Jo Lankester Managing Director at White October Events - The experience of the "Lead Dev Live" event

Joe, how you doing?

I'm really well, thanks. Thanks for having me here.

Good Joe. So Joe, do you want to give us a little bit of a background into White October? What do you guys do, the perspective on your portfolio? I want to just simply open up for the benefit of the whole audience. In your case, it's been pretty, pretty interesting. Your digital, your digital pivot strategy generated 12,000 registrants. So that's amazing. So give us a bit of a background on that and then, and then, yeah, we can just then begin to share the story.

Sure. So a little bit of background about White October events. We're a pure play events company. We're based in London and we've been going about seven years off. Flagship conference is called Lead Dev. It's a global series of in person conferences and meetups and it's aimed at engineering leaders. We have events and conferences in London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Austin, Tokyo and Edinburgh. And our conferences range from anything from 600 to about 1500 people. Plus there's 30, 30 or so sponsor booths and we've got a really strong global community behind the Lead Dev brand. And it's Lead Dev that I'm going to talk to you a little bit as a case study today.

Great Joe. So I guess what everyone's eager to understand. So how did it happen? When you have average attendance between 601 and a half thousand, you pivot your event 12,000 registration. So tell us a little bit about how that happened. Like more specifically like you, what were your expectations before and what your expectations after it happened and what. Tell us a bit about the story.

Yeah, sure. So we have. Our New York event was due to be held on the 7th and 8th of April. It was going to be about 800 people. We sold out eight weeks before the event and we just. Six weeks out, we just hit our sponsorship target. So we were really happy, feeling super confident about the event. And then about five or six weeks out, the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic kind of started to really hit us. And after some pretty intense meetings with the senior leadership team and the board, it became really apparent that we weren't going to be able to run the event. And so we made the really difficult decision to postpone both the New York event in April and also our London event which was due to be held in June with we were hoping for 1800 delegates to that one. So I'm sure, as you can imagine, we're a really small company. There's just 12 of us. And to make A decision like that was very challenging to say the least. And before we'd made those decisions, we'd had calls with all of our sponsors, our speakers and a lot of key stakeholders in the conferences to really understand where they were at, where what was happening in their world. It was the time when it was the week that this was happening, was the week that everybody was suddenly having to go and work remotely in the UK and the US Increasingly that was happening. So from those calls we knew that putting something on during the April event time was going to be really important to all of our stakeholders. We thought it would keep us front of mind and it would also help support some of their challeng, particularly for the sponsors who still had lead targets to hit during April and that period. And we were hoping that would help them move with us to the, to the postponed event dates later in the year. So, yeah, so that was kind of a bit of background behind the decision. And so three weeks out we launched our first virtual event.

Wow.

Not a lot of time.

So three weeks to put the event together. I think most of the people in the audience have got themselves into this kind of thinking mode of okay, what technology should we use? So although I don't want you to expand a lot about on that process, but it will be for the benefit of the audience. What tech do you use, what platform do you use and how do you go, how do you go about picking that tech?

Well, I mean, yeah, as you said, with three weeks to go, it's not a lot of time to choose the tech. So we had to make that decision really quickly and we chose to go with HeySummit as a platform and then we streamed, we live streamed to YouTube as well. And then we, alongside that we used Slack and we used Slack for all of our interactive discussions. We ran speaker office hours after each session and so people could move to Slack after each live session to continue the discussion. I think sort of learnings from that we just had to make a decision pretty quickly. There's pros and cons from every platform, but I think it was actually quite useful for us with that time frame to put some constraints and boundaries around it. So quite early on we knew some things we couldn't do, which was frustrating, but it also really helped with that limited time frame. Yeah, and I think the now we have a much clearer, moving forward, we have a kind of clearer list of what we, what we want from a tech platform. And so we have, we're in a much better place now. We've used one to Know what, where our kind of, what our must haves are and where we can make compromises. And so it's much easier now we've used one to go and pick one for a more permanent solution.

That's pretty interesting. And I just kind of wanted to understand also a little bit more on the aspect of. You say, Joe, about. Okay, you probably were expecting. What were your expectations before the event? Okay, so we're gonna run this virtual event. How do you, how did you go about it? Did you. Did you do any marketing differently to the way you would have normally market your event or. And what was the result of that as you started seeing everything kind of happening the way that it.

Yeah, well, I suppose we'd never run an event like this before. We've done a few webinars for some of our other more technical conferences. We've never done anything like this for lead dev. So it was really new territory. So we put together some targets with marketing team. Our targets were a thousand registrations, 300 views on the day, and 750 new Slack members in our Slack group. And I suppose our marketing plan, we wanted to again we had three weeks. We really didn't have a long, you know, a lot of time. So we were concentrating on emailing our full mailing list across all kind of global mailing list and then ads, some ads out using Twitter and LinkedIn and that was kind of it really. So we were a bit blown away with the results, to be honest.

That's very good. But I think what is important and I think what I would like the audience to also gain the perspective is that the interesting part is that you've seen through doing this digital process that your audience really values and the audience has your back. Right. So that's a really, really sweet storage. Now, Joe, obviously great, great story. Are you able to share with us a little bit what the good and the bad probably at this point in time on that front?

