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Imagine. SIPA Members Show Ability to Pivot in Face of Pandemic.

by Media
“The team had to be nimble and committed. They had to move fast. We created all new content for upcoming issues of Madison Magazine—no easy matter in a business that works 4 months out. For example, our Road Trip Issue’s content had to be completely changed. One of the new features was Tune In to Take Out.”
That’s a quote from Andie Behling of Morgan Murphy Media in an interview with Bo Sacks. So many publishers have had to pivot not only on their events but on what they cover and their webinars. Here are five examples to be applauded from fellow SIPA members. I’ve added a little Beatles tint for the headings.
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I’ve Just Seen a Face – the Zoom window. In its May newsletter, Environment Hawaii ran an article titled Board Talk: COVID-19 Effects on Tenants, Legacy Lands. It was accompanied by a wonderful photo of the Zoom meeting they had—talk about powerful faces! “On April 9, via Zoom, heads of the department’s Land Division, Division of State Parks, and Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation (DOBOR) briefed the Board of Land and Natural Resources on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting their permittees and lessees, as well as the divisions themselves.” By looking at the nine faces, you can see the seriousness and diversity of this subject.

The Long and Winding Road – firsthand accounts. Fantini Research Public Policy Review Editor Laura Briggs “reached out to Ronnie Jones of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board as part of a series seeking insight on issues regulators are facing due to COVID-19. This is his personal account of one of the nation’s hardest-hit areas.” Louisiana ranks third to New York and New Jersey in the number of infections and deaths. Fantini did not settle for any reports about Louisiana. They went to someone right in the middle of it all for this riveting account. “Historically it had not been unusual to shut down one or more casinos in the path of an approaching hurricane, but a total cessation of gaming activities in the state was unprecedented.” Jones is eloquent in his assessment and real in his reactions: “We are, all of us, waiting to exhale.”
Help! – gamification. I’ve written before about MedLearn Media’s popular Compliance Question of the Week. This week’s “Laboratory Question”: is: “I’ve heard there is a CPT® code for COVID-19, is this true?” After the answer is given, readers are told that “This question was answered in an edition of our Laboratory Compliance Manager. For more hot topics relating to laboratory services, please visit our store or call us at 1.800.252.1578, ext. 2. So it’s really serving many purposes: information, lead gen (they can sign up for the weekly questions), revenue driver and archives builder.
Do You Want to Know a Secret? – new content. Magna Publications’ Faculty Focus has, as one might think, executed a total shift to COVID-19 related articles. These include: Fourteen Simple Strategies to Reduce Cheating on Online Examinations; Offering Compassion and Care in Online Courses; and The Importance of Saying Goodbye to Your Students in Times of Uncertainty. They all were posted in the last few days. To promote their upcoming conference, they’ve also posted, Q&A: A Virtual Chat with a Few of Our Teaching Professor Conference Presenters. Virtual to promote virtual—makes sense.
Getting Better – it’s a “womanel”! Plain English Media’s HOAleader.com has a webinar on Thursday titled: COVID-19 and Your HOA, Version 4. (HOA is short for Homeowners Association.) “We at HOAleader.com have now hosted three free COVID-19 webinars for condo and HOA board members grappling with the many challenges triggered by the deadly virus—and the ground is still shifting under board members daily.” What’s my favorite element of this webinar? The panel consists of four woman lawyers—I guess that would be called a “womanel.” Let’s hope that there are enough of these panels that restrictions must eventually be made to include a man.
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‘People Will Remember it’ – Do You Have a Crisis Communication Plan?

by COVID 19Media
I’ve heard from many different entities during the COVID-19 crisis—theaters I’ve had subscriptions with, sports teams I order from, publications like The Washington Post and The New Yorker. (I’m not a big Amazon person, although I guess Mr. Bezos does own the Post.) And you really do get a sense of who they are from their outreach.
