Cadmore media player playing video Has the Pandemic been the Mother of Invention?
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Has the Pandemic been the Mother of Invention?
Description:
Has the Pandemic been the Mother of Invention?
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/4c62ed4d-e169-425f-813b-a673cfcc0c81/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T01H28M38S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/4c62ed4d-e169-425f-813b-a673cfcc0c81
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/4c62ed4d-e169-425f-813b-a673cfcc0c81/london 2020 bigmarker-recording.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=H3YgSqwlTs0Yo7POKQ2gNdPK0EGDH7rJaPDruNZpw60%3D&st=2025-05-11T11%3A47%3A59Z&se=2025-05-11T13%3A52%3A59Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2022-04-28T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SAM BURRELL: Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming along. I'm just going to wait for a minute-- well, not even a whole minute. I'm just going to wait for a little bit while people are coming in, because I know from previous experience that, if we don't give everybody a little bit of grace here, that they miss the beginning. And I don't want that to happen.
SAM BURRELL: It's nice to see everybody piling into this session. As you can see, there is a chat session. I hope everyone can see it. Lisa's just messaging and going, hi, everyone. Welcome to the session. So take a look at that. Experience has shown that Society Street chat can be very lively, particularly when we're talking about meetings.
SAM BURRELL: So hopefully that will be the case today. OK, yes, I'm in. Exactly. Hi, everyone. So I will start now properly. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to our final session of Society Street 2020. What a year it's been, eh? Now, because it's been a grim year in so many ways, we thought we'd end it on a positive note and focus on the good things and the new opportunities that we've learned about to cheer ourselves up as we move into the festive season and hopefully, a shiny new year.
SAM BURRELL: I did just want to say, I'll come back. This is the topic of the session. That's a bit boring, that slide. A quick thank you to our sponsors to thank them again that we've been able to offer the entirety of our online program this year free, Elsevier and Wiley, our Gold sponsors, Silverchair, Consort Strategy, ALPSP, AJE, Cadmore Media, Atypon, Cactus, and Renew Consultants, thank you, thank you, thank you.
SAM BURRELL: Honestly, what a year, eh? And before we kick off properly, a little housekeeping issue-- we'd love to include your questions and comments so we can discuss them as we go. So we really do invite you to participate in the chat. If the chat window hasn't opened as the default, you should be able to find the blue Chat button to open the panel in the-- I think it's the bottom, right-hand side.
SAM BURRELL: I can't remember. But there is a little blue Chat button that you should be able to see if you can't already see the chat function. So please, you guys are meant to be shaping this conversation. Jump in. Say stuff. Ask questions. And we'll be drawing it into the conversation that we have.
SAM BURRELL: So quick few introductions, I'm Sam. I'm the Society Strict Program Chair. We've got three speakers lined up for today's session. But before I introduce them to you, I just wanted to reflect a little bit on how our thinking about meetings and conferences has evolved through this year, to provide a framework for what we're talking about today. Now, for all of us, frankly, conferences and meetings have been almost entirely online.
SAM BURRELL: Some people think that that was coming anyway. And I think they're probably right. This tweet that I popped up on a slide, I picked up in July. And the guy who wrote it was organizing a conference. And he had been campaigning for ages to get stuff online, because he thought that there were so many benefits to doing conferences online. And so he ended up being part of the organizing committee. And he wrote a long thread about what he thought worked well.
SAM BURRELL: I thought his little visual there was quite nice there, because he kind of talked about the things that are really, really good about being able to go online, and the problems that it solves, not least, reducing carbon footprint, accessibility issues, both in terms of being able to afford to get there because you don't have to travel. It means you can carry on doing, possibly carry on doing child care at home.
SAM BURRELL: And there is all kinds of things that we gain. And he does acknowledge, of course, that there is stuff that we lose as well. One of the themes we're going to touch on today, I know, is around accessibility. And I know that all of our speakers have things to say about that based on their experience of what they've done this year. And I also just wanted to kind of touch a little bit on what a conference is.
SAM BURRELL: And at Renew-- I work for Renew Consultants-- one of the things that we've been thinking about is thinking about conferences and meetings as products. We do quite a lot of product development as a team. And we like to go back to sort of blank pieces of paper and ask ourselves what it is that this product is trying to do. So the disruption caused by the pandemic forced all of us, basically, to do the same thing, even when we didn't want to or even when it was long overdue.
SAM BURRELL: And my personal view is that conferences as we knew them were a little bit archaic. They're a bunch of disparate activities that get smushed into one product. And this isn't all of them, but here were some of my thoughts about what it is that makes up a conference. And the opportunity that this year has afforded us to separate those out and to see which of those we want to keep, which of those we want to combine with each other, and reformulate it into something different.
SAM BURRELL: And so I'm going to stop talking, introduce you to our speakers. But I will tell you a bit about them and why we invited them to join us today, because we think that they did just this. They looked at what a conference is and worked out how what they were delivering could be, frankly, improved or could take advantage of the new situation that they found themselves in.
SAM BURRELL: And so let me welcome Tobey, Gemma, and Sarah to our metaphorical floor today. Thank you for the three of you for joining us and giving your time so generously to allow us to explore this in more depth. In terms of how we're going to structure this session, I'm going to ask each of you to talk a bit about your meeting, and what you did, and what the challenges were. I'm sure there will be plenty of common themes.
SAM BURRELL: And then we-- I've got a few questions just in case the audience haven't already asked us a billion. If they have asked us, I'm going to drop my questions. And we'll go to the questions that have come from the audience, but to kind of pick out some of the themes and learnings. So Tobey joins us from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They have a very busy meeting schedule throughout the year.
SAM BURRELL: And one of the important roles their meetings play is disseminating the research in their field, which is true for many of us. And the solution that they came up with worked, I think, really well for their audience, and I think might be the catalyst for changing the way they do some of the things going forward, pandemic or no. So I wanted to get Tobey to come and talk to us about some of that.
SAM BURRELL: Secondly, I'm going to ask Gemma from the European Economics Association to tell us about the event that she was responsible for in August. I met Gemma at a Society Street event in May where she joined a roundtable discussion and was talking about her choice of platform. And what caught my attention about what she said was that she was very clear about how she wanted her online event to work, and having done some research into platforms, couldn't find one that fits her requirements.
SAM BURRELL: So rather than bending her event round to fit into somebody else's idea of what the event should look like, she decided to basically work with some other people and invent a platform that did what they wanted it to do. And finally, we'll be talking Sarah from the-- I'm going to get this right-- International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic works, there we go, who has literally just finished running their meeting.
SAM BURRELL: It finished, I don't know, a week ago, two weeks ago, which I know was planned as a series. And I haven't spoken to her in detail since, so I don't actually know her it went. So hopefully, it went really well. I know they were planning a series of hub and spoke events. One of their challenges was around the truly global nature of the meeting and of the attendees. So time zones was obviously an issue.
SAM BURRELL: But there was also the technology gap that was an issue. And that is enough from me. So thanks again to everybody joining us in the audience, but also our speakers. And I'm going to invite Tobey to kick us off. Tobey, could you tell us, give us a bit of a sense of what happened to your meetings this year?
TOBEY JACKSON: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Good afternoon, good morning to all of our attendees. So AIAA, as you mentioned, has a number of annual events that we do. So in 2020, we were able to hold our largest event as a face-to-face event in January. And then shortly there after, the pandemic unfolded. And we canceled two events, one that was in March and one that was in May.
TOBEY JACKSON: So moving forward, we had three more scheduled for this calendar year. And we took all of those fully virtual. So the first one had about 2,100 attendees. That was held in June. We held one with a little more than 1,000 in August. And then we just held one that had about 3,000 last week. So we're currently working on one that has more than 6,000 for January that will also be a fully virtual event.
TOBEY JACKSON: So in addition to that, we've done a number of conferences, or not really full conferences, but meetings, webinars, things on different topics for different groups as well. So with all of that, there has been a lot that we have learned. There has been a lot that was surprising, some challenges along the way, but as you mentioned, definitely something that's impacting how we look at our programs, going forward.
TOBEY JACKSON: So I know one of the things you asked us to talk about, Sam, was some of the challenges. So I'll be honest, I think everyone here that has done a virtual event or that is planning a virtual event will relate to this. Virtual conferences are hard. They are a lot harder, I think, than I thought they would be. For everything that you do, there is a process and a policy that goes behind it, at least one, if not more.
TOBEY JACKSON: So it's challenging. It's also challenging because it's new. And there are very few groups that have done a bunch, whereas in a face-to-face event, there is always examples that you can draw from. With virtual conferences, especially when we were planning one in June, there really wasn't a lot to choose from or to use as an example or kind of a benchmark.
TOBEY JACKSON: So that was really a challenge for us. Specific to our group, probably the biggest challenge for us was determining what should stay in a virtual conference and what pieces of a face-to-face conference could be done elsewhere, or at a different time, or in a different mechanism. So that, we did kind of this content inventory to make sure that we could get what we needed in the actual event, and then what else we could do perhaps at a different time.
SAM BURRELL: I want to dig down into some of that.
TOBEY JACKSON: Of course.
SAM BURRELL: What did look like? What was it that you decided you needed to keep?
TOBEY JACKSON: So we looked at everything. You know, our events, as I'm sure most groups-- they have a number of different things going on. I always say, it's not just a three-ring circus. It's like a 300-ring circus. And there is always concurrent events going on. That could include committee meetings. It could include social events. It could include technical paper presentations. It could include technical panel presentations.
TOBEY JACKSON: We have high-level panels. We have high-level speakers, and that's just a few of them. So really, looking at all of that, thinking-- kind of where we started was with the value proposition. Why do people come to our conferences? And the number-one reason, far and away, as you mentioned, was the technical program. They come to share research, to get feedback on that research, to be published.
TOBEY JACKSON: That was something that took priority number one, figuring that part out. That being said, that in and of itself is a challenge. We typically at our face-to-face conferences would do 30 concurrent paper presentation sessions. Doing that virtually is not only really a challenge time wise, but then we didn't have enough staff to support each of those. That's just a huge lift. Plus it's expensive.
TOBEY JACKSON: To have the technical capability behind that was really difficult. So looking at how to solve that, that took us a while. So that being said, that kind of led to another challenge of finding a vendor. I can relate to what Gemma was thinking. It's really hard to find-- to do panels and speakers, not that difficult.
TOBEY JACKSON: Most vendors can handle that. To handle the technical program, difficult. And really, that was a lesson learned, that we needed to go with a vendor that understood the technical program, that understood the desire to publish research and the desire of our technical community to be able to interact with each other. So that was a big lesson learned.
TOBEY JACKSON: In terms of other challenges, some of the things like networking, how would we do networking events? How would we handle sponsors? How would we handle exhibitors? Those are still things that we're still working on. There were different iterations of that. And we're learning as we go and looking at what the best practices are for that.
TOBEY JACKSON: So that was kind of how we started. How it went, the June event went pretty well, but we had some challenges with our vendor. So thinking about that, and when we were moving forward, we decided to go with a different set of vendors for our August event. And that went so much better. So that was definitely a big lesson learned there. Thinking about the technical program, what we ended up doing is we actually asked our presenters to pre-record their presentations and then come together for live Q&A. And we made the technical presentations available about a week in advance so that people could ideally watch those before they came to the Q&A sessions.
TOBEY JACKSON: What we learned, a great idea in theory. In reality, most people can't dedicate that time to be able to check those out in advance. So what ends up happening is it's great to have these technical presentations. It's going to be a wonderful content repository in the future once we solve the technical challenges of that in and of itself. But most people would come to the Q&A session never having watched any of these presentations and probably not looking at the paper itself.
TOBEY JACKSON: So we had to kind of reformat how we did those Q&A sessions to allow for people to do a brief summary of their work before they took questions so that people knew what was going on. So that was definitely-- and that's kind of an iterative process as well. The conference that we're doing in January, we're looking at a slightly different model that our vendor could offer us.
TOBEY JACKSON: So it allows for more live interaction, so definitely, some of the things that we're learning along the way and how we handle that. For the speakers and panels, that went really well. That was not one of our biggest challenges. But we did actually use a different vendor for the conference that we had last week that we had not used before, definitely some lessons learned there and some challenges, especially with some of the speakers.
TOBEY JACKSON: And so that was a little bit different for us. We hadn't had that before, so, again, something that we learned. Moving forward, one of the big lessons I think that we've learned is that we need to choose a vendor or vendors and stick with them so that our staff is comfortable with it. Our staff knows it. We can iterate on that.
TOBEY JACKSON: We can take all of those lessons learned and make everything better. And we can focus our time on improving versus learning a new system. So that's definitely one of the ways that we're looking at moving forward.
SAM BURRELL: I think that's a really great, kind of, like, here is a bunch of stuff that we thought about. And I saw Sarah and Gemma both nodding at various parts where you were talking there. And there is people chatting in chat. I've just had a message to go that we're going to be talking at a bit about monetization and price points, which is obviously vexatious. Gemma, could you just talk-- again, the idea here is to give us kind of a background to the things that you thought about, how it went, what challenges you found so that we can have a good starting point, understanding from where all three of you were.