Yeah, I mean I think you just touched on it just then. One of the amazing things was how our community kind of got behind us. And I think we've known how important our community is for a while. We've recently appointed a community manager. We've been planning a bit of a strategy around it, but we've been moving quite slowly on it and really carefully planning things out. And then obviously this situation has forced our hands. But of the 12,000 registrants, 9,000 were new to us, which is a bit mind blowing. And the reason for that is that our really loyal community amplified our message. For us. And so the social sharing was kind of off the charts. The forwarding of our emails just massively pushed our message out to a bigger network than we could have dreamed of. And so we've suddenly, I don't know, I don't think that we could have planned or anticipated the speed and the scale at which we just grew the community. So it's both very exciting. We've now got this amazing engaged community, but also we now need to look after them and then keep them engaged and keep them, keep them coming back for more. So exciting times.

But that was kind of, of course we were speaking earlier. The team is obviously at this point in time running up full speed. One thing to clarify to the audience out there is that Joe and their community are lead developers. So they're techie, highly tech individuals. They are highly engaged in Twitter and the reason why they use Slack is because Slack, Slack is the tool for developers. So I just wanted to kind of, to clarify that.

So yeah, absolutely. Our community's really happy and confident using these tools and so they will have, they're very comfortable using Slack to communicate. So that's why it was really successful.

I think one aspect that I wanted to touch on Joe, is you've gained a lot of new stats and a lot of new kind of KPIs, new metrics, so to speak. Do you, have you got any metrics or like in which you will assess this event or have you got any statistics that you are able to share with the audience so that they can get that perspective of what this now means or potentially means?

Yeah, I think that's been a really interesting learning curve that the things that we're measuring as successful for this event has had to shift quite wildly from what we would normally use as an in person event. One thing we were really interested to see was looking at the engagement of our attendees. So I think throughout the two. So our event was run over two days. We had two and a half thousand people actively participating on Slack in discussions with 20,000 messages sent over the two days. 5,000 people viewed the videos during the two days and many more afterwards. We've left it on YouTube and are promoting the videos now and they're getting many more views. And our sponsors collected 5,000 leads through a digital swag bag that we had on the site. So that level of engagement again, we just didn't know what to expect. But that's far and above what we could have dreamt of really. So that side of it is really exciting. But yeah, the, the new Metrics that we're trying to work out. How do we measure success with this kind of quite fluid and transient new audience? It's definitely interesting and something we're trying out lots of different things and I think it will be something we iterate on as we move forward.

That's pretty cool. I think, Joe, I wanted to touch on one thing and I think there's a really interesting, fantastic idea that I saw on your event, which was the SWAG bag and linking this in particular. I have not seen this being done in any of the virtual events that I've attended that I've seen. So the SWAG bag, how does that work? How does that link with sponsorship? Because obviously whatever is top of mind and everyone attending here is how can we make money? How can we drive this? You know, the revenue for these events. It's clear that yes, one element is lead generation, building your database and everything. So clearly case study. Therefore, absolutely not charging. Just to bear in mind, you didn't charge for this, for this session.

No, it was free. It was a free event.

So it was then more like your sponsors were the ones that were kind of backing you up on this. Tell us a little bit more about the SWAG bag and what does that mean and how did you engage sponsor leads and all that sort of stuff? Because that's very interesting for the audience.

Yeah. So I suppose we decided when we launched the event that we were going to use this as an opportunity to kind of support our sponsors who were supporting us in moving to the. All of our sponsors moved with us to the postponed event. They were extremely understanding, but we wanted to kind of give something back to them. So we offered this as a kind of free add on to their packages. Firstly, we definitely could have upsold. We in fact did upsell a few things because our sponsors were asking for it, which really shows the demand. I think there's huge opportunity to sell digital sponsorship packages for these events. They're incredibly valuable. And the number of leads, the 5,000 leads are downloaded that were collected by our sponsors is kind of testament to that. The SWAG bag, we actually did this one in a very light touch way. So the sponsors would have either a link to a free trial or something that they wanted to promote that we linked out to and then they collected their own leads. But we also encouraged them to do something a bit more creative. So a lot of them did things like if you engaged with their swag bag item, they donate an amount to either a coronavirus charity or a kind of tech charity. And Those items in particular, people were shouting about them on Twitter and we've never had people shouting out about amazing swag before. And so the ideas the sponsors came up with, our sales team were really lovely and so people really loved the swag bag. And I suppose it's not quite the same as having a booth conversation. I think there's still a bit of work to figure out how you can replicate that one on one conversation, but it did go a really long way in getting towards that.

Amazing, amazing. I have to say I loved it and I was kind of pretty impressed when that happened. Joe, I know that we can speak for hours and the audience would love to have it. I'm starting to see lots of questions coming in. By the way, questions are going to come through towards the end, if that's okay. The final question to you, Joe, is which I think is ultimately the, the key important part of this session that I want the audience to take, which is how is your business outlook looks or how does the business outlook look now with this history or this kind of big event that you've got on your back now and then how does it look like moving forward? What is the outlook positive? What does that mean now?

We're always positive, Ricardo. We always stay positive.

I know, I know.

I think, I mean, the immediate future is virtual. We're still planning in person events, but we don't know when the next one's going to be held, in all honesty. So I think for us it's about focusing on a digital product offering that can match and align the needs of our audience and our sponsors. And for us, we're thinking that that is going to be a permanent new revenue stream for us and it will sit alongside the in person events when they come back. So we're planning for our in person events to return as soon as possible, but we're hoping that this is giving us an opportunity to create this second revenue stream that's actually going to push us further forward and leave us in a really strong position when we come out of the back of this. So when you're looking 6, 8, 12, 18 months further forward, we're actually a much, much stronger.