When I emailed The Washington Ballet about my subscription—what remained this season and renewing the next—Wil called me about two seconds later to discuss it. (Another good lesson—I was impressed!) He was honest and straightforward, and it really made me feel good about continuing my subscription. When I later reminded him that he forgot my free Nutcracker tickets, he was so apologetic that I then felt bad.
Another division here held a webinar last week on Crisis Communications, and a colleague at another association, Theresa Witham, managing editor/publisher at CUES, did a great job covering it for us. The quotes I use are from her reporting. Here are some of the key takeaways from the webinar:
Clear messaging. “For a lot of people, thinking on your feet was really important after March. It still is,” said Ami Neiberger-Miller, founder of SteppingStone, LLC. “The people who did well, who moved quickly, had done well around fast decision making. They had clear decision streams and were able to put out information quickly.”
Authenticity. As the crisis continues, “being honest and authentic still counts a lot,” she said.
Empathy. Almost all of us have had to cancel or postpone a meeting—or move it to virtual like SIPA 2020 (early-bird registration ends this week!). So people can identify with that. “People notice when you acknowledge those losses” and disappointments in your communications, Neiberger-Miller said. It also allows you to transfer your enthusiasm to the new event.
Be up front. Many of the theaters here in Washington, D.C. still don’t know when they will be able to go on. So maybe their initial emails were a bit too optimistic and they’ve had to walk them back. That’s okay, said Neiberger-Miller. “I think you just explain what happened. Most people are reasonable.”
Build and trust your community. Theaters are like publishers in that both have built loyal communities. This is a time to honor that community with updates, empathetic messages and, maybe foremost, value. For theaters, that may mean opening up the archives to some past productions on video. The National Theatre in London has done incredibly well with donations from doing this.
It’s about them. “People will remember it,” if you are doing things to help them get through, she said.
Make a list of anything that could go wrong. COVID-19 has shown us that we need a plan for potential problems before they become reality, Neiberger-Miller said.
In case of… If your company has events and/or property, have a plan for different kinds of crises involving buildings and venues, such as a fire, natural disaster, gas leak or active shooter. Also think about attendee health emergency, speaker cancellation, speaker controversy and, of course, pandemic.
Remember to include people behaving badly in your planning. What would your company do if your event has a Me Too crisis involving a speaker, member or employee?
Create communication templates. Neiberger-Miller advises having templates for press releases and statements built out for various scenarios. In an earlier webinar we had, communications experts said they had one person responsible for templates throughout the company so messages would be consistent.  
Be ready. “You never know what your next crisis will be but if you have some of those pieces in place, it will be easier for you,” she said. “…Even if you didn’t have a plan for this exact scenario, if you already had a [crisis communication] plan in place it helped you respond.”
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Quiz Time: This Event Will Inform, Engage and Inspire. What is SIPA 2020?

by Media
I was watching Jeopardy the other night—okay, it has become the highlight of my exciting evenings—and in Final Jeopardy they asked something about an Ernest Hemingway novel and Spain. Oh my gosh, I shouted, happy to be out of a Zoom box for the first time all day, it’s The Sun Also Rises!
On Monday, June 1, the sun will rise on SIPA 2020, our first-ever, two-day virtual annual conference, and the lineup is shaping up to be exceptional. (Early-bird prices expire on Saturday.) So figuring that you can get all the details on the website and with my current love of quizzes, I devised my own, based on six of the sessions. Good luck.
1. Fill in the blank: A Euromoney article today led with this paragraph: “At the start of April, Exabel, an artificial intelligence and machine-learning platform for active asset managers, partnered with 1010data, __________________ data provider to the retail, consumer packaged goods and financial services industries, to develop their COVID-19 impact dashboard.”
a. a real-time
b. an alternative
c. a consumer
d. a personalized
2. Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine, said that they were going to do something but then people got furious and they had to change up. What was it?
a. Run podcasts on how coronavirus is affecting emergency clinicians
b. Do special COVID-19 podcasts
c. Put all their COVID-19 information behind a paywall
d. Let their audience know about yoga and meditation apps
3. Day 1 keynote speaker Don Harkey, CEO of People Centric, said that he has seen this as a result of everyone working from home:
a. People working shorter hours
b. Less effective virtual events
c. Work teams are actually becoming closer and feeling tighter as a team.