SAM BURRELL: So right, Gemma, off you go.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: OK, well, first and foremost, good afternoon from Italy. And thanks to Sam for inviting me here. Unlike Tobey, I've had one event to concentrate on during lockdown. And this actually took place in August of 2020. And in my case, what happened was that it's-- the European Economic Association holds one annual congress.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: It's considered one of Europe's largest congresses in terms of the number of parallel sessions. We have up to 40 parallel sessions over five days. Parallel sessions mean up to five paper and presentations. So there, over the course of five days, there are 1,000 papers presented. So we kind of decided in April, we realized that, when we had our executive committee meeting, that the in-person congress would not take place, whilst, at that time, the Scientific Program Committee, made up of about 200 academic economists had already graded about 1,000 papers.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So the decision not to cancel was very easy to take, because, of course, we didn't want to penalize the work of the graders of the program committee members and we didn't want to penalize the academic research community who had already been penalized enough during the previous few months. So deciding to cancel or postpone was easy. We decided not to do it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And we took the approach of, OK, let's look at the positive aspects of the virtual meetings, virtual events. At that time, we were having lots of experiences of actually meeting virtually, be it in small groups or large. We were all meeting via Zoom. And it was working extremely well, with groups up to 50 people all discussing et cetera, et cetera.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So it was extremely simple for us to know think, what are our priorities? Sorry. What are our priorities? What can we do with a virtual meeting? And of course, the dissemination of research findings to the whole economic research community was first and foremost in our minds.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We said, we've got the opportunity to actually bring together far more than 1,000 presenters who would have gathered together in an in-person congress. We really have got the opportunity to go out there and bring people who are not presenting their papers with the people who are presenting their papers, something that does not happen in our academic congress, which isn't a trade fair. So that was the first priority.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Then we want to basically tie together is broaden participation, to go out there and look at the countries that wouldn't, for many reasons, the financial, for bureaucratic reasons, wouldn't be able to come to our congresses. And we thought, well, we want to do all of this, but yet, fundamentally, we have to give them a location. So this is basically what, for us, was the-- kind of, it became the main topic of the whole direction of the meetings, was the case of, how can we create the actual virtual location and get the interaction among the congress participants?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And this is where we decided to create our own congress platform, which basically was a front-end platform for people who wanted to register and participate in our congress. At the time when we decided basically not to cancel or postpone the congress, we also decided not scale back on the scientific program. The graders had done their job. The presenters had been told about the outcome of their paper submission.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So we decided to keep the program as it was, which meant 40 parallel sessions. And we could have and done it very, very simply. We could have said, OK, we'll just send out Zoom links, to prepare the session and send out a Zoom link directly to the presenters, to the chairs, to anybody who wanted to participate, but we didn't want that, because we wanted to create the actual networking opportunities that an in-person congress would do.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So with that in mind, I started contacting the vendors, as Tobey would call them in the US. And basically, it took me a few days after a few demos to realize that they were not geared for an academic congress. What I mean by that is that I felt this for the trade fairs and for events, one-day events with a few, four parallel sessions, they were brilliant, but they could not handle a five-day event with 40 parallel sessions.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And one of the things that I was quite surprised to find out was that a lot of the vendors wanted to integrate the video conference platforms that were out there into their own platform. And I just could not understand this, because you know we've been using Zoom-- well, I've been using you Zoom, actually, since about November, because lots of research institutions had already started using Zoom to cut down, actually, on their meetings.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So I was using that and seeing Zoom Teams. I don't want to be sponsoring any kind of video conference platform here. So I didn't understand why the vendors were integrating and losing a lot of the functions that you could get specifically by using the video conference platform directly including the actual chat function. This is where, for me, what I found extremely bizarre is, we wanted this interaction amongst our participants, be it inside the scientific session or be it "outside" during the coffee breaks.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And yet, I was looking at these vendors' platforms. And lots of the functions that I wanted were being lost through this quite simple interaction. So in Italy, we were the first European country that went into lockdown. So I didn't have a lot of time. So to be honest, Sam asked me to speak about challenges. Quite simply, I didn't have time to think whether something was a challenge or not, if it was a hill or a mountain to climb.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We just basically, we plowed through and decided, you know, let's-- we were working with a developer on another-- on something different. I spoke with him, a five-minute conversation. I put my idea to him. And I said, you know, is it possible? And what I realized that we needed was something, because I realized that the whole world was, not just Italy, every week there was another country, a kind of the domino effect that we're going into lockdown.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And it didn't take a genius to realize that, within a few weeks, the whole world would be in lockdown. So I realized we need something intuitive, because if we were going basically to-- if our priority was a dissemination, we also realized that we couldn't expect to grab, let's say, the attention of a researcher for five days as we would in an in-person congress.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We'd need to grab their attention for specific sessions. And they'd need to have some way of, check in five minutes before the session they wanted needed to start, where they wanted to go just by one click of the button. So my main focus was on designing a congress platform that was intuitive and very, very, very user friendly. So what I thought of was something that we were all using during lockdown at the end of a very extremely busy day, Netflix, something where all you've got to do is just kind of flicking, flicking through, quick choice.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: I'll have this one, click. So the platform that we developed was basically, as an entrance to the, the approach to the scientific program is something very, very, very similar to, not just Netflix, but you know, all the kind of television channels that we all see on the internet television. So what we did with the program, the scientific program, is the main focus.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: This was actually the home page. And why we did this as well is that I didn't want it hidden, because a lot of what I was seeing with the vendors was hidden behind a log in screen. And I thought, if we need to-- if we want to broaden our participation, we need to have the program available on the public domain for everybody so people can decide, if they're not registered for the congress, they could decide if they want to register.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And this is what we did. We didn't have anything behind a log in screen. We didn't have any visuals of a kind of the location where the congress was with a [INAUDIBLE].. We had the problem on the front end for use basically by anybody who was interested in our program. And what we had behind basically the log in area was the links, the actual unprotected links to the section, because I think in the end, we decided to link out.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: All our sessions were held on Zoom because of chosen Teams. But for many reasons, the academic community were using Zoom as their preferred choice for their lessons. So we decided that our audience had some familiarity with Zoom, so we decided to use Zoom. And everything, all our sessions linked out. Our sessions were live.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: They worked extremely well, because as Tobey said-- I smile Tobey, because yeah, we could not possibly have asked people during lockdown in August to prepare their slides, to record their sessions, to actually come together, to find time to come together as five people and work with the various times that was as well. So we decided everything was going to go live.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Fortunately, it was so, so, so well. But I think that it worked so well because people were very appreciative of the fact that we hadn't canceled. And Tobey, this is why I want to bring to you that, I hope this isn't seen as a criticism that you prerecorded, and we went live and it worked well. I organized one event.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: It's like one of Europe's largest general, well, congress for general economics. And people meet once a year. I didn't have the opportunity to kind of pick up the errors I made and then make sure that they weren't repeated in the next congress. And I think that people actually approached our congress as well in the spirit that we approached it, which was, it's a very, very, very unusual year.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We're trying basically to bring the academic economics community together. And we're also trying to broaden your participation. So I think that the spirit as well of all of our audience was absolutely amazing. And of course, in that spirit, everything worked out extremely well, because if there was any errors, people took the errors in good spirits. And what I wanted to say is within our log-in area, we created a networking area.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And I think that if I had to speak about the biggest challenge, it's nothing technical. It wasn't an error with the platform. It was basically trying to get people to network during the congress, not because they didn't want to, not because-- there were just too many distractions.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And I think this is important to point out that I'm extremely optimistic for the future of virtual events. And I think, in future virtual events, networking will become something that, it works far better than it has this year, because people will be out of lockdown. People won't have these challenging personal situations in their daily life, et cetera, et cetera.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So I do think that our biggest challenge was actually getting people to find the time to-- people weren't in their offices. Our congress was held in August as well, at the end of August. So even if some countries were home schooling, they were still home schooling, other countries were on holidays. So people had their children there, other kinds of personal--
SAM BURRELL: So, Gemma--
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: I was just about to say, I'm going to ask a question. And then I'm not going to let you answer it so you can think about it for a minute, which is, what are you going to take for this year-- and actually, I'm going to come back. I'm going to ask all of you this. But I was just picking up on what you were saying there, Gemma, is this year was unusual. You responded very quickly.
SAM BURRELL: You came up with something that, frankly, you made up because it fit the requirements that you were trying to meet. When we come back to talk together, what I want to know is, what from this year do you think worked well enough that you want to roll it into future years and go, actually, that was something that we learned something from it that I think has a positive?
SAM BURRELL: But I'm not actually going to let you answer it. I'm asking that to everybody. And I want to hear from Sarah, because she's been nodding at both what you and Tobey were saying. She's going, yes, yes, I recognize that. So I just want to get her--
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Sorry, Sam, could I say something on a closing note, which--
SAM BURRELL: Of course, yeah.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE].. One of the reasons why we actually decided to invest in our [? Bespoke ?] congress platform is because we knew of the potential it would have for us for future events.
SAM BURRELL: OK, Gemma, no, that makes a lot of sense. Cool. Sarah, tell us about your event. I really hope it went well.
SARAH STANNAGE: It did. Thanks, Sam. And thanks to Society Street as well for the invitation to be on the panel. Yes, we've just finished the live event, but there are sort of many elements to it. And I'll just start with kind of just going back a little bit to sort of our event. We only run-- so this kind of parallels here with Gemma. We run one big congress every two years, actually.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we're constantly in the planning mode, but it takes that long. And it's one of those sort of landmark events within our sector in terms of impact and legacy. So we really do build into that. And we have a bit of an Olympics kind of bid situation. So we do rotate in terms of countries where we go to. So that kind of connection to place with the congress is really important.
SARAH STANNAGE: So sort of going back to April, that was kind of one of those moments where we were so disappointed to think, we're not going to be in Edinburgh this year in this beautiful venue that we had and this beautiful connection within the local organizing committee and local partners to come into Scotland. And there was so much work that had been already undertaken. But the decision not to postpone or to cancel was quite easy for us, actually, because we had, like Gemma, committed to the publication.
SARAH STANNAGE: And we owed it to our community, and our authors in particular who had invested so much time in their papers and this huge body of work which was absolutely fantastic. And we needed to really, really start to promote that. So there was no suggestion to really sort of cancel. We were going to have an event. It was then a case of looking at that the hybrid and then sort of going fully online. And quite frankly, again, looking at that kind of international profile, knowing that travel was not going to be possible, it was fairly easy to go, right, we're going fully online.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we did go through that process with our council, our trustees. But equally, there was this kind of moment-- and it was really for me, as the chief exec, to kind of look at the financial implications of doing that, and having a really quite big conversation with our council, our board to look at the impacts of that, mainly because a lot of our funders, and sponsors, and our exhibitors were also feeling the financial impacts of the global pandemic.
SARAH STANNAGE: So there was a real concern sort of back in April, May about, how do we bring the funders and the sponsors with us? And those conversations were absolutely critical in giving us the confidence to deliver online and also how to mitigate. So one of the points of mitigation with council, for example, was to underwrite or to use part of our reserves if we needed to to deliver this, but we were committed to it. And we were going to do it.
SARAH STANNAGE: And I think once we sort of got over that, then the conversations with the funders and the sponsors were actually quite exciting. And this is where the creativity came in. It became that space of, can we take some risks here? Can we look at doing things differently? You know, they were learning. A lot of our exhibitors and sponsors had never done this. So we just created those moments of, OK, well, let's try this.
SARAH STANNAGE: Let's have a look at that. And that's how we sort of built this. It was a completely collaborative effort, and right the way through, as soon as we had made that decision. But, also we couldn't find that platform. There was nothing off the shelf. We needed something bespoke. And it was really important for us, particularly with that body of work, is where the publication was really important to track in, and to keep a level of faith to our program, our technical program.
SARAH STANNAGE: This was an element of keeping it familiar as well for our audience. But we have these advantages as well. Now we could have made the decision of going online-- we would have had a 400 in-person event, so it's quite small. Everybody is sort of traveling in. We were really considering live streaming, but hadn't quite made that decision.
SARAH STANNAGE: Now we have this sort of opportunity, first time in our 70-year history, of really getting over those travel barriers. And for me, that was really exciting, because it leaves with a climate, friendly sort of moments that we really wanted to bring in. So we brought that in earlier, which was great news for us. But equally, the access, you can't just assume taking it online is going to make all the content accessible around the world.
SARAH STANNAGE: And when you have such an international profile within your membership, you have to really pay attention to that. So that's one of the really important points to engage in right at the beginning when you've made that commitment to go online. So for example, one of the funders that we were working with, I did just say to them at the outset, can we look at this sort of providing a level of equality of access, embracing the fact that we want everybody with us online, but there is a digital divide?
SARAH STANNAGE: So one of the funders supported grants. And so rather than having the attendance in-person grants to fly over, actually, why don't we apply that to the digital situation, and actually encouraging a level of participation that was far greater than the in-person. So it was really, it was four times on everything. It was a magic number for us is four times the level of participation.
SARAH STANNAGE: So that 400 in-person event became 1,600. Suddenly, we were able to really sort of nurture that level of participation that we hadn't been able to do before. So that was a huge moment for us in realizing our reach on the sort of extended audience and that can come into this kind of event. We recognized as well with the participation that the program, when you're-- so we sort of located our program still in Edinburgh.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we kept this kind of Scottish flavor. We were on GMT time within our program, trying to-- everybody is going to be Zoomed out. So let's keep a five-hour program. And then it did sort of hit me with the local organizing committee. It was like, well, half our audience is going to be asleep at that point. So we really need to think about how we extend.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we had extend to Q&As, for example, at 1 o'clock in the morning. But that was fine, because, actually, most of our-- we looked at our presenters. We were able to put together a program that really worked for their time zone. And how we sort of managed those sessions I think really worked. That was a great lesson out from the technical program. And again, it wouldn't have been possible necessarily in a real, physical space.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we kind of really encouraged that kind of a hub and spoke model that you, mentioned Sam. And that was a further opportunity here for participation, where we created these live hubs, which really worked with our regional groups, say, within our membership body. And then we extended that into institutions and universities. And that was overwhelming in terms of depreciation, so for example, being able to allow 25 students in on a conservation course to be able to access remotely together.
SARAH STANNAGE: So there was this feeling of coming together online which was so-- it's so important to us in the physical event. And I'm really glad that we managed to create that online so you still got this sense of community online. And there was an ability within that for networking as well. So we did sort of build in these networking sessions which just were smaller.
SARAH STANNAGE: We deliberately kept them smaller so that people could have that kind of attention online. But our exhibitors and our sponsors were able to come into those sessions. And we were able to build our exhibitors into the program more so that they had an opportunity to engage more directly with attendees online. And that worked really well. So we didn't lose a single sponsor or exhibitor from the physical event onto [INAUDIBLE] online.
SARAH STANNAGE: And there was a real, this moment of having a lot of enlighten as funders. We were very lucky with that. But this real sort of spirit of collaboration and experimentation-- and we built that in right from the start. But it worked. And we're very sort of basking in the glory of the delivery. But it sets us up for the next time.
SARAH STANNAGE: And it's important that we maintain this kind of new connection with our members and with our sort of new supporters now that are coming to us, this whole new level of participation that we've managed to now access, and so that we don't lose that for the next congress.
SAM BURRELL: I want to pick up on, actually, because it was something I wanted to ask Tobey about, but I was feeling polite at that point in the proceedings and didn't interrupt her, but I've lost that now. So it was around your attendees. So Tobey, you were talking about the number of people who came to each of those sessions. I guess what-- there is two questions that I want to ask the three of you, which is, what was the difference in your attendance compared to what you would expect from an in-person?
SAM BURRELL: And the other thing is, what did you learn about monetization and price points? Do you think you got it right? What was your thinking? So those, they're connected, aren't they? Because if you're going to get a billion people, you can only charge them 50p and that's fine. But if you're only going to have 20 people, you need to charge them a lot more.
SAM BURRELL: So Sarah, you just talked about being able to reach so many more people than you previously had. What did you do? I knew when I spoke to you before that you'd had loads more registrants than you were expecting to have. So did that translate into attendance? And what did you do about your-- how did you charge for it or not? And then I got to ask the other two as well, because I think that's a really interesting question.
SARAH STANNAGE: Well, we brought in a policy. Actually, we made it free for a month to members of our IC to access the congress online. And that was a decision to look at kind of a retention strategy and growth strategy [INAUDIBLE]. And it worked. I think that was something that our members really appreciated. At this point, a lot of the institutions they're working with are feeling the budget pressures. So again, the institutions were really appreciative of that.
SARAH STANNAGE: So the funding and the sponsorship became critical.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's interesting. Tobey, how did it work for you guys?
TOBEY JACKSON: So attendance-wise, we saw in the events that we did in June and in August, we saw a decrease from what we would see face to face. We were expecting that, partly because a number of paper presenters do not have access to their facilities to be able to complete their research. So if your paper presenters make up a bulk of your attendees, and that number drops, then your attendance will drop. And so that's really what we saw.
TOBEY JACKSON: The event that we just held, actually, last week, did really well. And so in terms of attendance numbers, it was great. So we did charge. We have charged or all of our fully online conferences. I think there is a different pricing model or a different concept that you need to take into consideration. When you're just doing a single session or a single webinar, I think that's different.
