Calling for inspiration: Community sponsored events

Hey Sarah @sarahmasterton-brown 

Oooo!! I feel like our Pulse event would be a great example for this!

We have a separate space on community for the event especially since it’s a recurring one for us. It’s helped me get a lot more members to our community and keep the conversation going, even once the event is done.
In terms of keeping community at the spotlight throughout the event, I’d recommend 3 phases.

1st phase (before the event) - there are multiple things we do here.
Primarily, we have all our speaker tracks promoted prior to the event on the Pulse community page. Not only does this help our speakers get spotlighted better, but it also helps folks to ask any questions prior to the event, especially those who can’t possibly be at the event for many reasons. The major bit during the initial phase would also be getting the word out about this community space presence. 
I’d suggest using the execs support to get word out about this - maybe get them to do a video that you can host on your homepage to drive people to the event specific conversation area on community. 
Your social team can also go a long way in putting word out, LinkedIn posts from your execs etc. 

Have a networking thread started so people can start planning prior to the event, keeping community as your base for it.

Share all your FAQs, know before you go kind of items also posted there so this community area becomes like a hub for this.

2nd phase (during the event) - we plan a few activities to keep the eyes of attendees on community, at the event. But I realised it’s very important to find a fine balance here since they are there to network, so you might not want to overdo it. Few suggestions from what I’ve tried and seen it work are - QR codes placed in different areas of the event for different conversation spaces in your community giving them the chance to check it out, drive them to a particular conversation that’s a hot topic on community & generally in your company field so as to give them the notion that they are free to add in their thoughts for it. You can also have a community booth with some swags for folks who do different things on community by signing up at the counter there - get them to engage in some fun thread that you can kick start priory to the event, getting them to tweet out about a community thread that stands out to them, etc. 
I’d say the biggest setback though is that most people are going to be on their phones, so signing up for community or going through it is not super easy for them since it’s not very a mobile friendly experience. Having the booth set up once helped us get even higher numbers on registrations since we had few laptops set up for them to try it out and that made it an easier experience. We also have community related tracks, so that helped us put word out more about this as inserts between sessions. 

We also continue to do a social competition that got us a lot of participants. We keep it fairly simple with a reward - you can see an example here. The main thing to keep in mind here again is finding that balance - to make social your primary space, but have a hook for them to be on community without making it feel like a huge effort. 

3rd phase (post the event) - 

Our focus here was all about ensuring we keep the conversation going on, even once it’s done. We use all the questions - too voted and answered/unanswered and bring them to community through the support of different community builders internally, so the speakers remain engaged. We also want to do this cause there are so many important questions that can’t be answered cause of time crunch, but are super critical for larger knowledge for the community. We reconnect back to things on phase 1 and 2 to close up on social contests, share experience posts from attendees and internal teams as well. So it’s like a complete circle to close on community.

This is a quick glimpse of what we do! I hope this helps - please let me know if you wanna discuss more into details. I’d be glad to get on a call too!

We also did a re-brand not too long ago, and @anirbandutta nailed it. He can give the details on that.

Hey @revathimenon  and @anirbandutta  
This has been super helpful, thank you.
I have previously had a good nosey at your Pulse community activity and you’ve done such a good - it’s a great inspiration and I did follow your lead earlier this year and published a sub-category for our event and posted similar topics.
But this year, I’ll most certainly use the booth idea and very good point about attendees being on their phone and it not being so easy to register for community.
We’re planning on hosting a community exclusive drinks/dinner event too.
Thanks for taking the time to post this feedback