_{How Frankwatching discovered the power of online events}

Updated on: Oct 12, 2021

We sit down with business development manager Harald de Jong from Frankwatching. A platform that has built a good reputation and shares knowledge in the fields of marketing, communication and technology. In addition to offering valuable blogs, they organize training courses, there is a job board and they host events.

The latter stopped abruptly when the coronavirus also reached the Netherlands. The way events were previously organized was no longer responsible and required a creative alternative.

How did Frankwatching approach this? And how does this proceed now?

Harald is involved in partnerships and the (further) development of Frankwatching's event portfolio, among other things. When corona broke out here, Harald, the event team and their event partner were in the middle of organizing the Digital Workspace Event. Three weeks earlier, a team member had asked the critical question: “Shouldn't we take into account that the virus is heading this way and that the event cannot take place?” The virus was still all the way in China at the time and no one had thought it would all come to that. When the virus was also here, everyone had to be called to cancel the event. Of course, there was all understanding, but what next?

You can't stop organizing events if you want to keep your strong event name that you've built over the years. Everyone from the Frankwatching event team then set to work to find solutions. We looked at international parties in both the B2B and B2C markets. Think Salesforce, The Next Web (TNW), and Adobe. Harald and his team got inspired very quickly and looked at what does and does not suit Frankwatching.

“Virtual events are different from physical events and we knew we had a lot to learn from them”

“You're starting from scratch and you're actually working on developing a new event model together. Virtual events are different from physical events and we knew we had to learn a lot from them,” says Harald.

Frankwatching is an online platform and having an online presence is in the genes, but before the coronavirus crisis broke out, there wasn't really a market to work on this.

“Once the choice was made to go for virtual events, we wanted it to feel like a real event. Nowadays, you can see that a lot is happening online and if you take a closer look, you can also see that it is often more like a series of on-demand webinars. So that's not what we wanted,” Harald explains.

The model for programming online events keeps Frankwatching the same as that of the physical events. There are live keynotes and expert sessions that are recorded in advance. The expert sessions go into a break-out round and last about half an hour, just like physical events. Depending on the event, three to four will be offered per round. This requires good software so that everything can be streamed at the same time.

“You're following an event with us from 10:00 in the morning to 15:00 in the afternoon. The total time has been reduced slightly compared to physical events. We see that many people stay on board and come back after the lunch break. Those people experience it as a real event and clear their agenda. You notice that if your content is strong and relevant enough, people stay engaged,” says Harald.

Frankwatching kept the themes for online events almost the same. There is an entire team that monitors the quality of the content and decides together what is relevant. The Frankwatching community is critical and won't be listening to an entire commercial session for long. It is therefore important to coordinate this properly with partners of the event. The more relevant the content, the greater the chance of a good review and the chance to build a relationship with the audience.

Harald explains that providing the opportunity to interact is an important part of online events. “People dare to ask a lot more via live chat than in a room with five hundred people. When we log in in the morning and we want to get the interaction started, we also notice that people are sending greetings en masse from where they are following the event. That's fun stuff and gives a sense of connection.”

This is therefore one of the major advantages of online events. You can follow them from the comfort of your own living room and watch sessions with your team five months later.

Ultimately, everything stands or falls with quality content. That really is the number one priority. That's why you need to keep collaborating with prominent brands and names. An engaging speaker with good content, that's what people want to see. After all, the threshold for dropping out is much lower when it comes to online than at physical events. And you want to prevent that.

The pricing of the virtual events was ultimately achieved by trying out different pricing. Of course, consideration has also been given to making tickets free, but the quality of Frankwatching's content is high and people are willing to pay for it. Surely you have to calculate what it all costs at the bottom of the line. The pricing strategy that is currently being used is similar to that of regular events, but the prices are lower. A ticket now costs an average of 69 euro while that of a normal event is around 300 euro.

“Some partners even say that with this information, they get more value from online events than from physical events”

Frankwatching has also built trust with partners over the years, making it possible to quickly go to online events together. “The collaboration with Lively is also very nice in this regard. And it was good to spar with each other about how we could best approach it now. We also received back that people find Grip, which we work with for virtual events, very pleasant and intuitive to work with. And as an organizer, you get a lot of insights at the back that you don't have in a normal event. We can now also share this with our partners. Some partners even say that with this information, they get more value from online events than from physical events,” says Harald.

What else the future will hold, Harald still finds difficult to say. He does see that offline networking cannot be completely replaced and the question is whether you should want that too. Surely eating a bitterbal casually together in “real life” is different than making the connection online. Somehow, Harald expects that there will soon be three flavors: Physical, virtual and hybrid events. Ultimately, everything depends on the willingness of participants and partners to participate.