TOBEY JACKSON: But for a full conference, we did charge. It was dramatically reduced from what the in-person fee would be. And we still had special levels for students, for example, retirees, full conference, those types of categories. The one that we just held last week, we actually did kind of a mixed model where we had some of a higher level sessions that were available for free.
TOBEY JACKSON: You had to sign up as a public to view those, but that was kind of a different model for us. And we're looking at doing something a little bit similar at a very reduced price for our conference in January.
SAM BURRELL: Is there any link there with membership?
TOBEY JACKSON: Yes, there is a definite discount for members.
SAM BURRELL: OK. Gemma, how did it go for you guys in terms of attendees, and where they were, and what kind of pricing model you did?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, we actually had to close registration at 2,000 because we were worried that the services-- as we were using the platform for the first time, we said we're going to limit it to 2,000, which is double of what we would have seen in an in-person congress. If we hadn't blocked, I would have expected about 2,500 2,800. Bear in mind, this is a congress that's held the last week of August, so you know, during the European holiday season.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: In terms of our pricing, we did something very, very similar to Sarah. We gave registration to non presenters, in this case, free for members. Presenters were charged. And they were charged quite simply. These are academics, so they have research funding. So when they basically present in a congress, they use their research funding.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So we felt that we could charge the presenters. What happened to the European Economic Association with this policy to give free registration to the congress for all members, we saw a huge increase in our membership base.
SAM BURRELL: I was just about to ask that. And I do want to ask Sarah that question as well, because we've had someone in chat. Sandra in chat's asking this question too, is, what's the relationship with membership? So you saw a big increase, Gemma, as a direct result of your pricing.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah.
SAM BURRELL: And you charge for membership, right?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes.
SAM BURRELL: Yes, OK. Sarah, did you find did that as well?
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, absolutely, about 40% in terms of new membership. And also, I mean, we're still processing this after, just after the event. But actually, a lot of non-members who paid, actually, we're offering that kind of ability to kind of become the member, and then sort of apply through that process. And we'll sort of refund. So there is a mechanism there of keeping hold of these new relationships to support into the membership community, which I think is really important.
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, do you think AIAA has seen that? Is there a relationship between virtual events and membership, do you think? So I mean, you might not know. It's something--
TOBEY JACKSON: It's a great question. It's not something that I have personally explored. We have a slightly different model for our face-to-face events. Years ago, we used to include the option to join as a member in the fee. And then you would get that member rate. And you would get a discounted membership. In particularly the United States, that's really difficult for government.
TOBEY JACKSON: They cannot do that on a government credit card. They cannot apply those fees. So we eventually decided to stop that. So there is kind of a different model in our association between registration revenue, and membership revenue, and membership numbers. But I think what it's doing and I think what really need to do is as our society, we need to take advantage of the new individuals that we're seeing that have come into AIAA to participate.
TOBEY JACKSON: And we need to make sure that we follow up with them to really encourage them to be members. We need to do our homework to look into what would be valuable to them and what is that kind of sticking point to bring them into membership. I think that's what we need to learn. So picking up on that theme of value, and the other kind of area that I want to explore is around sponsorship.
TOBEY JACKSON: Sarah, I know you talked about-- I think you said it was funders rather than necessarily sponsors doing the kind of grant packages for the digital access. And that really grabbed me when we talked about it before. But there is also a kind of larger question of, how did sponsorship work? How did your sponsors feel about what you were doing? Did they come with you?
TOBEY JACKSON: Did they shape what you did? Let's talk a bit about sponsorship. How did that all pan out? And I'll start with Sarah, because I know she's got lots of things to say. But I do want to come to Tobey and Gemma as well on this one.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, I mean, I'll just touch on that. Absolutely, from the beginning, sponsors and exhibitors who we had some physical event were coming with us into this new sort of virtual or online concept. And that had to be different. It couldn't be the same. This was not kind of [INAUDIBLE] territory. You couldn't possibly participate. So for us, it was about kind of finding the mechanism of ensuring that exhibitors and sponsors were visible, but were participating online.
SARAH STANNAGE: So some of the areas for having chat channels and things like that which worked brilliantly in terms of bringing in the feel of connection and just encouraging conversations online alongside the technical program was really important, as well as bringing in their expertise into the conversations and actually seeing that there was room for them in there. So actually, some of this was just pivoting what were traditional packages.
SARAH STANNAGE: And I'm so glad now we have-- we just, we're not going to go back at all to those previous packages of support and actually create something much more exciting and creative into the next conference as well.
SAM BURRELL: So really thinking about sponsorship, whether it's in person or not, and what that relationship is, isn't it, of kind of what each party can bring to the table?
SARAH STANNAGE: Absolutely. And it was more meaningful. I mean, the exhibitors were all reporting to me at the end that that's one of the best-- I mean, some of them had never been onto an online event in that space before. So they didn't have anything to compare to. But actually, they were really pleased with the results. The conversations they were having, the new relationships, I mean, some of our exhibitors were developing distributing networks internationally in countries they couldn't previously get into.
SARAH STANNAGE: And that was exceptional in terms of results.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's exciting. Tobey, what was your experience of kind of the sponsorship relationship, the sponsor relationship?
TOBEY JACKSON: I feel like I keep being the bearer of bad news. [INAUDIBLE] for us. And so I have to caveat that I did not work directly with our exhibitors and sponsors in these virtual programs, but I have experience working with them in the past. And I kind of know what happened. It was challenging. So the first time that we tried to do virtual exhibits, it did not work very well.
TOBEY JACKSON: Not many people attended. We didn't it go with the 3D build out type of model. So it wasn't necessarily the most exciting thing you've ever seen online. And it just, it was really challenging. Sponsorship was a little bit better, in that it afforded some different opportunities, doing commercials, for example, or presenting an actual program.
TOBEY JACKSON: What we learned is that, whenever a sponsor does something, for example, presenting a kind of half-hour session, if they name it with just their name, no one will come. But if they name it something-- we had a sponsor or do something that was "The History of Propulsion" for our Propulsion and Energy forum. That got great attendance. And they had great engagement in that.
TOBEY JACKSON: And that really worked out well for them, so kind of learning those things as we go. Exhibits are still really challenging. We're still finding that.
SAM BURRELL: Do you know what, though? So again, I mean, my experience is obviously very different with Society Street. But I was speaking to somebody who is a platform vendor, actually, about sponsorship. And he said that he's fed up of exhibiting, full stop, because he thinks it's a complete waste of time. And actually, the fact that we've moved online and we're trying to think about things very differently, he said, I want to contribute in a meaningful way that's not sales, that is actually just being in the relationship, and kind of getting to know some people, and contributing positively.
SAM BURRELL: And he said, that is much more valuable to me as a sponsor than having some drafty hall with the thing behind me and a desk where nobody wants to make eye contact with you because it's a bit embarrassing. I think there is-- again, I think the format of conferences as they were is quite old and staid, and could do with a bit of a-- anyway, Gemma?
TOBEY JACKSON: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: How was your sponsor experience?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Our policy for years has been not to have sponsors.
SAM BURRELL: Oh, wow, not at all?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, for conflict of interest. We don't have sponsors. We have exhibitors who are publishing houses. And what happened in my own personal case was that when I started approaching at the exhibitors who would attend the in-person congress, it was that between April and May where the UK, which has a number of publishing houses, had just gone into lockdown.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: The staff was separated. A lot of the event staff were put on paid leave by-- in the UK, you have a specific name for it that I can't remember.
SAM BURRELL: Furlough.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Right, that's right. And quite simply, nobody knew what was going on. So when I decided I would offer them, within this kind of our Netflix, our EA-flix, as we fondly nicknamed it, I'd have a banner at the bottom of exhibitors. If they wanted to put their logo was a kind of sign of support, they could, but we didn't charge them anything. And we just linked-- I offered them the opportunity of having a kind of manned Zoom page where people could just--
SAM BURRELL: Come and chat
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: --call in, yeah, and chat. But they weren't interested. But I think that basically, they didn't have the manpower. You know, it seemed as if a lot of the event staff were laid off as the first people to be laid off within the publishing houses. And nobody knew what was going on. So my experience wasn't positive. But I didn't push it either.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah. OK, so to change tack a bit, did any of you guys do anything specific to include, or bring in, or ensure that sort of your early-career researchers, practitioners-- because there is something about conferences being a really important part of building a network, and advancing your career, and getting to know more about the field that you're just starting out in, finding mentors, all that kind of stuff.
SAM BURRELL: Did you address any of that in your conference planning? And if so, how did it go? Tobey, you're nodding.
TOBEY JACKSON: Yes. So students are the-- and students being in undergraduate-, graduate-, PhD-level students are a big part of just our association in general, but our conference attendance. So absolutely, they are a huge factor to consider when we're looking at conference programming. So we have always had student and what we call rising leaders, young professionals programming. So we looked at how to take that online.
TOBEY JACKSON: Several aspects, though, we actually took off into a different-- we took them online, but at a different time. So for example, we've done an event called meet the employers where students and individuals are looking for internships in labs can actually meet with prospective employers, and talk with them and kind of learn about what they do and what's exciting. So we've taken that.
TOBEY JACKSON: And we've done it online, but at a different time. Some of the other programs were done that way too. We do look at speed mentoring. We do offer that at our face-to-face events. And so we've looked at how to take that in a different time as well and how to offer that, so definitely something that we've taken into consideration. And then I would also emphasize that, for us, student pricing was dramatically lower than any other registration fee.
TOBEY JACKSON:
SAM BURRELL: Gemma? Oh, you're muted. You're muted.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Sorry. OK, yeah, what we did quite simply involved the specific scientific sessions. And we had field experts chair the sessions. This was extremely easy to do, as people didn't have to travel. So they were willing to do this. We would love for these people to come to in-person meetings, but we know, not just the timing of our congress, the end of August-- and these are extremely busy experts.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And they quite simply wouldn't come in to chair a 90-minute session. So we worked very, very hard on this for [INAUDIBLE] virtual. It worked extremely well. And we're very, very pleased with it. Of course, we kept on mentoring programs, the mentoring programs that we run for women and female, young female economists. We continued it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We continued our other workshops we do. So we just, as I said--
SAM BURRELL: You just kept it all going.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: Sarah, did you want to address any of that, the kind of--
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, well, we would bill students and early-career researchers in quite different levels, but throughout sort of the congress. One of the most exciting areas, we recruited 25 digital engagement volunteers who were all students and early-career researchers to support the session chairs. That was brilliant. So all those kind of informal, offline discussions were brilliant.
SARAH STANNAGE: And obviously, there was lots of connections made that way, as well as bringing some slightly more program sessions together with student poster, those kind of sessions, and bringing them into kind of mixing everybody in, so having really experienced kind of those are leading within the profession right alongside the students. And we found a lot of the content, you just couldn't tell, specifically on the posters, you know, whose was a student poster and who wasn't.
SARAH STANNAGE: It was absolutely exceptional in terms of the quality and delivery throughout.
SAM BURRELL: That's fabulous, and actually just links directly into a question I've just been asked, which is, how did each of you, how did your conferences handle the poster sections? What did you do? How did they work? So Sarah, just a bit more detail on what you did and how it went would be good.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, so we designed the kind of poster sessions to be quite dedicated sessions. And it was very sort of more sort, dare I say it, face to face on Zoom, so that the posters were more of a-- well, you can do it on sort of like a breakout room sort of session or sort of more in terms of just keeping smaller groups, posters within themes together. That worked really well. So actually, in these sort of meeting environments, we had posters presenters talking to each other.
SARAH STANNAGE: And then people were dropping in. So these were sort of drop-out, drop-in sessions. And that actually, keeping that level of being informal worked really well.
SAM BURRELL: So you'd get five or six together.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah.
SAM BURRELL: And then there was a time.
SARAH STANNAGE: Time, yeah.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah, that sounds interesting. Tobey, what did you do?
TOBEY JACKSON: So we don't have poster sessions, per se. It's something that we've done at face-to-face conferences in the past, but haven't done in the past couple of years, I would say. So we have paper sessions instead. So what we did is ask our people presenters to upload an MP4 a file. That took a little bit of handholding, and lots of processes, and explaining how to do that. But for the most part, everyone got it.
TOBEY JACKSON: And it worked really well. So we asked them to upload their presentation as a video recording. Those were individuals, not done by a session, but they were individuals. And then those were available a week before. And then we have live Q&A sessions. So that model's changing slightly as we look at the ability to do some live presentations through a particular platform that we're using.
TOBEY JACKSON: But again, having those presentations is great for looking at-- I know we've talked about monetization. That's one of those products that you can monetize, just like you would conference proceedings. You can look at how you can monetize those presentations as well.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you have poster sessions?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Not in the sense of the poster sessions as medical congresses have. Like Tobey, people-- our presenters present their papers, 20-minutes presentation. And they present them within a group, up to five people all on the same seam. As I said, you know, these were live, great discussions as well of people who could-- wanted to listen to them, brilliant. So yeah, we're extremely happy with how the actual scientific program evolved.
SAM BURRELL: So I'm going to get to the question that I've been burning to ask you all from the very beginning, which is, what are you going to take from this year? Let's say these three vaccines are all wildly successful and in eight months' time, we can go back to in-person. And effectively, we can take the best of both. What are you going to take from this year of what you've learned from this year and put it into your planning for sessions going forward?
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, I'm going to start with you this time.
TOBEY JACKSON: So even when a vaccine is widely available and even when it is safe to meet again, we're not going back to conferences the way that they were before. That's something that AIAA strongly feels. And that's something that we are actively planning for. So we have to look at a hybrid model. We have to look at how do we bring that face to face and the virtual together. So a couple of things that we're looking at even for January, how do we do this kind of-- here in the States, we call it "glocal," or that's when it's been kind of named, this kind of local-group get together.
TOBEY JACKSON: So Sarah, definitely, I'm going to be following up with you after this to learn about your hub model, because I really want to know some more about that. But that's one way of doing it, looking at building in watch parties and those types of small-group gatherings, but ultimately, looking at building in a virtual component. We have live streamed our speakers at face-to-face conferences for some time now, so that's not new to us.
TOBEY JACKSON: It's how do we incorporate especially the technical presenters that won't be able to attend the face to face. And I think one of the things we need to think about-- and Sam, you and I had talked about this before. You know, we've all talked about, we've experienced attendance, that people that couldn't travel to an event before, for example, speakers that couldn't participate-- for various reasons, people that couldn't participate in our face-to-face events are able to attend our virtual events.
TOBEY JACKSON: We cannot hold a face-to-face event and say, well, we're so glad that you attended in 2020, but our 2021 and future models don't include you. That's not going to happen. So we have to figure out how we encourage those people to come back in whatever way they can participate and how we can include them. I think that's the big challenge, going forward.
SAM BURRELL: Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, definitely the live hub model is something we will keep going for the next sort of planning session. And I would also add, the on-demand access after has been really appreciated, I mean, huge take up, actually. In fact, I think that's part of something that can be monetized, actually. We've not looked at it specifically, but I think that's an opportunity area, because actually, everybody had that, yes, we're going to watch everything in advance.
SARAH STANNAGE: Nobody did. Everybody came to the live-- there was a high participation in the livestream. But actually, the on demand afterwards so people could go back to presentations and look at the live, you know, watch everything again several times, in some cases, has been really appreciated. So that's something we need to absolutely wrap into to other programming areas as well.
