Planning a virtual event can be overwhelming, and clients often call us unsure where to start. Whether you meet with Chronicle Cinema or another production company, these are the questions worth settling before the first meeting, they’ll make that meeting dramatically more useful.
1. What is the purpose of the event?
Obvious, and routinely skipped. Are you training attendees, or collecting leads? Why are you asking people to give you their day? Get the stakeholders to agree on this before anything else, because every other decision follows from it.
2. What part of it is stressing you out most?
Planning a virtual event is hard because you don’t know what you don’t know. Is it the technology? Registration? Whether the presenters will know what to do? Write the list of worries down and bring it. A good production partner would rather hear the fears than the specs.
3. What is the budget?
A defined budget doesn’t limit the conversation, it focuses it. Four things drive the number:
How many attendees? Most virtual production is priced per attendee, so a ballpark helps.
Breakouts or small rooms? Very doable, but each one adds a layer of production.
How many days? Longer events need more labor.
How many live sessions per day? Streaming live from webcams, a studio, or the floor of a venue makes the event feel real, and costs more than playback.
4. Who is the audience?
Who attends? What are their jobs, their interests, their reasons for showing up? Knowing exactly who you’re trying to reach shapes everything from run-of-show to platform.
5. Who is presenting, and with what?
Walk your production partner through every presenter and the format they’ll use. Slides? Video? Live demo? Remote or in the room? This is where run-of-show problems get caught early instead of on show day.
6. Will it be evergreen?
An evergreen event stays available after the live portion ends, attendees can re-watch sessions they missed, and people who never registered can find it later. If you record it and publish it, the event keeps working for months. Decide whether that’s worth it to you before the first meeting, because it changes how the thing is shot.