d. The old kids show Zoom has been completely forgotten
4. Today, this company launched a live streaming events platform that combines existing resources such as Pages, Events, and Live to help companies reconnect with their customers and communities.
a. Google
b. Facebook
c. Instagram
d. LInkedIn
5. Education Week’s monthly Online Summits have Discussion Rooms. For the next event on May 20, the following is true:
a. 5 of the 9 rooms have sponsors
b. 4 Education Week writers will be part of the discussions
c. Education Week provides 1 hour of professional development credit if the educator attends live.
d. All of the above
6. Fill in the blank. Krystle Kopacz, CEO of Revmade, wrote this in an article in March: “At this point, researching how competitors have tried to solve the problem is important. You want to learn from any missteps and present a unique solution to your audience. You can’t drive _____________ if you’re replicating something that’s already created.
a. revenue
b. loyalty
c. success
d. harmony
ANSWERS
1. b – alternative data. The article said that this dashboard will give investors a close to real-time insight into how the pandemic and lockdowns have impacted consumer spending in the U.S. Meg Hargreaves, COO, Industry Dive, and Michael Marrale, CEO, MScience, will present Content Licensing: Alternative Data 101 on Monday, June 1 at 12:30 pm.
2. c – EB Medicine is doing a, b and d. But when they put COVID-19 info behind a paywall, people were furious. Dan Fink, managing director, Money-Media, a Financial Times company; Lynn Freer, president, Spidell Publishing Inc.; and Stephanie Williford, CEO, EB Medicine, will present Growing Your Audience in the Time of Pandemic, Tuesday, June 2 at 1 pm.
3. c – Teams are becoming closer. Harkey will present Keynote: Accelerating Out of the Crisis, Monday, June 1 at 11 am.
4. d – LinkedIn. On Tuesday, June 2 at 1:40 pm, Steve Kearns, marketing leader, social media, LinkedIn, and Michelle Peña, senior editor, Business Management Daily, present All Things LinkedIn: Sales, Marketing and Content Strategies.
5. d – All of the above. At 12:05 on Monday, June 1, Matthew Cibellis, director of programming, live & virtual events, Education Week, will present Creating a Standout Virtual Event.
6. b – loyalty. On Tuesday, June 2 at 11 am, Krystle Kopacz, CEO, Revmade, will present Keynote: Six Steps to Improve Your Digital Revenue Outlook Immediately.
SCORE
1-2 right – You have to register for SIPA 2020 to learn more!
3-4 right – You have to register for SIPA 2020 and lead a discussion!
5-6 right – You have to register for SIPA 2020 and be on next year’s program committee.
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‘What Do You Do Best?’ SIPA 2020 Keynote Don Harkey Sees a Clear Path Forward

by Media
Even before Don Harkey, CEO of People Centric Consulting Group, and I started a Zoom conversation on Monday—you are in for a treat when he keynotes the first-ever SIPA 2020 Virtual Conference on June 1!—we both laughed. I think it was because each of us used “pivot” in the first sentence that we spoke.
“That’s the word of the month for me,” he said.
It’s probably the word of the year for all of us. Funny, when I looked it up in Webster’s just now, the noun appears first—”a person, thing or factor having a central or major role, function or effect.” The second definition reminded me that it’s what we call the center in basketball, almost an antiquated term now that the game has changed so much and centers matter less.
But I digress. It’s the verb pivot that we have all been living the last two months—turning, changing to something new. And accepting.
“My favorite story is that my 75 year-old mother-in-law is teaching piano lessons on Skype,” Harkey said. “If you would have told me that at Christmas time, I would’ve said no way. But she’s doing it and liking it and said she will be offering it to her students in the future. It’s things like that that are fundamentally changing. The key, as always, is listening to customers and putting fear away.