SAM BURRELL: So do you think-- what does that mean, though, for an in-person, fast forward to next year, or I don't know, to every year or every other year? What does that mean?
SARAH STANNAGE: I think, for recorded content and how we sort of position that next [INAUDIBLE] publication and the congress proceedings, how they're together unconnected, it's a bit like the video abstracts and how that's promoted. Because we haven't done that sort of level of connection and the promotion, then, on social media, which will lift your impact factor and the citation opportunity. That's not something we've done before.
SARAH STANNAGE: And actually, this has presented a great opportunity to do that. And we need to carry that forward and do it even more so for the next one.
SAM BURRELL: I guess it's inventing new stuff, isn't it? Because it is exactly-- the pandemic has been the mother of invention, of going, actually, we did this because we have to. And oh, actually, it's quite good. Gemma, what are you going to take from this year and roll into future events, do you think?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Well, I think the fact that we invested in our [? Bespoke ?] platform means that we are going to increase our event portfolio, in general. I'd also like to explore, given that we have this [? Bespoke ?] platform, I'd like to explore hybrid events too. And what I'm excited about is the fact that we obviously, being academic economists, holding our congresses, our in-person congresses in universities, we've now got the perfect opportunity, not only through our [? Bespoke ?] platform, but also through the equipment that the universities have invested in for the virtual teaching to really now look at the hybrid model and move forward on that.
SAM BURRELL: I actually had a question for you as well. You know you said that you did all of your sessions live and through Zoom?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes.
SAM BURRELL: Did you record them and make them available on demand as well?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes, we did. We did. And we also did a very, very detailed and post-congress survey as well about specific-- you know, we asked questions about the registration fee, our registration, if you'd pay-- if you were a participant, if you pay an actual fee just to attend as a non-presenter. Response was very, very, very positive. People are willing to pay for congresses. People want as well to have the sessions to watch.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What we did, we uploaded everything on YouTube. And we linked up our congress platform. They're available for everybody. We can see how many times they've been viewed, both on YouTube, which isn't some-- it's not the best indicator, but we also see from our congress platform how many times people are clicking on them, which is a better indicator. People are watching.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: I mean, it's job market season. In fact, I'm organizing a virtual job market. The closer we're getting to the actual interviews, the more we see people, potential recruiters are clicking on the actual videos. What we found with the recordings, there is a clear issue in GDPR, because some of the data on the slides is private. You have to get the actual consensus of the body that's giving you the data.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Some people don't want to be recorded, so it becomes a little bit sticky when you've got a group session going on. You have to stop-- or the Zoom room managers, I've been calling them, had stop the recording, had to remember to stop the recording. Some people expressed they didn't want to be recorded after they'd been recorded. You had to go and edit the video before you uploaded it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: That's tricky. We thought we'd handled it very well from the start by telling people to inform us. People don't read emails. But yes, people do want to watch the videos, but handling the actual recordings itself is a little bit of a gray area.
SAM BURRELL: Something that occurs to me as an attendee, is I've struggled this year, as so many of us have. But when I see a conference, and I look at the program, and I go, oh, there is two sessions there I really, really want to go to, and the rest of it is a pile of poo. And I-- well, not a pile of poo, but I don't particularly want to go. Sorry, I meant to be behaving myself here. But you know, it's not of interest to me.
SAM BURRELL: And so therefore, I object to paying whatever it is. I mean, there is quite-- again, I mean, we sort of touched on this. But I think when you start looking at on-demand question, or pricing models, or what you might take going forward, it kind of comes back to the point of, you can disaggregate some of the stuff that's all bundled into a conference. I mean, is that something that any of you guys are looking at playing with?
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, you put your mic on. I hope That means yes.
TOBEY JACKSON: I think there are different ways that you can make content available and different levels of content. But I think that when you think about, again, going back to that value proposition, what is it that makes your conference different than others? So I'll give you a good example. You know, as I talked about, I think there is a different pricing model for webinars. There is a group here that is putting out a webinar that has a speaker that, yes, I'm very interested in hearing.
TOBEY JACKSON: And they're charging for it. It's an hour session with one speaker. I can hear this speaker probably next month for free. I am not going to pay to attend it. So I think that that is what you need to keep in mind. What is the reason why people come to your conference? For us, with the technical presentations, absolutely, those are recorded. Those are available through the platform.
TOBEY JACKSON: Some of the high-level speakers, we can pull out and perhaps put on YouTube. But yeah, there is-- you have to go back to that value proposition. Why would people want to watch this either live or on demand? What's important to them?
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you have something on that one?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What I think the European Economic Association is going to do moving forward is actually-- bear in mind that we've done the initial investment in our platform. So for us, organizing future virtual events is going to have a far lower cost than for associations that have been using other vendors. Rather than put the cost on the member, I think that we're going to look good our institutional members who, for us at the moment, are central banks.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What we're doing with the virtual events is putting to them as a service to the economic community. So it's something that they as a sponsor of the association, as an institutional member should be supporting us, and therefore, increase their membership or increase their donation to us. So rather than put the costs on the actual individual member, we're going to use it as a kind of sales pitch and increase our institutional membership base.
SAM BURRELL: And a question that I have, but I did send to you before, so hopefully this won't be a shock to you-- I mean, I think one of the things I'd be quite interested to pick out is what about what you did this year surprised you? Tobey?
TOBEY JACKSON: It's hard. That's not a big surprise, but it is a lot harder than I think I thought it would be. As I mentioned, in talking to friends of mine that are also in associations and running virtual programs, they agree. It is incredibly time consuming. It requires different roles from your staff than I think they may be used to. One thing, for example, you may have a very technically savvy membership and audience who are participants in your event, but when it comes to virtual events, I feel like sometimes that goes out the window.
TOBEY JACKSON: And so people need a lot more assistance. They need help. When they contact you, they want to respond quickly. They want to know that there-- they're sitting at home by themselves, and that there is someone that's actually paying attention and listening to them. So it requires a bigger staff lift. I think that's, to me, that was a big surprise.
TOBEY JACKSON: But I think on, a positive note, what was the big surprise is that there are a number of things that we can take from virtual events that are really benefits, that are good things. Content searching, for example-- it is so much easier, if you have a good robust search feature within your conference program online, it is so much easier to find what you're looking for than to sit down with a 120-pave program book and try and find it.
TOBEY JACKSON: That's huge. On demand-- whereas before, you can't be in two places at once, and we didn't record our technical presentations, so you had to pick and choose. Now you can actually see exactly what you want to see. So there are definitely some benefits, I think, that surprised me, that, moving forward, we're looking forward to kind of playing on those and really taking advantage of.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, what surprised you?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Well first and foremost, I got technological in 2020. I was the least technological. And I found myself designing a virtual congress platform. Aside from that, what surprised me? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the spirit in which people actually came together-- and as I mentioned, OK, we did, we have our one event, a very, very big event.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: But it's the spirit of people. I think that we all found ourselves in the same position. And people were just extremely grateful that the event wasn't canceled. And this surprised me. This is the academic community that are used to very, very, very-- paper presentations, being put difficult questions to them.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Especially in economics, it's a male-dominated field. And there is a lot of emphasis on bullying in the academic community at the moment. And what surprised me is that, virtually, people were extremely well behaved, far more well behaved than what they were in person.
SAM BURRELL: Oh, that's interesting.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, which you know, as we're giving, trying to give a lot of visibility as well to bullying, especially in economics, within the academic community, this was very, very, very pleasing to see, the spirit in which people came together and the lack of bullying that there was virtually.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's interesting, really interesting. Sarah, what about you?
SARAH STANNAGE: I can definitely identify with Gemma, and actually, what Tobey said as well. One sort of slight negative in our surprise, we weren't really ready for a lot of our presenters not meeting their deadlines. We thought the [INAUDIBLE] was really good, going to be on time. No-- so we didn't have enough capacity at really deal with lots of late submissions and things like that. So that was a kind of learning throughout.
SARAH STANNAGE: But on the positive, that was a real opportunity to support professional development within the sector for coming online for presenters. And that is something, again, that we're wanting to do as [INAUDIBLE] society and really supporting our membership with that. That was a pleasing surprise that we can sort of come away with, with helping our members and our community in such a strong, positive way.
SAM BURRELL: So I've got one question here from a member of our audience which I'm going to take and then maybe fiddle with a little bit, which, she says, about value proposition being an issue for member societies. She says, is the virtual model where you can pick and choose a sign of membership moving towards a transactional model? And I guess my little spin on that is, do you think moving conferences online has sped up that process of it being more transactional, more pick and choosey, do you think?
SAM BURRELL: I mean, that's quite a philosophical question. But let's go there. Sarah, what do you think?
SARAH STANNAGE: I could certainly see how that, there is a risk there of sort of returning to a very transactional model. But when you've got participation front and center, that participatory model comes back in, because, actually, what you're encouraging is this level of engagement that you can't get at a physical event necessarily, or an in-person congress. So actually, it's about-- almost, it goes back to this equality in access.
SARAH STANNAGE: And that's something that is really tangible now within our sector. So I think that's something you have to look at and pay attention to, but when you've got an international membership body, you need to. That's important to do that.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah. Tobey, did you want to add anything to that?
TOBEY JACKSON: This is a tough question.
SAM BURRELL: I know.
TOBEY JACKSON: This is a really good one. And it's something that I think we could probably spend another hour and a half just discussing and not necessarily reaching a conclusion. I think that really-- this is an easy out. But it really depends on the professional society, right, whether you become a transactional membership model or not. For us, I don't know that this necessarily speeds up that process.
TOBEY JACKSON: I think it's something that we were thinking about before, but not-- it's not an entirely transactional model that we were thinking of before. The relationship model, certainly when it comes to organization memberships, what we call corporate membership-- the relationship model is just as important, if not more important than that transactional model. For individual members, it's something that we've been thinking about for a long time.
TOBEY JACKSON: When we started looking at Amazon and all these other things that people subscribe to, it's made us question the value proposition of associations. And why do people join? What do people get out of it? What is going to make them renew next year? And it's kind of case specific.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you want to add anything?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Quite simply to say that I, like Tobey, think it's very, very, very case specific. For the European Economic Association, I don't think that we're going to reconsider our membership fees, not at all, because we see it more as a service. We're lucky to have a-- I don't know what the budgets of the other associations, but we've been able to invest over the past few years in increasing the services to our members without having to look at the actual-- to break down the membership fees.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And it's something that we're not going to do either in the future.
SAM BURRELL: OK, so I'm just going to say to the audiences that, if you've got any burning questions, now is the time to throw them in, because otherwise, I'm going to start with my winding-up questions. So if you're sitting there thinking, oh, maybe there is something I should-- I'd like to ask them, now is the time to do. I am going to, while we're waiting to see if anyone's got, wait, wait, I've got a question, I'm going to jump in with the-- what did you enjoy about this year?
SAM BURRELL: Let's focus on the kind of, specifically within planning meetings and the way that the year's gone horribly wrong in so many ways, what about it did you enjoy? What made you smile? Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: It is this coming together and kind of really sort of everybody feeling like they're in it together, literally. And the online community was a surprising space, [INAUDIBLE] the last bit. But it really was, actually. And everybody was really kind. The kindness level was quite substantial.
SAM BURRELL: That's really nice. I mean, I tell you, I found, particularly through doing this Society Street stuff, is I've met people, and made new connections, and have what feels very real relationships with people that I'd normally expect only to get when I meet people in person. And I think, because all of us are-- it's not a case of I'm the odd one out working from home. And it's just we're all in this place.
SAM BURRELL: And so it's offered opportunities to make connections in new ways, I guess. Tobey, what made you smile?
TOBEY JACKSON: Well, on a daily kind of thought, just the idea that I can take a shower and walk five steps to my office is something that I enjoy, although I miss the personal interaction. I think this idea of community is important. I know there was a question about, do we feel like our community is stronger? In a lot of ways, yes, I do think that. In particular, in the aerospace community, I feel like we struggled with our image sometimes and people seeing us this is relevant or important, especially young people wanting to do careers in aerospace.
TOBEY JACKSON: And then this pandemic hit. And we had so many aerospace companies that transitioned to making PPE, that transitioned to really just different ways in which they could help. And I feel like that helped significantly. But then, just within the professional society and the association community, I agree with you, Sam. Like, I feel more connected in many ways.
TOBEY JACKSON: People came to us and said, hey, we're thinking of doing a virtual event. We heard you did x. Can you help? We went to others and said the same thing. And it's this kind of, yeah, we're all in the same boat. Let's learn from each other. Let's help.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, what made you smile?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, well, on a personal level, I'm such a nerdy researcher. And all of a sudden, I'm now working with lawyers in Belgium on licensing models for the congress platform, and having to think up a business model, and marketing plans. And I'm just a nerdy researcher at the end of the day. So this has made me smile a lot. But I get emails from people who want to use our congress platform.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: You know, it's completely outside my field. So yeah, this [INAUDIBLE] smile, it makes me laugh--
SAM BURRELL: It's a stretch.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: --hysterically
SAM BURRELL: It's a strange year, isn't it? We're all being asked to do things that we never imagined. So again, there is some of you who have already seen. There is a question that we're just-- and this is going to be my wrapping-up question. And then I'm going to do the whole thank you so much thing, but just to give you a preview. But so to finish off with, do you think your community now is stronger? So that's kind of your subject area community.
SAM BURRELL: Is it stronger as a result of what we've had to do this year? Or-- well, let's hope it is. Or have you seen it strengthen in some places? Tobey?
TOBEY JACKSON: I think so. I think we've seen in some of our communication tools students reaching out. And we've seen kind of virtual mentoring happening, just from people asking questions. I think people recognize the value of getting together and sharing, sharing information, sharing research, and sharing ideas. So yes, I think, ultimately, it has made us stronger.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma? Is your community stronger, do you think?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Definitely, definitely. And I think that what's made it stronger is that a lot of the junior economists have had personal interactive, virtual interaction experiences with extremely high-profile economists who they wouldn't have basically been able to get anywhere near in in-person events, quite simply because maybe the high-profile economist wouldn't have been there. And they've seen a human side to somebody who may be terrified-- of their reputation had terrified them.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And you know, as we've said many times during this hour, this hour and a half, that there has been such an amazing spirit to this year in all senses.
SAM BURRELL: Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: Of course, definitely, without a doubt, we're stronger as a community, globally. And I think it's brought us, even we've got-- we had over 89 countries participate in the congress this year online. We wouldn't have achieved that in a physical event. But it has been this sort of opportunity to bring together the different career levels in a completely different way. And it's just a huge, sort of, the good will to share knowledge, which is exactly what we're here to do as an [INAUDIBLE] society to deliver, was absolutely achieved, quite frankly, with the online space.
SAM BURRELL: And that's such a nice place to be able to wrap this session up and say, thank you guys so much for coming and talking to us about what you did, what you did this year. We really appreciate all of your time. I'm just going to move on this to here and just say thank you to everybody who attended, who joined in on the chat, who just listened. Thank you for coming along. This is our last Society Street 2020 event.
SAM BURRELL: We will be doing something next year. Please feel free to sign up. If you go to our website, you'll be able to sign up. And we'll alert you when we've got the program for next year signed up. Thank you again to our sponsors for making this all possible. And it's been a blast. I mean, to be fair, I'm knackered after doing this all year.
