The revised travel ban and visa restrictions imposed by President Donald Trump make it difficult for organizers to organize an international conference. Many academicians and scholars have also decided to skip academic conferences to protest Trump travel ban. That is why; organizers nowadays find it daunting to identify the most appropriate date, venue and location for their upcoming conferences.
You must take advantage of latest communication technologies to overcome the impact of Trump travel ban and visa restrictions. You must organize a virtual conference to enable scholars, researchers, academicians, students and professionals to participate in the international conference regardless of their current geographic location. However, you still need to focus on a number of factors to organize a great international conference in a virtual environment.
5 Tips for Organizing an International Conference in a Virtual Environment
1) Address Time Zone Differences
When you decide to organize the international conference in a virtual environment, it becomes essential to decide the conference schedule according to the time zone of each participant. Your conference strategy must identify the prospective participants and decide the schedule according to varying time zones. You further need to make and distribute a concrete conference program to each participant, while allowing him to participate in the event according to his local time zone. You must manage the time zone differences in advance to eliminate confusions and hurdles in future.
2) Pre-Record Content and Presentation
Most virtual conference platforms enable participants to make live presentations and share real-time content. But you must remember that there are always chances that a participant may fail to present his conference paper live. You must pre-record the content, and organize the video clips precisely to make the international conference successful despite technical glitches and disruptions. Likewise, you must request the participants to pre-record their presentations and submit the video clips in advance. The pre-recording of content and presentation will help you to keep participants engaged despite technical glitches and bandwidth fluctuations.
3) Pick the Right Conference Hosting Platform
You have option to choose from several conference-hosting platforms. Some of these platforms are free whereas others are paid. But you must pick a hosting platform that complements your international conference program perfectly. In additional to allowing participants to communicate and interact with each other efficiently, the platform must allow promoters and advertisers to showcase their products/services. Also, you must gather information from various sources to evaluate the quality of each conference hosting platform accurately.
4) Test All Resources Elaborately
You can easily make the international conference successful by picking the right hosting platform. However, you will also need a variety of resources to keep the participants engaged and make them communicate seamlessly. For instance, the virtual conference experience of participants will be impacted by quality on internet connection, bandwidth, video-conferencing software, audio system, projector, and display screen resolution. You must identify the factors that will affect the conference experience of participants directly, and test these resources elaborately to conduct the international conference without any delay or disruptions.
5) Facilitate Smooth and Uninterrupted Communication
You must remember that most participants love to discuss various aspects of the conference topic and presentations. You must enable participants to interact with each other efficiently in the virtual environment to make the international conference successful. The online chat feature of the conference hosting platform will help you to facilitate real-time interaction throughout the event. But you still need to ensure that each participant can see the name and contact information of other attendees without any hassle. The networking option will persuade many scholars to attend the international conference organized by you in future.
In addition to focusing on other aspects of the international conferences, it is also important to promote the event through the right channel. You have to launch a comprehensive digital marketing campaign to promote the international organization by targeting the most relevant audience. But the conference listing and conference alerts options provided by reputable websites enable you to promote the international conference by targeting the most relevant audience without putting extra time, effort and money.