“The challenge we all face is the new situation we’re in—the stress and the fear—and that we’ve had to pivot from all of [our normal] positions. This is outside of our comfort zone and at the same time it’s interrupted all our habits. But now we have a common enemy so to speak. In a way it’s like an unintentional experiment. There are positives—my mother-in-law’s new outlook—and negatives that can come out of this. I own a business, and I’m stuck and it’s hard to pivot—oh, I said I wasn’t going to use that word again. None of us would choose this crisis.”
Harkey has an easy-going style. When I asked him how presenting from a box on a screen rather than in person might change his style, he hesitated. “Oh, no, I’ll be standing, moving. I won’t change anything. But that’s a good tip for others.”
He has found that he is able to feed off the energy of chats and comments taking place while he speaks. That’s one of those positives of our brave new world, he said.
“We do a live group every month here—60-70 people—so the question became, ‘how do we recreate that?'” Harkey asked. The answer, of course, is virtually. “I was the speaker and all these conversations were going on on the side. But it wasn’t distracting. It was actually fun to interact with that. There was energy being created. And it related to what I was talking about. You felt part of the community.
“When you’re at a live conference, you go to sessions, briefly meet someone, but maybe miss those people later on. Or you might be sitting in the front row, and you can’t pull up an article that something the speaker said triggered. At an online conference, you can pull up this article, or talk more virtually with a person you met or heard.”
Identifying With SIPA Spirit
Harkey said that as a “recovering engineer,” he can identify with the entrepreneurial spirit of SIPA members. He was working for 3M and saw some teams being successful and others not so much and why. So he decided to start a company and apply what he learned. All has been going well, and then a pandemic hit.
“There was a moment for me. All of this started happening, and the new revenue targets for the year for our company [seemed worrisome].” He thought to himself about the various scenarios and most weren’t good. Would he have to go back to engineering?
“I didn’t sleep too well that night,” Harkey related. “But”—as a believer in being very open with his employees—”I brought it to the team the next day. I said, ‘the best case is we’re fine, but the worst is really, really bad.’ They all circled around the problem and rallied. ‘Okay, now that we know that, what decisions do we make? We can focus on moving forward and helping clients.’ It’s like on planes when you’re told in case of emergency to put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others.”
As an engineer, Harkey also knows innovation. He has met business owners who are just so focused on the fear that they can’t innovate.
“When it comes to Innovating, it just doesn’t happen magically,” he told me. “I can’t tell you, ‘Okay, go be creative now and write,’ while we’re talking. Or everyone go innovate. It’s a creative process. You can’t do that on command.
“So you try to look for opportunities. What do you really know? What do you do that’s unique? What do you do best? Remind yourself of who you really are. Don’t walk in and just talk [to customers]. Listen. Have conversations. You don’t have the answer right away. Collect information. Then if there’s a circle of what you do well and where they need help, [see] where they intersect.”
He offered an example of one client that helped people sell items online through Amazon. They were having horrible backlogs, like 7-8 weeks for guitar strings. “The customer looked at themselves and said, ‘We’re really good at helping customers solve problems,’ so they started looking for solutions and found ways to get past those lead times.
“Sometimes we’re afraid in these situations and we shut down. But this is not a time to circle the wagons. It’s a time to listen. We had a meeting with a large nonprofit that have a location that people [like going to], or that’s what they thought. We asked, ‘What are you great at?’ ‘Well, we’re great at bringing people together.’ ‘Okay, what does that mean [in this environment]? The core of what they do well is not the building. Then if the building isn’t the key, what is? We can do different things to bring people together.
“Usually when we hear innovate, we think, ‘What can I do with technology?'” But it can go way beyond that, he said.
‘We’re Coming Together More’
We returned to his mother-in-law and the idea that certain positives will come out of this. He pointed to a restaurant in his area—Springfield, Mo.—that has discovered that they really have a knack for doing takeout. “So now they’re focused on delivery. Pick up food on the way home—it makes sense,” he said.
“Another example is that I think [as a whole], we feel tighter as teams. We’re coming together more. But we’re working apart, so what’s happening? Well, we have a clear purpose and clear objectives. We’re communicating clearly with each other. Maybe even more than before. It’s improving esprit de corps. So don’t stop accidentally doing that.”