SAM BURRELL: I think, Tobey, that was you saying, this is really hard work. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much to you guys. And I hope to see you guys again next year. All right, bye, everybody. Thanks for coming along.
Segment:0 .
SAM BURRELL: Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming along. I'm just going to wait for a minute-- well, not even a whole minute. I'm just going to wait for a little bit while people are coming in, because I know from previous experience that, if we don't give everybody a little bit of grace here, that they miss the beginning. And I don't want that to happen.
SAM BURRELL: It's nice to see everybody piling into this session. As you can see, there is a chat session. I hope everyone can see it. Lisa's just messaging and going, hi, everyone. Welcome to the session. So take a look at that. Experience has shown that Society Street chat can be very lively, particularly when we're talking about meetings.
SAM BURRELL: So hopefully that will be the case today. OK, yes, I'm in. Exactly. Hi, everyone. So I will start now properly. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to our final session of Society Street 2020. What a year it's been, eh? Now, because it's been a grim year in so many ways, we thought we'd end it on a positive note and focus on the good things and the new opportunities that we've learned about to cheer ourselves up as we move into the festive season and hopefully, a shiny new year.
SAM BURRELL: I did just want to say, I'll come back. This is the topic of the session. That's a bit boring, that slide. A quick thank you to our sponsors to thank them again that we've been able to offer the entirety of our online program this year free, Elsevier and Wiley, our Gold sponsors, Silverchair, Consort Strategy, ALPSP, AJE, Cadmore Media, Atypon, Cactus, and Renew Consultants, thank you, thank you, thank you.
SAM BURRELL: Honestly, what a year, eh? And before we kick off properly, a little housekeeping issue-- we'd love to include your questions and comments so we can discuss them as we go. So we really do invite you to participate in the chat. If the chat window hasn't opened as the default, you should be able to find the blue Chat button to open the panel in the-- I think it's the bottom, right-hand side.
SAM BURRELL: I can't remember. But there is a little blue Chat button that you should be able to see if you can't already see the chat function. So please, you guys are meant to be shaping this conversation. Jump in. Say stuff. Ask questions. And we'll be drawing it into the conversation that we have.
SAM BURRELL: So quick few introductions, I'm Sam. I'm the Society Strict Program Chair. We've got three speakers lined up for today's session. But before I introduce them to you, I just wanted to reflect a little bit on how our thinking about meetings and conferences has evolved through this year, to provide a framework for what we're talking about today. Now, for all of us, frankly, conferences and meetings have been almost entirely online.
SAM BURRELL: Some people think that that was coming anyway. And I think they're probably right. This tweet that I popped up on a slide, I picked up in July. And the guy who wrote it was organizing a conference. And he had been campaigning for ages to get stuff online, because he thought that there were so many benefits to doing conferences online. And so he ended up being part of the organizing committee. And he wrote a long thread about what he thought worked well.
SAM BURRELL: I thought his little visual there was quite nice there, because he kind of talked about the things that are really, really good about being able to go online, and the problems that it solves, not least, reducing carbon footprint, accessibility issues, both in terms of being able to afford to get there because you don't have to travel. It means you can carry on doing, possibly carry on doing child care at home.
SAM BURRELL: And there is all kinds of things that we gain. And he does acknowledge, of course, that there is stuff that we lose as well. One of the themes we're going to touch on today, I know, is around accessibility. And I know that all of our speakers have things to say about that based on their experience of what they've done this year. And I also just wanted to kind of touch a little bit on what a conference is.
SAM BURRELL: And at Renew-- I work for Renew Consultants-- one of the things that we've been thinking about is thinking about conferences and meetings as products. We do quite a lot of product development as a team. And we like to go back to sort of blank pieces of paper and ask ourselves what it is that this product is trying to do. So the disruption caused by the pandemic forced all of us, basically, to do the same thing, even when we didn't want to or even when it was long overdue.
SAM BURRELL: And my personal view is that conferences as we knew them were a little bit archaic. They're a bunch of disparate activities that get smushed into one product. And this isn't all of them, but here were some of my thoughts about what it is that makes up a conference. And the opportunity that this year has afforded us to separate those out and to see which of those we want to keep, which of those we want to combine with each other, and reformulate it into something different.
SAM BURRELL: And so I'm going to stop talking, introduce you to our speakers. But I will tell you a bit about them and why we invited them to join us today, because we think that they did just this. They looked at what a conference is and worked out how what they were delivering could be, frankly, improved or could take advantage of the new situation that they found themselves in.
SAM BURRELL: And so let me welcome Tobey, Gemma, and Sarah to our metaphorical floor today. Thank you for the three of you for joining us and giving your time so generously to allow us to explore this in more depth. In terms of how we're going to structure this session, I'm going to ask each of you to talk a bit about your meeting, and what you did, and what the challenges were. I'm sure there will be plenty of common themes.
SAM BURRELL: And then we-- I've got a few questions just in case the audience haven't already asked us a billion. If they have asked us, I'm going to drop my questions. And we'll go to the questions that have come from the audience, but to kind of pick out some of the themes and learnings. So Tobey joins us from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They have a very busy meeting schedule throughout the year.
SAM BURRELL: And one of the important roles their meetings play is disseminating the research in their field, which is true for many of us. And the solution that they came up with worked, I think, really well for their audience, and I think might be the catalyst for changing the way they do some of the things going forward, pandemic or no. So I wanted to get Tobey to come and talk to us about some of that.
SAM BURRELL: Secondly, I'm going to ask Gemma from the European Economics Association to tell us about the event that she was responsible for in August. I met Gemma at a Society Street event in May where she joined a roundtable discussion and was talking about her choice of platform. And what caught my attention about what she said was that she was very clear about how she wanted her online event to work, and having done some research into platforms, couldn't find one that fits her requirements.
SAM BURRELL: So rather than bending her event round to fit into somebody else's idea of what the event should look like, she decided to basically work with some other people and invent a platform that did what they wanted it to do. And finally, we'll be talking Sarah from the-- I'm going to get this right-- International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic works, there we go, who has literally just finished running their meeting.
SAM BURRELL: It finished, I don't know, a week ago, two weeks ago, which I know was planned as a series. And I haven't spoken to her in detail since, so I don't actually know her it went. So hopefully, it went really well. I know they were planning a series of hub and spoke events. One of their challenges was around the truly global nature of the meeting and of the attendees. So time zones was obviously an issue.
SAM BURRELL: But there was also the technology gap that was an issue. And that is enough from me. So thanks again to everybody joining us in the audience, but also our speakers. And I'm going to invite Tobey to kick us off. Tobey, could you tell us, give us a bit of a sense of what happened to your meetings this year?
TOBEY JACKSON: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Good afternoon, good morning to all of our attendees. So AIAA, as you mentioned, has a number of annual events that we do. So in 2020, we were able to hold our largest event as a face-to-face event in January. And then shortly there after, the pandemic unfolded. And we canceled two events, one that was in March and one that was in May.
TOBEY JACKSON: So moving forward, we had three more scheduled for this calendar year. And we took all of those fully virtual. So the first one had about 2,100 attendees. That was held in June. We held one with a little more than 1,000 in August. And then we just held one that had about 3,000 last week. So we're currently working on one that has more than 6,000 for January that will also be a fully virtual event.
TOBEY JACKSON: So in addition to that, we've done a number of conferences, or not really full conferences, but meetings, webinars, things on different topics for different groups as well. So with all of that, there has been a lot that we have learned. There has been a lot that was surprising, some challenges along the way, but as you mentioned, definitely something that's impacting how we look at our programs, going forward.
TOBEY JACKSON: So I know one of the things you asked us to talk about, Sam, was some of the challenges. So I'll be honest, I think everyone here that has done a virtual event or that is planning a virtual event will relate to this. Virtual conferences are hard. They are a lot harder, I think, than I thought they would be. For everything that you do, there is a process and a policy that goes behind it, at least one, if not more.
TOBEY JACKSON: So it's challenging. It's also challenging because it's new. And there are very few groups that have done a bunch, whereas in a face-to-face event, there is always examples that you can draw from. With virtual conferences, especially when we were planning one in June, there really wasn't a lot to choose from or to use as an example or kind of a benchmark.
TOBEY JACKSON: So that was really a challenge for us. Specific to our group, probably the biggest challenge for us was determining what should stay in a virtual conference and what pieces of a face-to-face conference could be done elsewhere, or at a different time, or in a different mechanism. So that, we did kind of this content inventory to make sure that we could get what we needed in the actual event, and then what else we could do perhaps at a different time.
SAM BURRELL: I want to dig down into some of that.
TOBEY JACKSON: Of course.
SAM BURRELL: What did look like? What was it that you decided you needed to keep?
TOBEY JACKSON: So we looked at everything. You know, our events, as I'm sure most groups-- they have a number of different things going on. I always say, it's not just a three-ring circus. It's like a 300-ring circus. And there is always concurrent events going on. That could include committee meetings. It could include social events. It could include technical paper presentations. It could include technical panel presentations.
TOBEY JACKSON: We have high-level panels. We have high-level speakers, and that's just a few of them. So really, looking at all of that, thinking-- kind of where we started was with the value proposition. Why do people come to our conferences? And the number-one reason, far and away, as you mentioned, was the technical program. They come to share research, to get feedback on that research, to be published.
TOBEY JACKSON: That was something that took priority number one, figuring that part out. That being said, that in and of itself is a challenge. We typically at our face-to-face conferences would do 30 concurrent paper presentation sessions. Doing that virtually is not only really a challenge time wise, but then we didn't have enough staff to support each of those. That's just a huge lift. Plus it's expensive.
TOBEY JACKSON: To have the technical capability behind that was really difficult. So looking at how to solve that, that took us a while. So that being said, that kind of led to another challenge of finding a vendor. I can relate to what Gemma was thinking. It's really hard to find-- to do panels and speakers, not that difficult.
TOBEY JACKSON: Most vendors can handle that. To handle the technical program, difficult. And really, that was a lesson learned, that we needed to go with a vendor that understood the technical program, that understood the desire to publish research and the desire of our technical community to be able to interact with each other. So that was a big lesson learned.
TOBEY JACKSON: In terms of other challenges, some of the things like networking, how would we do networking events? How would we handle sponsors? How would we handle exhibitors? Those are still things that we're still working on. There were different iterations of that. And we're learning as we go and looking at what the best practices are for that.
TOBEY JACKSON: So that was kind of how we started. How it went, the June event went pretty well, but we had some challenges with our vendor. So thinking about that, and when we were moving forward, we decided to go with a different set of vendors for our August event. And that went so much better. So that was definitely a big lesson learned there. Thinking about the technical program, what we ended up doing is we actually asked our presenters to pre-record their presentations and then come together for live Q&A. And we made the technical presentations available about a week in advance so that people could ideally watch those before they came to the Q&A sessions.
TOBEY JACKSON: What we learned, a great idea in theory. In reality, most people can't dedicate that time to be able to check those out in advance. So what ends up happening is it's great to have these technical presentations. It's going to be a wonderful content repository in the future once we solve the technical challenges of that in and of itself. But most people would come to the Q&A session never having watched any of these presentations and probably not looking at the paper itself.
TOBEY JACKSON: So we had to kind of reformat how we did those Q&A sessions to allow for people to do a brief summary of their work before they took questions so that people knew what was going on. So that was definitely-- and that's kind of an iterative process as well. The conference that we're doing in January, we're looking at a slightly different model that our vendor could offer us.
TOBEY JACKSON: So it allows for more live interaction, so definitely, some of the things that we're learning along the way and how we handle that. For the speakers and panels, that went really well. That was not one of our biggest challenges. But we did actually use a different vendor for the conference that we had last week that we had not used before, definitely some lessons learned there and some challenges, especially with some of the speakers.
TOBEY JACKSON: And so that was a little bit different for us. We hadn't had that before, so, again, something that we learned. Moving forward, one of the big lessons I think that we've learned is that we need to choose a vendor or vendors and stick with them so that our staff is comfortable with it. Our staff knows it. We can iterate on that.
TOBEY JACKSON: We can take all of those lessons learned and make everything better. And we can focus our time on improving versus learning a new system. So that's definitely one of the ways that we're looking at moving forward.
SAM BURRELL: I think that's a really great, kind of, like, here is a bunch of stuff that we thought about. And I saw Sarah and Gemma both nodding at various parts where you were talking there. And there is people chatting in chat. I've just had a message to go that we're going to be talking at a bit about monetization and price points, which is obviously vexatious. Gemma, could you just talk-- again, the idea here is to give us kind of a background to the things that you thought about, how it went, what challenges you found so that we can have a good starting point, understanding from where all three of you were.
