Reimagined Conference Turns into a Major Global Event
“Reimagined” Conference Turns into a Major Global Event
Virtual conference attendees meet and confer prior to the start of a session
When the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at SDSU’s Fowler College of Business announced the theme for their 7th annual California Entrepreneurship Educators Conference in early 2020, they had no idea how prophetic they would be.
“We decided this year’s conference theme would be ‘Reimagine the Discipline of Entrepreneurship’ and we started making plans to hold the event on the SDSU campus, like we had done each of the previous years,” said Dr. Alex DeNoble, executive director of the center. “Then COVID-19 hit and speakers started withdrawing from our planned event. At that point we made the tough decision to cancel the conference, which was scheduled for April 16 – 18.”
But the cancellation didn’t happen. Instead, they “reimagined” the conference as an online event where a global group of entrepreneurship educators could participate at no charge.
Since this was going to be a far different event than the center had ever hosted before, DeNoble had some significant concerns. “We wondered if our scheduled presenters and our attendees were willing to participate online,” he said. “We questioned ourselves as to whether or not we had the technical competency and staffing to manage a virtual conference.”
The center addressed the second of these concerns by working with a team from the International Council for Small Businesses (ICSB) where DeNoble is a board member. By the third week in March, the ICSB helped the center finalize the agenda and arranged for the necessary technical support to ensure that there would be no glitches during the event.
Conference attendees in a virtual chat room during the conference
Additionally, the center contracted with Whova, a local company whose technology offered a comprehensive registration system which provided the center with information on each participant, the sessions they attended and the ability for them to connect with each other during or after the conference. The technology also had a built-in come-and-go feature which allowed participants the flexibility of choosing which sessions to attend. “We didn’t expect people to sit in front of their computer all day for two straight days,” explained DeNoble. “This feature let them come and go as they pleased so that they could sit in on only the sessions that interested them.”
As for their concern about the speakers and attendee participation, DeNoble was in for a big surprise. “More than half of the scheduled speakers were able to present online and we were able to invite other featured speakers to join us. We ended up with a total of 55 speakers and 23 sessions,” said DeNoble. “What really shocked us was that we had 1126 registrants from 65 countries, 28 U.S. states, and from 875 organizations for the online conference. Last year – our 6th annual event – was the first time that we had over 100 attendees join us face-to-face, so we were really happy with the online results.”
As for next year, DeNoble hasn’t ruled out putting the conference online again. “What we thought was a bad situation turned out to be a major win for us,” he said. “We may even ‘reimagine’ next year’s conference to be a hybrid of online and in-person, but we’ll make that decision in the coming months.”
