Virtual events made easy.

Need to change your in-person event to a virtual format? There are solutions for every type event - from small events that keep your small business running to large company-wide meetings and conferences.

Let's get started!

Need Webex? Contact Sales

Choose the right solution

Plan for success

Practice makes perfect

Day of the event

Webex
Meetings

Webex
Events

Webex Meetings
with VBrick

Facebook
Streaming

Additional
resources

Choose the right solution

A great event starts with choosing the right platform. Consider how many people you need to connect, how they will participate, the level of control you need, how much interaction you want and if you want to record and share the playback later.

For events with over 5,000 attendees, contact your Cisco sales or partner team.

For events with over 5,000 attendees, contact your Cisco sales or partner team
* Available with Webex Meetings April 13, 2020; coming to Webex Events soon
** Webex Meetings support up to 1,000 attendees. For the best experience, we recommend events of only up to 200
*** Vbrick supports more than 3000+ attendees, however, the free trial is limited to 5000 maximum
† Depends on platform capability

Plan for success

Just like an in-person event, planning is key to success:

Schedule your event at a time that works for all attendee time zones to increase attendance.
Decide if you need people to register to attend or not. Registering is useful if you need to track who will be attending your event before it starts, knowing how many registered attended joined and allows easy follow up communications after an event.
Presenting? Get help by enlisting an event team who can help you with logistics, while you stay focused on delivering great content.
Have a communication plan, including activities like promoting your event on webpages, social media and through email.
Contact key attendees 1:1 and send out reminders leading up to the event - including an hour or so before, so people remember to join on the day.

Practice makes perfect

Schedule a rehearsal

Invite all presenters, panelists and Q&A moderators to the event. Ask someone to join as an attendee to test the experience.
Connect in the same way, from the same location and device as you will for the live event.
Test everyone's audio. For audio quality, we recommend using a noise cancelling headset.
Share video in the rehearsal to ensure presenters can be seen clearly. Adjust lighting if needed and remove any unnecessary items from their background that may be distracting.
Have all presenters test content sharing and any multi-media sharing from the same device they will use in the live event, in presentation mode and ensure they are using the same dongles as on the day - if needed.
Run through the content for timing, transitions and to test the interactive features you’ll use.
Create, test and save polls for use during the live event.

Roles and responsibilities

The host role is automatically assigned to the person who scheduled the event. They, or an assigned host, will start the event, grant privileges to attendees or panelists for Q&A moderation where available, start the audio, designate presenters, facilitate polls, manage recording and end the event. Only the host needs to have a user account.
Assign an MC or moderator to welcome attendees, introduce speakers, keep time, start recording and manages interactive features like polling.
Discuss logistics and etiquette, like identifying who will drive the slides, how and when presenters mute or unmute, and how Q&A will be handled.
If you are assigning roles, like Q&A moderation, panelists and presenters – practice these specific activities in your rehearsal.

Day of the event

Before you go live:

All panelists and presenters should join 15-30 minutes early to allow the host to assign roles as needed and test their connection on the day.
Distribute final content before the call. That way attendees won’t be left out if they are unable to see content-sharing during the call or need to join via audio-only due to unexpected low bandwidth.
Tip: Create a group online, or a space in Webex Teams for attendees to join after registering. There, you can post information before and after the event and stay connected after the event.

Let’s go!

A best practice is to welcome attendees and allow a few minutes for people to join. Announce that the call will be starting in 3,2,1 minutes.
Set expectations for attendees like muting etiquette, opportunities they will have to interact and ask questions – if any.
Tell your audience if or where you’ll be sharing your content and recording after the event.

After the event

Plan to stay in the virtual event after the scheduled time has concluded to answer additional questions, save chat panels and Q&A for post-event follow-up.
Post recording links, referenced or shared content from the event, poll results or next steps in the space or agreed location before the event.

Download our checklist

Using Webex Meetings

Webex Meetings provides a more casual, and interactive experience for attendees. Webex meetings is designed for interactive collaboration - where attendees and presenters have similar abilities to mute and unmute themselves, share content and message during the meeting. As such, there are less controls on attendee participation.

For larger audience sizes, presenters may find it difficult to keep track of any attendees that are unmuted and disturbing others.

Top Tips

Before your meeting, get familiar with the basic host controls. When scheduling your meeting ensure mute on entry is enabled and beep on entry is disabled.

During your meeting we recommend having the host assigned to mute attendees as needed, manage chat and remind you to keep the session running on time. Remember to record your meeting.

After the meeting, you can choose to save your chat messages. Don’t forget to send the recording to all attendees, and include a survey using a third-party survey tool for feedback if required.

Get started with Webex Meetings

Using Webex Events

Webex Events provides more controls – enabling you to deliver formal events with confidence, while providing an interactive experience for attendees. Webex Events allows you to schedule a program. This feature gives you more options for managing registration, by grouping related events together around a specific project, learning series or audience. You can also customize the registration form for a more friendly, informative sign-up. If you need to measure the effectiveness of your event marketing efforts, create source IDs to track where registrations came from. Lastly – if needed, you can configure ecommerce to allow you to charge for your event using popular payment methods like Paypal.

Before your event, get familiar with how to schedule an event and know the basics of Webex Events. If needed, share helpful links so that attendees know what to expect, how to register and join an event. We recommend sharing how to join via the desktop application for the best experience.

During the event, start a practice session so that attendees joining early don’t hear you getting ready to go live. follow the best practices above, and don’t forget to record your event! We recommend using the interactive features Webex Events provides, such as Q&A and polling to keep attendees engaged.

After the event, distribute post-event surveys and analyze results, send thank you for attending and sorry we missed you emails with a link to the recording, track lead sources, run reports on live and recorded event stats.

Get started with Webex Events

Using Webex Meetings with Vbrick

Webex Meetings with Vbrick allows you to live stream your event to large global audiences. It is a great solution for large events; from all-hands or company-wide meetings - to large announcements. For the best experience, host broadcasts from one or more Webex-compatible video endpoints.

After the event, Vbrick allows you to share an interactive recording. As the event host, you can control access to the recording, edit the video online, use speech to text transcription services and expire content automatically. Vbrick also provides interactive features when watching the recording too – like the ability to search through speech while providing efficient video playback and caching.

Before your event ensure streaming your meetings is enabled by your site administrator.

During your event, don’t forget to start the stream.

After your event, your stream automatically becomes available as a recording in your Vbrick Rev account. You are encouraged to configure your saved video at that time.

Contact Vbrick

Using Webex Meetings with Facebook Streaming

Webex Meetings with Facebook Live streaming allows you to extend the reach of your event to your social media community – from within your Webex Meetings application. The streams include the audio, video, and content that is shared while the meeting is active.

Before the event, check that streaming your meetings using Facebook Live is enabled by your site administrator.

During your event, start streaming to your Facebook account and share to your timeline. Assign someone to monitor the live interactions in your newsfeed.

After the event, your stream automatically becomes available as a recording in your Facebook Timeline when it ends. Depending on your Facebook settings, your viewers can respond to your stream by using the React and Comment buttons. Your viewers can also show your meeting to other Facebook users by using the Share button.

Stream your Webex Meetings to Facebook

Additional resources

Want to talk to an expert? Join a professional live team of trainers for a live class on running the perfect event.

Attend a live class

Need help? Let our certified Webex producers take your online event or webinar to the next level. Our Webex assist team will take care of your event logistics end to end - so you can rest assured your event will go flawlessly, and stay focused on the content and delivery.

Contact our Webex Assist Team