SAM BURRELL: So right, Gemma, off you go.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: OK, well, first and foremost, good afternoon from Italy. And thanks to Sam for inviting me here. Unlike Tobey, I've had one event to concentrate on during lockdown. And this actually took place in August of 2020. And in my case, what happened was that it's-- the European Economic Association holds one annual congress.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: It's considered one of Europe's largest congresses in terms of the number of parallel sessions. We have up to 40 parallel sessions over five days. Parallel sessions mean up to five paper and presentations. So there, over the course of five days, there are 1,000 papers presented. So we kind of decided in April, we realized that, when we had our executive committee meeting, that the in-person congress would not take place, whilst, at that time, the Scientific Program Committee, made up of about 200 academic economists had already graded about 1,000 papers.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So the decision not to cancel was very easy to take, because, of course, we didn't want to penalize the work of the graders of the program committee members and we didn't want to penalize the academic research community who had already been penalized enough during the previous few months. So deciding to cancel or postpone was easy. We decided not to do it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And we took the approach of, OK, let's look at the positive aspects of the virtual meetings, virtual events. At that time, we were having lots of experiences of actually meeting virtually, be it in small groups or large. We were all meeting via Zoom. And it was working extremely well, with groups up to 50 people all discussing et cetera, et cetera.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So it was extremely simple for us to know think, what are our priorities? Sorry. What are our priorities? What can we do with a virtual meeting? And of course, the dissemination of research findings to the whole economic research community was first and foremost in our minds.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We said, we've got the opportunity to actually bring together far more than 1,000 presenters who would have gathered together in an in-person congress. We really have got the opportunity to go out there and bring people who are not presenting their papers with the people who are presenting their papers, something that does not happen in our academic congress, which isn't a trade fair. So that was the first priority.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Then we want to basically tie together is broaden participation, to go out there and look at the countries that wouldn't, for many reasons, the financial, for bureaucratic reasons, wouldn't be able to come to our congresses. And we thought, well, we want to do all of this, but yet, fundamentally, we have to give them a location. So this is basically what, for us, was the-- kind of, it became the main topic of the whole direction of the meetings, was the case of, how can we create the actual virtual location and get the interaction among the congress participants?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And this is where we decided to create our own congress platform, which basically was a front-end platform for people who wanted to register and participate in our congress. At the time when we decided basically not to cancel or postpone the congress, we also decided not scale back on the scientific program. The graders had done their job. The presenters had been told about the outcome of their paper submission.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So we decided to keep the program as it was, which meant 40 parallel sessions. And we could have and done it very, very simply. We could have said, OK, we'll just send out Zoom links, to prepare the session and send out a Zoom link directly to the presenters, to the chairs, to anybody who wanted to participate, but we didn't want that, because we wanted to create the actual networking opportunities that an in-person congress would do.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So with that in mind, I started contacting the vendors, as Tobey would call them in the US. And basically, it took me a few days after a few demos to realize that they were not geared for an academic congress. What I mean by that is that I felt this for the trade fairs and for events, one-day events with a few, four parallel sessions, they were brilliant, but they could not handle a five-day event with 40 parallel sessions.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And one of the things that I was quite surprised to find out was that a lot of the vendors wanted to integrate the video conference platforms that were out there into their own platform. And I just could not understand this, because you know we've been using Zoom-- well, I've been using you Zoom, actually, since about November, because lots of research institutions had already started using Zoom to cut down, actually, on their meetings.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So I was using that and seeing Zoom Teams. I don't want to be sponsoring any kind of video conference platform here. So I didn't understand why the vendors were integrating and losing a lot of the functions that you could get specifically by using the video conference platform directly including the actual chat function. This is where, for me, what I found extremely bizarre is, we wanted this interaction amongst our participants, be it inside the scientific session or be it "outside" during the coffee breaks.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And yet, I was looking at these vendors' platforms. And lots of the functions that I wanted were being lost through this quite simple interaction. So in Italy, we were the first European country that went into lockdown. So I didn't have a lot of time. So to be honest, Sam asked me to speak about challenges. Quite simply, I didn't have time to think whether something was a challenge or not, if it was a hill or a mountain to climb.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We just basically, we plowed through and decided, you know, let's-- we were working with a developer on another-- on something different. I spoke with him, a five-minute conversation. I put my idea to him. And I said, you know, is it possible? And what I realized that we needed was something, because I realized that the whole world was, not just Italy, every week there was another country, a kind of the domino effect that we're going into lockdown.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And it didn't take a genius to realize that, within a few weeks, the whole world would be in lockdown. So I realized we need something intuitive, because if we were going basically to-- if our priority was a dissemination, we also realized that we couldn't expect to grab, let's say, the attention of a researcher for five days as we would in an in-person congress.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We'd need to grab their attention for specific sessions. And they'd need to have some way of, check in five minutes before the session they wanted needed to start, where they wanted to go just by one click of the button. So my main focus was on designing a congress platform that was intuitive and very, very, very user friendly. So what I thought of was something that we were all using during lockdown at the end of a very extremely busy day, Netflix, something where all you've got to do is just kind of flicking, flicking through, quick choice.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: I'll have this one, click. So the platform that we developed was basically, as an entrance to the, the approach to the scientific program is something very, very, very similar to, not just Netflix, but you know, all the kind of television channels that we all see on the internet television. So what we did with the program, the scientific program, is the main focus.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: This was actually the home page. And why we did this as well is that I didn't want it hidden, because a lot of what I was seeing with the vendors was hidden behind a log in screen. And I thought, if we need to-- if we want to broaden our participation, we need to have the program available on the public domain for everybody so people can decide, if they're not registered for the congress, they could decide if they want to register.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And this is what we did. We didn't have anything behind a log in screen. We didn't have any visuals of a kind of the location where the congress was with a [INAUDIBLE].. We had the problem on the front end for use basically by anybody who was interested in our program. And what we had behind basically the log in area was the links, the actual unprotected links to the section, because I think in the end, we decided to link out.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: All our sessions were held on Zoom because of chosen Teams. But for many reasons, the academic community were using Zoom as their preferred choice for their lessons. So we decided that our audience had some familiarity with Zoom, so we decided to use Zoom. And everything, all our sessions linked out. Our sessions were live.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: They worked extremely well, because as Tobey said-- I smile Tobey, because yeah, we could not possibly have asked people during lockdown in August to prepare their slides, to record their sessions, to actually come together, to find time to come together as five people and work with the various times that was as well. So we decided everything was going to go live.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Fortunately, it was so, so, so well. But I think that it worked so well because people were very appreciative of the fact that we hadn't canceled. And Tobey, this is why I want to bring to you that, I hope this isn't seen as a criticism that you prerecorded, and we went live and it worked well. I organized one event.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: It's like one of Europe's largest general, well, congress for general economics. And people meet once a year. I didn't have the opportunity to kind of pick up the errors I made and then make sure that they weren't repeated in the next congress. And I think that people actually approached our congress as well in the spirit that we approached it, which was, it's a very, very, very unusual year.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We're trying basically to bring the academic economics community together. And we're also trying to broaden your participation. So I think that the spirit as well of all of our audience was absolutely amazing. And of course, in that spirit, everything worked out extremely well, because if there was any errors, people took the errors in good spirits. And what I wanted to say is within our log-in area, we created a networking area.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And I think that if I had to speak about the biggest challenge, it's nothing technical. It wasn't an error with the platform. It was basically trying to get people to network during the congress, not because they didn't want to, not because-- there were just too many distractions.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And I think this is important to point out that I'm extremely optimistic for the future of virtual events. And I think, in future virtual events, networking will become something that, it works far better than it has this year, because people will be out of lockdown. People won't have these challenging personal situations in their daily life, et cetera, et cetera.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So I do think that our biggest challenge was actually getting people to find the time to-- people weren't in their offices. Our congress was held in August as well, at the end of August. So even if some countries were home schooling, they were still home schooling, other countries were on holidays. So people had their children there, other kinds of personal--
SAM BURRELL: So, Gemma--
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: I was just about to say, I'm going to ask a question. And then I'm not going to let you answer it so you can think about it for a minute, which is, what are you going to take for this year-- and actually, I'm going to come back. I'm going to ask all of you this. But I was just picking up on what you were saying there, Gemma, is this year was unusual. You responded very quickly.
SAM BURRELL: You came up with something that, frankly, you made up because it fit the requirements that you were trying to meet. When we come back to talk together, what I want to know is, what from this year do you think worked well enough that you want to roll it into future years and go, actually, that was something that we learned something from it that I think has a positive?
SAM BURRELL: But I'm not actually going to let you answer it. I'm asking that to everybody. And I want to hear from Sarah, because she's been nodding at both what you and Tobey were saying. She's going, yes, yes, I recognize that. So I just want to get her--
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Sorry, Sam, could I say something on a closing note, which--
SAM BURRELL: Of course, yeah.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE].. One of the reasons why we actually decided to invest in our [? Bespoke ?] congress platform is because we knew of the potential it would have for us for future events.
SAM BURRELL: OK, Gemma, no, that makes a lot of sense. Cool. Sarah, tell us about your event. I really hope it went well.
SARAH STANNAGE: It did. Thanks, Sam. And thanks to Society Street as well for the invitation to be on the panel. Yes, we've just finished the live event, but there are sort of many elements to it. And I'll just start with kind of just going back a little bit to sort of our event. We only run-- so this kind of parallels here with Gemma. We run one big congress every two years, actually.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we're constantly in the planning mode, but it takes that long. And it's one of those sort of landmark events within our sector in terms of impact and legacy. So we really do build into that. And we have a bit of an Olympics kind of bid situation. So we do rotate in terms of countries where we go to. So that kind of connection to place with the congress is really important.
SARAH STANNAGE: So sort of going back to April, that was kind of one of those moments where we were so disappointed to think, we're not going to be in Edinburgh this year in this beautiful venue that we had and this beautiful connection within the local organizing committee and local partners to come into Scotland. And there was so much work that had been already undertaken. But the decision not to postpone or to cancel was quite easy for us, actually, because we had, like Gemma, committed to the publication.
SARAH STANNAGE: And we owed it to our community, and our authors in particular who had invested so much time in their papers and this huge body of work which was absolutely fantastic. And we needed to really, really start to promote that. So there was no suggestion to really sort of cancel. We were going to have an event. It was then a case of looking at that the hybrid and then sort of going fully online. And quite frankly, again, looking at that kind of international profile, knowing that travel was not going to be possible, it was fairly easy to go, right, we're going fully online.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we did go through that process with our council, our trustees. But equally, there was this kind of moment-- and it was really for me, as the chief exec, to kind of look at the financial implications of doing that, and having a really quite big conversation with our council, our board to look at the impacts of that, mainly because a lot of our funders, and sponsors, and our exhibitors were also feeling the financial impacts of the global pandemic.
SARAH STANNAGE: So there was a real concern sort of back in April, May about, how do we bring the funders and the sponsors with us? And those conversations were absolutely critical in giving us the confidence to deliver online and also how to mitigate. So one of the points of mitigation with council, for example, was to underwrite or to use part of our reserves if we needed to to deliver this, but we were committed to it. And we were going to do it.
SARAH STANNAGE: And I think once we sort of got over that, then the conversations with the funders and the sponsors were actually quite exciting. And this is where the creativity came in. It became that space of, can we take some risks here? Can we look at doing things differently? You know, they were learning. A lot of our exhibitors and sponsors had never done this. So we just created those moments of, OK, well, let's try this.
SARAH STANNAGE: Let's have a look at that. And that's how we sort of built this. It was a completely collaborative effort, and right the way through, as soon as we had made that decision. But, also we couldn't find that platform. There was nothing off the shelf. We needed something bespoke. And it was really important for us, particularly with that body of work, is where the publication was really important to track in, and to keep a level of faith to our program, our technical program.
SARAH STANNAGE: This was an element of keeping it familiar as well for our audience. But we have these advantages as well. Now we could have made the decision of going online-- we would have had a 400 in-person event, so it's quite small. Everybody is sort of traveling in. We were really considering live streaming, but hadn't quite made that decision.
SARAH STANNAGE: Now we have this sort of opportunity, first time in our 70-year history, of really getting over those travel barriers. And for me, that was really exciting, because it leaves with a climate, friendly sort of moments that we really wanted to bring in. So we brought that in earlier, which was great news for us. But equally, the access, you can't just assume taking it online is going to make all the content accessible around the world.
SARAH STANNAGE: And when you have such an international profile within your membership, you have to really pay attention to that. So that's one of the really important points to engage in right at the beginning when you've made that commitment to go online. So for example, one of the funders that we were working with, I did just say to them at the outset, can we look at this sort of providing a level of equality of access, embracing the fact that we want everybody with us online, but there is a digital divide?
SARAH STANNAGE: So one of the funders supported grants. And so rather than having the attendance in-person grants to fly over, actually, why don't we apply that to the digital situation, and actually encouraging a level of participation that was far greater than the in-person. So it was really, it was four times on everything. It was a magic number for us is four times the level of participation.
SARAH STANNAGE: So that 400 in-person event became 1,600. Suddenly, we were able to really sort of nurture that level of participation that we hadn't been able to do before. So that was a huge moment for us in realizing our reach on the sort of extended audience and that can come into this kind of event. We recognized as well with the participation that the program, when you're-- so we sort of located our program still in Edinburgh.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we kept this kind of Scottish flavor. We were on GMT time within our program, trying to-- everybody is going to be Zoomed out. So let's keep a five-hour program. And then it did sort of hit me with the local organizing committee. It was like, well, half our audience is going to be asleep at that point. So we really need to think about how we extend.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we had extend to Q&As, for example, at 1 o'clock in the morning. But that was fine, because, actually, most of our-- we looked at our presenters. We were able to put together a program that really worked for their time zone. And how we sort of managed those sessions I think really worked. That was a great lesson out from the technical program. And again, it wouldn't have been possible necessarily in a real, physical space.
SARAH STANNAGE: So we kind of really encouraged that kind of a hub and spoke model that you, mentioned Sam. And that was a further opportunity here for participation, where we created these live hubs, which really worked with our regional groups, say, within our membership body. And then we extended that into institutions and universities. And that was overwhelming in terms of depreciation, so for example, being able to allow 25 students in on a conservation course to be able to access remotely together.
SARAH STANNAGE: So there was this feeling of coming together online which was so-- it's so important to us in the physical event. And I'm really glad that we managed to create that online so you still got this sense of community online. And there was an ability within that for networking as well. So we did sort of build in these networking sessions which just were smaller.
SARAH STANNAGE: We deliberately kept them smaller so that people could have that kind of attention online. But our exhibitors and our sponsors were able to come into those sessions. And we were able to build our exhibitors into the program more so that they had an opportunity to engage more directly with attendees online. And that worked really well. So we didn't lose a single sponsor or exhibitor from the physical event onto [INAUDIBLE] online.
SARAH STANNAGE: And there was a real, this moment of having a lot of enlighten as funders. We were very lucky with that. But this real sort of spirit of collaboration and experimentation-- and we built that in right from the start. But it worked. And we're very sort of basking in the glory of the delivery. But it sets us up for the next time.
SARAH STANNAGE: And it's important that we maintain this kind of new connection with our members and with our sort of new supporters now that are coming to us, this whole new level of participation that we've managed to now access, and so that we don't lose that for the next congress.
SAM BURRELL: I want to pick up on, actually, because it was something I wanted to ask Tobey about, but I was feeling polite at that point in the proceedings and didn't interrupt her, but I've lost that now. So it was around your attendees. So Tobey, you were talking about the number of people who came to each of those sessions. I guess what-- there is two questions that I want to ask the three of you, which is, what was the difference in your attendance compared to what you would expect from an in-person?
SAM BURRELL: And the other thing is, what did you learn about monetization and price points? Do you think you got it right? What was your thinking? So those, they're connected, aren't they? Because if you're going to get a billion people, you can only charge them 50p and that's fine. But if you're only going to have 20 people, you need to charge them a lot more.
SAM BURRELL: So Sarah, you just talked about being able to reach so many more people than you previously had. What did you do? I knew when I spoke to you before that you'd had loads more registrants than you were expecting to have. So did that translate into attendance? And what did you do about your-- how did you charge for it or not? And then I got to ask the other two as well, because I think that's a really interesting question.
SARAH STANNAGE: Well, we brought in a policy. Actually, we made it free for a month to members of our IC to access the congress online. And that was a decision to look at kind of a retention strategy and growth strategy [INAUDIBLE]. And it worked. I think that was something that our members really appreciated. At this point, a lot of the institutions they're working with are feeling the budget pressures. So again, the institutions were really appreciative of that.
SARAH STANNAGE: So the funding and the sponsorship became critical.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's interesting. Tobey, how did it work for you guys?
TOBEY JACKSON: So attendance-wise, we saw in the events that we did in June and in August, we saw a decrease from what we would see face to face. We were expecting that, partly because a number of paper presenters do not have access to their facilities to be able to complete their research. So if your paper presenters make up a bulk of your attendees, and that number drops, then your attendance will drop. And so that's really what we saw.
TOBEY JACKSON: The event that we just held, actually, last week, did really well. And so in terms of attendance numbers, it was great. So we did charge. We have charged or all of our fully online conferences. I think there is a different pricing model or a different concept that you need to take into consideration. When you're just doing a single session or a single webinar, I think that's different.
TOBEY JACKSON: But for a full conference, we did charge. It was dramatically reduced from what the in-person fee would be. And we still had special levels for students, for example, retirees, full conference, those types of categories. The one that we just held last week, we actually did kind of a mixed model where we had some of a higher level sessions that were available for free.
TOBEY JACKSON: You had to sign up as a public to view those, but that was kind of a different model for us. And we're looking at doing something a little bit similar at a very reduced price for our conference in January.
SAM BURRELL: Is there any link there with membership?
TOBEY JACKSON: Yes, there is a definite discount for members.
