“Necessity” is a mild way to describe the impetus for invention brought by COVID-19. We’ve learned in 2020 that creativity is, as business strategist Natalie Nixon argues, “incredibly practical and crucial to survival” — in the business events industry especially, where the pandemic has forced us to go digital or go dark.

Beth Surmont, CAE, CMP, director of experience design at 360 Live Media, reflects on what she’s learned about virtual events.

California Mermaid Convention dives into its first digital event, casting a net across the seas to attract a worldwide audience of mermaid enthusiasts, influencers, and entertainers.

Convening Leaders speaker Ben Hindman, CEO of Splash, says that virtual events require a significant marketing shift — focusing less on the event experience and more on establishing your value proposition.

The PCMA research study, Beyond ROI to ROE, provides a new framework and toolkit to help business event professionals analyze, quantify, and report on the impact of meetings and events — with a novel approach that makes it possible to equally measure the countable metrics and the magic that happens when we gather.

Held last month in Sydney, PCMA’s Convening Asia Pacific: Global Recovery Forum provides a few lessons in hybrid event experience design that prioritize safety for in-person attendees and interactivity for digital participants.

Try your hand at this simulation, part of a weeks-long conference that was designed to demonstrate a new model for continuing medical education.

In early November, Marriott International launched its “Connect with Confidence” hybrid event series to help event professionals experience the future of meetings.

Food and culture tours — both live and virtual — can make complicated and uncomfortable history lessons much easier to digest.

To meet the evolving needs of the business events industry in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, convention centers and other meeting venues are adding broadcast studios to their list of options for event producers.

Large digital meetings have scale, while smaller in-person meetings can deliver serendipity. Hybrid meetings of the future have potential to deliver both, said futurist Mark Pesce.

Business events professionals and their suppliers responding to the November Recovery Dashboard survey indicated they were both more and less hopeful about the future — depending on which question they were answering.