🔒Six months in: Pandemic creates new opportunities for event engagement

Faced with a major health crisis that had businesses closed for months and people in most professions working remotely, a handful of local organizations reacted swiftly to continue providing virtual services.

Gone are the days of a firm handshake with eye contact in business. For now, anyway.

For some, this shutdown was the kick in the pants they needed to execute plans for operating business virtually. Even with the state’s gradual reopening, they’re finding the move to virtual delivery may not be just getting us through, it’s taking us to the next level of delivering services.

The Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce’s first large event test of the virtual waters was its 18th annual Healthcare and Life Sciences Awards in June. The goal, according to the chamber’s vice president of marketing and events Tameika Miller, was to host a virtual event with many of the engaging components of the traditional in-person affair. The online event trend has continued, but Chamber organizers have become more creative with presentations, including using breakout sessions for attendees.

Pulling out all of the stops to ensure that the virtual events remain as successful as in-person, the Chamber markets, shares the news with influencers, sends email blasts, leverages media partnerships, and pays for print, digital and even some old-fashioned radio ads.

The Chamber’s last signature program of the year — its annual Big Connect B2B networking show in November — will feature four days of virtual exhibitors, speakers and tools for attendees.

“We're taking the Big Connect from one day to a multi-day event where we have a combination of these different approaches, so that people are feeling they're getting value and they're learning about the topic that they want to learn about,” Miller says. “Going forward, the smart thing to do for us and other organizations is to keep some of these lessons learned during these very unprecedented and trying times. We need to tap into that creativity in the future.”

Manufacturing a new reality

At the end of March, Manufacture CT’s Executive Director Jamison Scott knew that the association’s mid-June in-person annual meeting was not going to happen.

The executive board of the group — formerly the New Haven Manufacturers Association — thought about postponing until September, but then learned that events later in the year were being canceled. There were also some logistical issues around changing the date, so they decided to try a virtual event.

“At the time, it was definitely unlike anything anybody had done,” Scott says. “It was a lot of work. An annual face to face, you know the drill, you know what to do, it's dinner, it's networking. I've been through that a million times.”

But then Scott made the jump to virtual and hasn’t slowed down since. Ordinarily, after the association’s annual meeting, events slow for the summer and pick back up in September. The 2020 programming continued virtually through July and picked back up in late August.

“We wanted to make sure that our members knew that we were here. We wanted to keep them engaged,” Scott says.

In early October, the association held its first in-person event since last winter, its sixth annual golf outing.

“Turnout was very good,” Scott says, adding that sponsorship and participant numbers were up a bit. “I can’t be happier with the response. People are really looking forward to these opportunities because they’re far and few between. Since you can play golf while socially distanced, people were very supportive. It took some creativity with logistics in changing the post-game dinner to a staggered arrival, but it worked well.

Virtual reality

When the pandemic struck, Orange/Woodbridge Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage was ready. Branch Vice President Aileen DeFeo says that the Realtor had been recently shifting to virtual platforms.

“Because so many of our clients are relocation clients, we were already using virtual tours, using social media platforms to market homes. We were able to expand what we did with relocation clients to all of our clients,” she explains.

She continues to host weekly Zoom meetings for her 160-plus agents with about 75% of interactions virtual. The result is a much more efficiently run operation.

“Closings are literally taking 20 minutes now. By the time the buyers and attorneys get to the closing table, everything is done,” she says. “Real estate is booming. We have a better buyer because of COVID and now we’re not doing open houses and allowing strangers to walk through houses. It’s all by appointment and the buyers are pre-qualified — they’re serious buyers, not just kicking the tires.”

Cup half full

Three Tuesdays each month, Executive Coach Rob Thomas would meet with 10 businesspeople at a diner in Milford, Fairfield or Derby. They’d enjoy a bottomless cup of coffee and talk about the importance of networking. Then March came.

“March 13, I got myself a Zoom account and never looked back,” he says. He moved his diner meetings — along with his other two meetings — online and hasn’t missed a beat.

During “Networking in Diners” each person talks about their business for four minutes, then Thomas gives direction for conversation before posing a business challenge.

“We share our own experience about how we got through that challenge. I need to hire or fire someone, my networking sucks, my marketing isn’t working, and things like that. We don't give advice,” he explains.

He says his membership, which has doubled since March, is loving the virtual delivery of diner meetings, guest speakers and happy hour.

In October, he began with one in-person meeting a month at Derby’s Valley Diner for the first 10 registrants.

“I’m not sure if it’ll be permanent, we’ll see how it goes. It is 2020,” Thomas says.