SAM BURRELL: OK. Gemma, how did it go for you guys in terms of attendees, and where they were, and what kind of pricing model you did?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, we actually had to close registration at 2,000 because we were worried that the services-- as we were using the platform for the first time, we said we're going to limit it to 2,000, which is double of what we would have seen in an in-person congress. If we hadn't blocked, I would have expected about 2,500 2,800. Bear in mind, this is a congress that's held the last week of August, so you know, during the European holiday season.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: In terms of our pricing, we did something very, very similar to Sarah. We gave registration to non presenters, in this case, free for members. Presenters were charged. And they were charged quite simply. These are academics, so they have research funding. So when they basically present in a congress, they use their research funding.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: So we felt that we could charge the presenters. What happened to the European Economic Association with this policy to give free registration to the congress for all members, we saw a huge increase in our membership base.
SAM BURRELL: I was just about to ask that. And I do want to ask Sarah that question as well, because we've had someone in chat. Sandra in chat's asking this question too, is, what's the relationship with membership? So you saw a big increase, Gemma, as a direct result of your pricing.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah.
SAM BURRELL: And you charge for membership, right?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes.
SAM BURRELL: Yes, OK. Sarah, did you find did that as well?
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, absolutely, about 40% in terms of new membership. And also, I mean, we're still processing this after, just after the event. But actually, a lot of non-members who paid, actually, we're offering that kind of ability to kind of become the member, and then sort of apply through that process. And we'll sort of refund. So there is a mechanism there of keeping hold of these new relationships to support into the membership community, which I think is really important.
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, do you think AIAA has seen that? Is there a relationship between virtual events and membership, do you think? So I mean, you might not know. It's something--
TOBEY JACKSON: It's a great question. It's not something that I have personally explored. We have a slightly different model for our face-to-face events. Years ago, we used to include the option to join as a member in the fee. And then you would get that member rate. And you would get a discounted membership. In particularly the United States, that's really difficult for government.
TOBEY JACKSON: They cannot do that on a government credit card. They cannot apply those fees. So we eventually decided to stop that. So there is kind of a different model in our association between registration revenue, and membership revenue, and membership numbers. But I think what it's doing and I think what really need to do is as our society, we need to take advantage of the new individuals that we're seeing that have come into AIAA to participate.
TOBEY JACKSON: And we need to make sure that we follow up with them to really encourage them to be members. We need to do our homework to look into what would be valuable to them and what is that kind of sticking point to bring them into membership. I think that's what we need to learn. So picking up on that theme of value, and the other kind of area that I want to explore is around sponsorship.
TOBEY JACKSON: Sarah, I know you talked about-- I think you said it was funders rather than necessarily sponsors doing the kind of grant packages for the digital access. And that really grabbed me when we talked about it before. But there is also a kind of larger question of, how did sponsorship work? How did your sponsors feel about what you were doing? Did they come with you?
TOBEY JACKSON: Did they shape what you did? Let's talk a bit about sponsorship. How did that all pan out? And I'll start with Sarah, because I know she's got lots of things to say. But I do want to come to Tobey and Gemma as well on this one.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, I mean, I'll just touch on that. Absolutely, from the beginning, sponsors and exhibitors who we had some physical event were coming with us into this new sort of virtual or online concept. And that had to be different. It couldn't be the same. This was not kind of [INAUDIBLE] territory. You couldn't possibly participate. So for us, it was about kind of finding the mechanism of ensuring that exhibitors and sponsors were visible, but were participating online.
SARAH STANNAGE: So some of the areas for having chat channels and things like that which worked brilliantly in terms of bringing in the feel of connection and just encouraging conversations online alongside the technical program was really important, as well as bringing in their expertise into the conversations and actually seeing that there was room for them in there. So actually, some of this was just pivoting what were traditional packages.
SARAH STANNAGE: And I'm so glad now we have-- we just, we're not going to go back at all to those previous packages of support and actually create something much more exciting and creative into the next conference as well.
SAM BURRELL: So really thinking about sponsorship, whether it's in person or not, and what that relationship is, isn't it, of kind of what each party can bring to the table?
SARAH STANNAGE: Absolutely. And it was more meaningful. I mean, the exhibitors were all reporting to me at the end that that's one of the best-- I mean, some of them had never been onto an online event in that space before. So they didn't have anything to compare to. But actually, they were really pleased with the results. The conversations they were having, the new relationships, I mean, some of our exhibitors were developing distributing networks internationally in countries they couldn't previously get into.
SARAH STANNAGE: And that was exceptional in terms of results.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's exciting. Tobey, what was your experience of kind of the sponsorship relationship, the sponsor relationship?
TOBEY JACKSON: I feel like I keep being the bearer of bad news. [INAUDIBLE] for us. And so I have to caveat that I did not work directly with our exhibitors and sponsors in these virtual programs, but I have experience working with them in the past. And I kind of know what happened. It was challenging. So the first time that we tried to do virtual exhibits, it did not work very well.
TOBEY JACKSON: Not many people attended. We didn't it go with the 3D build out type of model. So it wasn't necessarily the most exciting thing you've ever seen online. And it just, it was really challenging. Sponsorship was a little bit better, in that it afforded some different opportunities, doing commercials, for example, or presenting an actual program.
TOBEY JACKSON: What we learned is that, whenever a sponsor does something, for example, presenting a kind of half-hour session, if they name it with just their name, no one will come. But if they name it something-- we had a sponsor or do something that was "The History of Propulsion" for our Propulsion and Energy forum. That got great attendance. And they had great engagement in that.
TOBEY JACKSON: And that really worked out well for them, so kind of learning those things as we go. Exhibits are still really challenging. We're still finding that.
SAM BURRELL: Do you know what, though? So again, I mean, my experience is obviously very different with Society Street. But I was speaking to somebody who is a platform vendor, actually, about sponsorship. And he said that he's fed up of exhibiting, full stop, because he thinks it's a complete waste of time. And actually, the fact that we've moved online and we're trying to think about things very differently, he said, I want to contribute in a meaningful way that's not sales, that is actually just being in the relationship, and kind of getting to know some people, and contributing positively.
SAM BURRELL: And he said, that is much more valuable to me as a sponsor than having some drafty hall with the thing behind me and a desk where nobody wants to make eye contact with you because it's a bit embarrassing. I think there is-- again, I think the format of conferences as they were is quite old and staid, and could do with a bit of a-- anyway, Gemma?
TOBEY JACKSON: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: How was your sponsor experience?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Our policy for years has been not to have sponsors.
SAM BURRELL: Oh, wow, not at all?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, for conflict of interest. We don't have sponsors. We have exhibitors who are publishing houses. And what happened in my own personal case was that when I started approaching at the exhibitors who would attend the in-person congress, it was that between April and May where the UK, which has a number of publishing houses, had just gone into lockdown.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: The staff was separated. A lot of the event staff were put on paid leave by-- in the UK, you have a specific name for it that I can't remember.
SAM BURRELL: Furlough.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Right, that's right. And quite simply, nobody knew what was going on. So when I decided I would offer them, within this kind of our Netflix, our EA-flix, as we fondly nicknamed it, I'd have a banner at the bottom of exhibitors. If they wanted to put their logo was a kind of sign of support, they could, but we didn't charge them anything. And we just linked-- I offered them the opportunity of having a kind of manned Zoom page where people could just--
SAM BURRELL: Come and chat
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: --call in, yeah, and chat. But they weren't interested. But I think that basically, they didn't have the manpower. You know, it seemed as if a lot of the event staff were laid off as the first people to be laid off within the publishing houses. And nobody knew what was going on. So my experience wasn't positive. But I didn't push it either.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah. OK, so to change tack a bit, did any of you guys do anything specific to include, or bring in, or ensure that sort of your early-career researchers, practitioners-- because there is something about conferences being a really important part of building a network, and advancing your career, and getting to know more about the field that you're just starting out in, finding mentors, all that kind of stuff.
SAM BURRELL: Did you address any of that in your conference planning? And if so, how did it go? Tobey, you're nodding.
TOBEY JACKSON: Yes. So students are the-- and students being in undergraduate-, graduate-, PhD-level students are a big part of just our association in general, but our conference attendance. So absolutely, they are a huge factor to consider when we're looking at conference programming. So we have always had student and what we call rising leaders, young professionals programming. So we looked at how to take that online.
TOBEY JACKSON: Several aspects, though, we actually took off into a different-- we took them online, but at a different time. So for example, we've done an event called meet the employers where students and individuals are looking for internships in labs can actually meet with prospective employers, and talk with them and kind of learn about what they do and what's exciting. So we've taken that.
TOBEY JACKSON: And we've done it online, but at a different time. Some of the other programs were done that way too. We do look at speed mentoring. We do offer that at our face-to-face events. And so we've looked at how to take that in a different time as well and how to offer that, so definitely something that we've taken into consideration. And then I would also emphasize that, for us, student pricing was dramatically lower than any other registration fee.
TOBEY JACKSON:
SAM BURRELL: Gemma? Oh, you're muted. You're muted.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Sorry. OK, yeah, what we did quite simply involved the specific scientific sessions. And we had field experts chair the sessions. This was extremely easy to do, as people didn't have to travel. So they were willing to do this. We would love for these people to come to in-person meetings, but we know, not just the timing of our congress, the end of August-- and these are extremely busy experts.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And they quite simply wouldn't come in to chair a 90-minute session. So we worked very, very hard on this for [INAUDIBLE] virtual. It worked extremely well. And we're very, very pleased with it. Of course, we kept on mentoring programs, the mentoring programs that we run for women and female, young female economists. We continued it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: We continued our other workshops we do. So we just, as I said--
SAM BURRELL: You just kept it all going.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: [INAUDIBLE]
SAM BURRELL: Sarah, did you want to address any of that, the kind of--
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, well, we would bill students and early-career researchers in quite different levels, but throughout sort of the congress. One of the most exciting areas, we recruited 25 digital engagement volunteers who were all students and early-career researchers to support the session chairs. That was brilliant. So all those kind of informal, offline discussions were brilliant.
SARAH STANNAGE: And obviously, there was lots of connections made that way, as well as bringing some slightly more program sessions together with student poster, those kind of sessions, and bringing them into kind of mixing everybody in, so having really experienced kind of those are leading within the profession right alongside the students. And we found a lot of the content, you just couldn't tell, specifically on the posters, you know, whose was a student poster and who wasn't.
SARAH STANNAGE: It was absolutely exceptional in terms of the quality and delivery throughout.
SAM BURRELL: That's fabulous, and actually just links directly into a question I've just been asked, which is, how did each of you, how did your conferences handle the poster sections? What did you do? How did they work? So Sarah, just a bit more detail on what you did and how it went would be good.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, so we designed the kind of poster sessions to be quite dedicated sessions. And it was very sort of more sort, dare I say it, face to face on Zoom, so that the posters were more of a-- well, you can do it on sort of like a breakout room sort of session or sort of more in terms of just keeping smaller groups, posters within themes together. That worked really well. So actually, in these sort of meeting environments, we had posters presenters talking to each other.
SARAH STANNAGE: And then people were dropping in. So these were sort of drop-out, drop-in sessions. And that actually, keeping that level of being informal worked really well.
SAM BURRELL: So you'd get five or six together.
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah.
SAM BURRELL: And then there was a time.
SARAH STANNAGE: Time, yeah.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah, that sounds interesting. Tobey, what did you do?
TOBEY JACKSON: So we don't have poster sessions, per se. It's something that we've done at face-to-face conferences in the past, but haven't done in the past couple of years, I would say. So we have paper sessions instead. So what we did is ask our people presenters to upload an MP4 a file. That took a little bit of handholding, and lots of processes, and explaining how to do that. But for the most part, everyone got it.
TOBEY JACKSON: And it worked really well. So we asked them to upload their presentation as a video recording. Those were individuals, not done by a session, but they were individuals. And then those were available a week before. And then we have live Q&A sessions. So that model's changing slightly as we look at the ability to do some live presentations through a particular platform that we're using.
TOBEY JACKSON: But again, having those presentations is great for looking at-- I know we've talked about monetization. That's one of those products that you can monetize, just like you would conference proceedings. You can look at how you can monetize those presentations as well.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you have poster sessions?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Not in the sense of the poster sessions as medical congresses have. Like Tobey, people-- our presenters present their papers, 20-minutes presentation. And they present them within a group, up to five people all on the same seam. As I said, you know, these were live, great discussions as well of people who could-- wanted to listen to them, brilliant. So yeah, we're extremely happy with how the actual scientific program evolved.
SAM BURRELL: So I'm going to get to the question that I've been burning to ask you all from the very beginning, which is, what are you going to take from this year? Let's say these three vaccines are all wildly successful and in eight months' time, we can go back to in-person. And effectively, we can take the best of both. What are you going to take from this year of what you've learned from this year and put it into your planning for sessions going forward?
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, I'm going to start with you this time.
TOBEY JACKSON: So even when a vaccine is widely available and even when it is safe to meet again, we're not going back to conferences the way that they were before. That's something that AIAA strongly feels. And that's something that we are actively planning for. So we have to look at a hybrid model. We have to look at how do we bring that face to face and the virtual together. So a couple of things that we're looking at even for January, how do we do this kind of-- here in the States, we call it "glocal," or that's when it's been kind of named, this kind of local-group get together.
TOBEY JACKSON: So Sarah, definitely, I'm going to be following up with you after this to learn about your hub model, because I really want to know some more about that. But that's one way of doing it, looking at building in watch parties and those types of small-group gatherings, but ultimately, looking at building in a virtual component. We have live streamed our speakers at face-to-face conferences for some time now, so that's not new to us.
TOBEY JACKSON: It's how do we incorporate especially the technical presenters that won't be able to attend the face to face. And I think one of the things we need to think about-- and Sam, you and I had talked about this before. You know, we've all talked about, we've experienced attendance, that people that couldn't travel to an event before, for example, speakers that couldn't participate-- for various reasons, people that couldn't participate in our face-to-face events are able to attend our virtual events.
TOBEY JACKSON: We cannot hold a face-to-face event and say, well, we're so glad that you attended in 2020, but our 2021 and future models don't include you. That's not going to happen. So we have to figure out how we encourage those people to come back in whatever way they can participate and how we can include them. I think that's the big challenge, going forward.
SAM BURRELL: Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: Yeah, definitely the live hub model is something we will keep going for the next sort of planning session. And I would also add, the on-demand access after has been really appreciated, I mean, huge take up, actually. In fact, I think that's part of something that can be monetized, actually. We've not looked at it specifically, but I think that's an opportunity area, because actually, everybody had that, yes, we're going to watch everything in advance.
SARAH STANNAGE: Nobody did. Everybody came to the live-- there was a high participation in the livestream. But actually, the on demand afterwards so people could go back to presentations and look at the live, you know, watch everything again several times, in some cases, has been really appreciated. So that's something we need to absolutely wrap into to other programming areas as well.
SAM BURRELL: So do you think-- what does that mean, though, for an in-person, fast forward to next year, or I don't know, to every year or every other year? What does that mean?
SARAH STANNAGE: I think, for recorded content and how we sort of position that next [INAUDIBLE] publication and the congress proceedings, how they're together unconnected, it's a bit like the video abstracts and how that's promoted. Because we haven't done that sort of level of connection and the promotion, then, on social media, which will lift your impact factor and the citation opportunity. That's not something we've done before.