It’s also true that Zoom offers a strangely effective dynamic, where it’s tough to look away from the other person or people, as opposed to in face-to-face conversations.
Harkey admits that, of course, it’s far from perfect now, but in line with his upbeat nature, he said that we will, ahem, pivot from some of the bad. “Even bad things that have happened to you, we’re learning lessons from that, good and bad, and can use them to move forward.”
Join us on Monday, June 1, and hear much more from this visionary leader. Register this week to get the lowest rate! Every registrant will be entitled to on-demand listening of all sessions.
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Have ‘Realistic Expectations’ – Thoughts on Virtual Event Platforms

by Media
“The single most important thing [for a virtual event] is realistic expectations about what the sponsor and attendee can expect,” said Brian Cuthbert, group vice president, Diversified Communications U.S., in a webinar held early in the pandemic. “You are not reimagining the show. How many leads can I expect? How will the learning be? Are you implementing video? Are there trainers or is there an audio webinar?”
“We’ve been pulling together, in the past five days, a virtual event for the same time that the live event was scheduled,” Alicia Evanko, executive vice president, Travel Group Global Events, Northstar Travel Group, added. “We’re just doing an appointment event so we’re using Zoom. We’re exploring other options for the content piece.
“The #1 priority is bringing those buyers and sellers together because we’re already getting requests, ‘Hey, can you get me the list? I’ll set those appointments up myself.’ Zoom will handle the appointments. We will have content available.”
The platforms that she named included Brandlive, eZ-XPO, Bravura Technologies and 6connect communications.
Of course, almost every company doing events has had to switch to some form of virtual platform. Through our former excellent events director Emily Ruf, I found a blog from her new company, The Linux Foundation, recommending these virtual event vendors. A lot of research went into their selections:
inXpo Intrado
Best for large events with high budgets requiring a virtual conference experience with few compromises. InXpo Intrado has robust hosting capabilities and uses hyper-scale cloud providers for its infrastructure to provide highly reliable and resilient performance.
vFAIRS
Best for medium to large events with smaller budgets that want to offer a 3D environment/booth experience. It has many of the same robust features for sponsors, virtual trade shows, concurrent sessions, and attendee networking features that InXpo Intrado does, but at a lower cost of entry.
MeetingPlay
Best for any size event where attendee networking tools are a priority and sponsor ‘booths’ aren’t required. It does not have a 3D virtual exhibit hall/booth capability. That said, the sponsor benefits built into this platform are robust, and they have excellent attendee networking capabilities. As with vFAIRS, you can use Meeting Play’s own integrated video conferencing solution for content delivery, or use your own.
QiQo Chat
QiQo is best for smaller technical gatherings that don’t need all the bells and whistles of an industry event focus. This is a great option for a focus on small group collaboration, such as developer meetings and hackathons.QiQo acts as a Zoom wrapper for attendees collaboration and session broadcasting and is ideally suited for smaller events that have a more narrow focus
For smaller open source options, they recommend: Jitsi Meet; Open Broadcaster Software; EtherPad; and Big Blue Button. There’s more information in their post.
Remo is recommended for its networking capabilities. It features a “discussion table format that mimics mingling around a cocktail table at a reception. Attendees can click on a table in a virtual banquet room to join, which takes them into a live video chat with the other five or so people at that ‘table.'”
And the very popular Hopin. “Similar to speed networking, the tool randomly connects two participants into a live, one-on-one video chat where they have a set amount of time to talk and possibly add each other as ‘contacts’ before time is up and they are both connected with other participants.”
At Connectiv and SIPA we are partnering with BeaconLive on CES Deconstructed, webinars and for the upcoming SIPA 2020 Virtual Conference and have been very satisfied. One piece of advice that I’ve heard often is to start with the platforms you already use. Have discussions with your current vendor(s) about what you need and what they can do. A vendor might not even have be fully aware of what they are capable of until they’re told what you might envision.