other moderators is extremely small – read more below
  3. The possible “danger” felt by a GoVirtual moderator is much more unfounded than offline (because
  4. the moderator lies in a much tighter corset than offline)
  5. The possible dangers of using another moderator (i.e. your favorite moderator) are higher than they seem at first glance.

To better understand this, here are the three central background conditions from which the above consequences arise:

  1. The technical concept of GoVirtual
  2. The special leadership requirements for a moderator
  3. The (compared to classical events) much smaller importance of subject knowledge

Re 1: The technical concept of GoVirtual

Interactive online events have many components that must be kept in balance live, so that the professionalism of the event does not suffer:
a) Live video software b) Interaction software c) Speakers e) Coffee break activities e) Introduction to workshops – and out again if necessary f) Video recordings, etc. if necessary pp

It is important to realize that, from the point of view of the execution (not the experience, but the execution), a live online event is more like a live TV show than a classical stage event.

Take the visuals as an example:

In a stage event, the attendee can choose where he or she looks, full picture of the stage? Just the facilitator? Slides? The cool thing is: It’s all there, all on the stage, ready to look at. So, the organizer only has to show one single “image” (namely the stage).

Compare to this events that are only visible through a monitor (no matter if it’s a TV show or an online live event)

Now, attendees cannot chose what they see anymore. They only have the small window of the monitor. This means, YOU as the organisor have to decide what to show to them. Und you have to switch views so it stays interesting (offline the view is also constantly changed, but offline the attendees change their view themselves, you don’t have to do this).

So: You need to mix Live video of the presenter large/small, speakers large/small, slides, video clips if necessary, interaction requests, interaction results, all this must happen at exactly the right moment. As TV viewers we take this for granted. But it is by no means, because:

In classic television (think of talk shows) you have a separate person for doing this! This live image editor They do all the switching above. And they do this in close conjunction with the show host (i.e. “facilitator”). Now, this has three effects:

First, it requires an extremely high briefing effort: For a 30-minute show, a team of 3-7 people meets twice a day. The editorial team, the moderator and the picture directors have to agree which effect should be created for the viewer and at what moment something should be shown and why. In addition to these meetings, there are countless meetings with the presenter throughout the day, so that he says exactly the right thing at the right moments. During the planning process, the schedules are updated again and again by a specially assigned assistant.
Now, here we are talking about planning inside of one day. This means that everyone involved can use their short-term memory. Events, however, are about several days, if not weeks. It’s about the question, “What did we say we wanted to do at this point again?”

Secondly, of course, such an approach is simply extremely expensive. But what’s worse:

Thirdly, the fact that dozens of people now have a schedule means that you can no longer simply change the schedule. This means that authentic, fast reactions, as they are a matter of course in offline live events, and which are the essence of the live event, are simply no longer possible, because the changes can no longer be communicated quickly enough. You now have a timed, sterile Lanz talk show that is anything but interactive or connecting participants.

Fourthly, something goes wrong all the time because of this procedure. This is then “somehow” ironed out and the show also “somehow” goes over the stage.

Thorsten Dierks, the then CEO of O2, once said: “If you digitize a bad analog process, you have a bad digital process”.

Instead of the above process, with GoVirtual everything is in one hand: From moderation of the planning team meetings, consulting, concept development, rehearsals, technical moderation, content moderation and leadership to moderation of the de-briefing minutes after the end of the event.

As opposed to offline-events in online events, a great event does not result despite the reduction of personnel, but because of the reduction of personnel.

Re: 2. what skills does an online live event moderator need?

When you think of setting up and directing an audience for interaction and/or workshops, you usually have a real audience in mind. And with a real audience, many moderators have somehow done that. But that is deceptive.

But leading an audience through a camera without seeing anyone is something completely different. It takes either talent, but mostly also training to be able to guide through.

So it would be good if years of TV moderation experience could be combined with years of business and workshop experience. This is exactly what Tim Schlüter does and – if we do several tracks – also with other moderators we use.

3. what a moderator of a GoVirtual online live event does not have to be able to do

GoVirtual is the promise to deliver an event that is more interactive and exciting than the offline event ever was. This is made possible by a consistent focus on getting something across to the audience. To achieve this, the audience is much more involved than most organizers are used to.

This means that GoVirtual events are not about a show in which speakers and presenter prove to each other how well-read they are. It is about the audience and their concerns.

The questions are fetched digitally from the audience. The format 8:1:8 and other elements ensure that there are questions. This means that the presenter does not have to be able to ask “clever” questions. The audience’s questions are always better if they are fetched with the right method. This is our experience since 2015.
What’s more, VOXR’s unique SMART Q&A method also ensures that the right questions are in the spotlight, because it’s easy to see immediately what the most pressing issues in the room are.
This means: Absolutely every halfway speech capable person could select questions, ask them and have them answered by an expert. No expertise is needed for this.

Of course this sounds full-bodied. We only dare to say it because we have seen it again and again since 2015.

In fact, it’s the other way around: We had the biggest problems in involving the audience and creating real interaction where expert moderators could not free themselves from the need to act out their own expertise.

But it’s not as if VOXR GoVirtual presenters were talking dolls. They are long-time journalists, in the case of Tim Schlüter a long-time presenter of a flagship show on NDR television and Tagesschau reporters, as well as reporters from numerous business events at all levels. Tim Schlüter has worked with the Chancellor as well as with CEOs, but also with supposedly “simple” people etc. You can therefore expect a certain basic quality.

Another part of GoVirtual is that all participants, including the moderator, do not only receive a 20min briefing, but rather plan together from the beginning (!)

This results in a briefing that is far beyond what TV or conference moderators usually receive.

The sum of all the above points obviously leads to a great feedback and reaching your goals. A coherent facilitation is part of that.

One last thing:

For your reassurance as an organizer it is easily possible to define another role besides the moderator, namely that of the “expert”. This comes into play when the moderator and the speakers together are at a loss as to how a question is meant, or something similar. This has not happend in the past  yet (at dozens of business events of different levels, industries, audiences and topics). However, we can well imagine that this gives you as the organizer security and we’ll always make sure in our planning meetings that your security and safety needs are catered to.

Tim Schlüter

TV-, Event- und Online-Moderator Tim Schlüter ist Gründer der mehrfach preisgekrönten deutschen Interaktionssoftware VOXR. Seit 2015 berät er u.a. 30% aller DAX Unternehmen, Ministerien und den Mittelstand zu interaktivem Event-Design. Er arbeitet seit 2002 mit Remote-Live-Video, seit 2015 mit Onine-Live-Video und moderiert seit 2018 einen Online-Unternehmerclub. Am 13. März 2020 hat er das erste vollständige und kopierbare Online-Event-Format mit strategischer Interaktion und Face-to-Face Austausch vorgelegt. Aus diesem Konzept wurde "ActiveVirtual", das bereits 13 Mal für Groß-Events zum Einsatz kam - und darüber hinaus in dutzenden Webinaren. Er hat in eigenen interaktiven Kurz-Trainings die Methode bereits hunderten Teilnehmern vermittelt.

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