SARAH STANNAGE: And actually, this has presented a great opportunity to do that. And we need to carry that forward and do it even more so for the next one.
SAM BURRELL: I guess it's inventing new stuff, isn't it? Because it is exactly-- the pandemic has been the mother of invention, of going, actually, we did this because we have to. And oh, actually, it's quite good. Gemma, what are you going to take from this year and roll into future events, do you think?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Well, I think the fact that we invested in our [? Bespoke ?] platform means that we are going to increase our event portfolio, in general. I'd also like to explore, given that we have this [? Bespoke ?] platform, I'd like to explore hybrid events too. And what I'm excited about is the fact that we obviously, being academic economists, holding our congresses, our in-person congresses in universities, we've now got the perfect opportunity, not only through our [? Bespoke ?] platform, but also through the equipment that the universities have invested in for the virtual teaching to really now look at the hybrid model and move forward on that.
SAM BURRELL: I actually had a question for you as well. You know you said that you did all of your sessions live and through Zoom?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes.
SAM BURRELL: Did you record them and make them available on demand as well?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yes, we did. We did. And we also did a very, very detailed and post-congress survey as well about specific-- you know, we asked questions about the registration fee, our registration, if you'd pay-- if you were a participant, if you pay an actual fee just to attend as a non-presenter. Response was very, very, very positive. People are willing to pay for congresses. People want as well to have the sessions to watch.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What we did, we uploaded everything on YouTube. And we linked up our congress platform. They're available for everybody. We can see how many times they've been viewed, both on YouTube, which isn't some-- it's not the best indicator, but we also see from our congress platform how many times people are clicking on them, which is a better indicator. People are watching.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: I mean, it's job market season. In fact, I'm organizing a virtual job market. The closer we're getting to the actual interviews, the more we see people, potential recruiters are clicking on the actual videos. What we found with the recordings, there is a clear issue in GDPR, because some of the data on the slides is private. You have to get the actual consensus of the body that's giving you the data.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Some people don't want to be recorded, so it becomes a little bit sticky when you've got a group session going on. You have to stop-- or the Zoom room managers, I've been calling them, had stop the recording, had to remember to stop the recording. Some people expressed they didn't want to be recorded after they'd been recorded. You had to go and edit the video before you uploaded it.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: That's tricky. We thought we'd handled it very well from the start by telling people to inform us. People don't read emails. But yes, people do want to watch the videos, but handling the actual recordings itself is a little bit of a gray area.
SAM BURRELL: Something that occurs to me as an attendee, is I've struggled this year, as so many of us have. But when I see a conference, and I look at the program, and I go, oh, there is two sessions there I really, really want to go to, and the rest of it is a pile of poo. And I-- well, not a pile of poo, but I don't particularly want to go. Sorry, I meant to be behaving myself here. But you know, it's not of interest to me.
SAM BURRELL: And so therefore, I object to paying whatever it is. I mean, there is quite-- again, I mean, we sort of touched on this. But I think when you start looking at on-demand question, or pricing models, or what you might take going forward, it kind of comes back to the point of, you can disaggregate some of the stuff that's all bundled into a conference. I mean, is that something that any of you guys are looking at playing with?
SAM BURRELL: Tobey, you put your mic on. I hope That means yes.
TOBEY JACKSON: I think there are different ways that you can make content available and different levels of content. But I think that when you think about, again, going back to that value proposition, what is it that makes your conference different than others? So I'll give you a good example. You know, as I talked about, I think there is a different pricing model for webinars. There is a group here that is putting out a webinar that has a speaker that, yes, I'm very interested in hearing.
TOBEY JACKSON: And they're charging for it. It's an hour session with one speaker. I can hear this speaker probably next month for free. I am not going to pay to attend it. So I think that that is what you need to keep in mind. What is the reason why people come to your conference? For us, with the technical presentations, absolutely, those are recorded. Those are available through the platform.
TOBEY JACKSON: Some of the high-level speakers, we can pull out and perhaps put on YouTube. But yeah, there is-- you have to go back to that value proposition. Why would people want to watch this either live or on demand? What's important to them?
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you have something on that one?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What I think the European Economic Association is going to do moving forward is actually-- bear in mind that we've done the initial investment in our platform. So for us, organizing future virtual events is going to have a far lower cost than for associations that have been using other vendors. Rather than put the cost on the member, I think that we're going to look good our institutional members who, for us at the moment, are central banks.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: What we're doing with the virtual events is putting to them as a service to the economic community. So it's something that they as a sponsor of the association, as an institutional member should be supporting us, and therefore, increase their membership or increase their donation to us. So rather than put the costs on the actual individual member, we're going to use it as a kind of sales pitch and increase our institutional membership base.
SAM BURRELL: And a question that I have, but I did send to you before, so hopefully this won't be a shock to you-- I mean, I think one of the things I'd be quite interested to pick out is what about what you did this year surprised you? Tobey?
TOBEY JACKSON: It's hard. That's not a big surprise, but it is a lot harder than I think I thought it would be. As I mentioned, in talking to friends of mine that are also in associations and running virtual programs, they agree. It is incredibly time consuming. It requires different roles from your staff than I think they may be used to. One thing, for example, you may have a very technically savvy membership and audience who are participants in your event, but when it comes to virtual events, I feel like sometimes that goes out the window.
TOBEY JACKSON: And so people need a lot more assistance. They need help. When they contact you, they want to respond quickly. They want to know that there-- they're sitting at home by themselves, and that there is someone that's actually paying attention and listening to them. So it requires a bigger staff lift. I think that's, to me, that was a big surprise.
TOBEY JACKSON: But I think on, a positive note, what was the big surprise is that there are a number of things that we can take from virtual events that are really benefits, that are good things. Content searching, for example-- it is so much easier, if you have a good robust search feature within your conference program online, it is so much easier to find what you're looking for than to sit down with a 120-pave program book and try and find it.
TOBEY JACKSON: That's huge. On demand-- whereas before, you can't be in two places at once, and we didn't record our technical presentations, so you had to pick and choose. Now you can actually see exactly what you want to see. So there are definitely some benefits, I think, that surprised me, that, moving forward, we're looking forward to kind of playing on those and really taking advantage of.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, what surprised you?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Well first and foremost, I got technological in 2020. I was the least technological. And I found myself designing a virtual congress platform. Aside from that, what surprised me? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the spirit in which people actually came together-- and as I mentioned, OK, we did, we have our one event, a very, very big event.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: But it's the spirit of people. I think that we all found ourselves in the same position. And people were just extremely grateful that the event wasn't canceled. And this surprised me. This is the academic community that are used to very, very, very-- paper presentations, being put difficult questions to them.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Especially in economics, it's a male-dominated field. And there is a lot of emphasis on bullying in the academic community at the moment. And what surprised me is that, virtually, people were extremely well behaved, far more well behaved than what they were in person.
SAM BURRELL: Oh, that's interesting.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, which you know, as we're giving, trying to give a lot of visibility as well to bullying, especially in economics, within the academic community, this was very, very, very pleasing to see, the spirit in which people came together and the lack of bullying that there was virtually.
SAM BURRELL: No, that's interesting, really interesting. Sarah, what about you?
SARAH STANNAGE: I can definitely identify with Gemma, and actually, what Tobey said as well. One sort of slight negative in our surprise, we weren't really ready for a lot of our presenters not meeting their deadlines. We thought the [INAUDIBLE] was really good, going to be on time. No-- so we didn't have enough capacity at really deal with lots of late submissions and things like that. So that was a kind of learning throughout.
SARAH STANNAGE: But on the positive, that was a real opportunity to support professional development within the sector for coming online for presenters. And that is something, again, that we're wanting to do as [INAUDIBLE] society and really supporting our membership with that. That was a pleasing surprise that we can sort of come away with, with helping our members and our community in such a strong, positive way.
SAM BURRELL: So I've got one question here from a member of our audience which I'm going to take and then maybe fiddle with a little bit, which, she says, about value proposition being an issue for member societies. She says, is the virtual model where you can pick and choose a sign of membership moving towards a transactional model? And I guess my little spin on that is, do you think moving conferences online has sped up that process of it being more transactional, more pick and choosey, do you think?
SAM BURRELL: I mean, that's quite a philosophical question. But let's go there. Sarah, what do you think?
SARAH STANNAGE: I could certainly see how that, there is a risk there of sort of returning to a very transactional model. But when you've got participation front and center, that participatory model comes back in, because, actually, what you're encouraging is this level of engagement that you can't get at a physical event necessarily, or an in-person congress. So actually, it's about-- almost, it goes back to this equality in access.
SARAH STANNAGE: And that's something that is really tangible now within our sector. So I think that's something you have to look at and pay attention to, but when you've got an international membership body, you need to. That's important to do that.
SAM BURRELL: Yeah. Tobey, did you want to add anything to that?
TOBEY JACKSON: This is a tough question.
SAM BURRELL: I know.
TOBEY JACKSON: This is a really good one. And it's something that I think we could probably spend another hour and a half just discussing and not necessarily reaching a conclusion. I think that really-- this is an easy out. But it really depends on the professional society, right, whether you become a transactional membership model or not. For us, I don't know that this necessarily speeds up that process.
TOBEY JACKSON: I think it's something that we were thinking about before, but not-- it's not an entirely transactional model that we were thinking of before. The relationship model, certainly when it comes to organization memberships, what we call corporate membership-- the relationship model is just as important, if not more important than that transactional model. For individual members, it's something that we've been thinking about for a long time.
TOBEY JACKSON: When we started looking at Amazon and all these other things that people subscribe to, it's made us question the value proposition of associations. And why do people join? What do people get out of it? What is going to make them renew next year? And it's kind of case specific.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, did you want to add anything?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Quite simply to say that I, like Tobey, think it's very, very, very case specific. For the European Economic Association, I don't think that we're going to reconsider our membership fees, not at all, because we see it more as a service. We're lucky to have a-- I don't know what the budgets of the other associations, but we've been able to invest over the past few years in increasing the services to our members without having to look at the actual-- to break down the membership fees.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And it's something that we're not going to do either in the future.
SAM BURRELL: OK, so I'm just going to say to the audiences that, if you've got any burning questions, now is the time to throw them in, because otherwise, I'm going to start with my winding-up questions. So if you're sitting there thinking, oh, maybe there is something I should-- I'd like to ask them, now is the time to do. I am going to, while we're waiting to see if anyone's got, wait, wait, I've got a question, I'm going to jump in with the-- what did you enjoy about this year?
SAM BURRELL: Let's focus on the kind of, specifically within planning meetings and the way that the year's gone horribly wrong in so many ways, what about it did you enjoy? What made you smile? Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: It is this coming together and kind of really sort of everybody feeling like they're in it together, literally. And the online community was a surprising space, [INAUDIBLE] the last bit. But it really was, actually. And everybody was really kind. The kindness level was quite substantial.
SAM BURRELL: That's really nice. I mean, I tell you, I found, particularly through doing this Society Street stuff, is I've met people, and made new connections, and have what feels very real relationships with people that I'd normally expect only to get when I meet people in person. And I think, because all of us are-- it's not a case of I'm the odd one out working from home. And it's just we're all in this place.
SAM BURRELL: And so it's offered opportunities to make connections in new ways, I guess. Tobey, what made you smile?
TOBEY JACKSON: Well, on a daily kind of thought, just the idea that I can take a shower and walk five steps to my office is something that I enjoy, although I miss the personal interaction. I think this idea of community is important. I know there was a question about, do we feel like our community is stronger? In a lot of ways, yes, I do think that. In particular, in the aerospace community, I feel like we struggled with our image sometimes and people seeing us this is relevant or important, especially young people wanting to do careers in aerospace.
TOBEY JACKSON: And then this pandemic hit. And we had so many aerospace companies that transitioned to making PPE, that transitioned to really just different ways in which they could help. And I feel like that helped significantly. But then, just within the professional society and the association community, I agree with you, Sam. Like, I feel more connected in many ways.
TOBEY JACKSON: People came to us and said, hey, we're thinking of doing a virtual event. We heard you did x. Can you help? We went to others and said the same thing. And it's this kind of, yeah, we're all in the same boat. Let's learn from each other. Let's help.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma, what made you smile?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Yeah, well, on a personal level, I'm such a nerdy researcher. And all of a sudden, I'm now working with lawyers in Belgium on licensing models for the congress platform, and having to think up a business model, and marketing plans. And I'm just a nerdy researcher at the end of the day. So this has made me smile a lot. But I get emails from people who want to use our congress platform.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: You know, it's completely outside my field. So yeah, this [INAUDIBLE] smile, it makes me laugh--
SAM BURRELL: It's a stretch.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: --hysterically
SAM BURRELL: It's a strange year, isn't it? We're all being asked to do things that we never imagined. So again, there is some of you who have already seen. There is a question that we're just-- and this is going to be my wrapping-up question. And then I'm going to do the whole thank you so much thing, but just to give you a preview. But so to finish off with, do you think your community now is stronger? So that's kind of your subject area community.
SAM BURRELL: Is it stronger as a result of what we've had to do this year? Or-- well, let's hope it is. Or have you seen it strengthen in some places? Tobey?
TOBEY JACKSON: I think so. I think we've seen in some of our communication tools students reaching out. And we've seen kind of virtual mentoring happening, just from people asking questions. I think people recognize the value of getting together and sharing, sharing information, sharing research, and sharing ideas. So yes, I think, ultimately, it has made us stronger.
SAM BURRELL: Gemma? Is your community stronger, do you think?
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: Definitely, definitely. And I think that what's made it stronger is that a lot of the junior economists have had personal interactive, virtual interaction experiences with extremely high-profile economists who they wouldn't have basically been able to get anywhere near in in-person events, quite simply because maybe the high-profile economist wouldn't have been there. And they've seen a human side to somebody who may be terrified-- of their reputation had terrified them.
GEMMA PRUNNER-THOMAS: And you know, as we've said many times during this hour, this hour and a half, that there has been such an amazing spirit to this year in all senses.
SAM BURRELL: Sarah?
SARAH STANNAGE: Of course, definitely, without a doubt, we're stronger as a community, globally. And I think it's brought us, even we've got-- we had over 89 countries participate in the congress this year online. We wouldn't have achieved that in a physical event. But it has been this sort of opportunity to bring together the different career levels in a completely different way. And it's just a huge, sort of, the good will to share knowledge, which is exactly what we're here to do as an [INAUDIBLE] society to deliver, was absolutely achieved, quite frankly, with the online space.
SAM BURRELL: And that's such a nice place to be able to wrap this session up and say, thank you guys so much for coming and talking to us about what you did, what you did this year. We really appreciate all of your time. I'm just going to move on this to here and just say thank you to everybody who attended, who joined in on the chat, who just listened. Thank you for coming along. This is our last Society Street 2020 event.
SAM BURRELL: We will be doing something next year. Please feel free to sign up. If you go to our website, you'll be able to sign up. And we'll alert you when we've got the program for next year signed up. Thank you again to our sponsors for making this all possible. And it's been a blast. I mean, to be fair, I'm knackered after doing this all year.
SAM BURRELL: I think, Tobey, that was you saying, this is really hard work. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much to you guys. And I hope to see you guys again next year. All right, bye, everybody. Thanks for coming along.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode