news - Decibel Events

THE EVENT HORIZON. What Happens Next?

Is it too early to try and imagine what events will be like after the shelter-at-home orders have been lifted?

Probably. We re hoping that question doesn t age like milk. But there s no harm in doing a bit of informed speculation. What else is going on right? So, here s what we know:

1. We know that Los Angeles has extended shelter-at-home orders through May 15^thas did the state of Vermont. Chicago and its home state of Illinois are poised to do so as well. The CDC s recommendation of no live events with more than 50 people stands until May 15^th as well. We strongly doubt an April 30^threopening is happening for most of the country. So basically, don t expect live events of any size to happen before June.

2. We also know that the CDC also recommends anyone with pre-existing conditions making them more vulnerable to COVID-19 should avoid mass gatherings. This remains true even after stay-at-home orders are lifted. Some have suggested that any future gatherings this summer should be limited to locals from within a certain radius since traveling to and from events is a great way to kick-off new outbreaks and stay-at-home 2.0.

3. Public health experts across the world are also anticipating future waves of COVID-19, and while strict stay-at-home orders and expanding medical infrastructure now will prevent things from getting this bad a second time, we should all be prepared for spontaneous cancellations or postponements of events based on localized outbreaks until a vaccine is widely available.

So broadly, these are the circumstances under which events this summer could take place.

Let s say we can get small scale, local events that incorporate a significant virtual component going this summer. Anthony Fauci seems optimistic. We ve linked to this already, but here are the CDC s mass gatherings guidelines that would frame any summer events. We recommend that anyone planning an event, or planning to attend an event this summer read them in full.

OK, sidebar. I fully understand the gravity of what is being stated here, and I appreciate the lengths the CDC has gone to guide the events community but, for real, doesn t the following sound like it was written by a robot trying to live among us and gain insider knowledge for the inevitable future robot uprising?

Handshakes and high-fives are often exchanged at meetings and sporting events, and these can be ways in which COVID-19 can be transmitted from person to person. As a way of decreasing the social pressure to engage in these common behaviors, consider displaying signs (physical and/or electronic) that discourage these actions during the gathering.

While the clinical description of high-fiving situations made me suspicious, the physical and/or electronic parenthetical is a dead giveaway. Nice try robots! Be careful guys. The robots know we like to high-five and are susceptible to COVID-19.

Anyway, back to it.

Now, along with the CDC recommendations for safe conduct at mass gatherings, there are a number of recommendations here for event planners. These include flexible sick-leave policies, refund policies for sick attendees, frequent sanitizing of surfaces, making sterile masks available, and enforcing social distance. Additionally, the CDC recommends that event planners maintain active communication with local public health officials and remain prepared to alter or postpone an event at a moment s notice based on community health conditions. Any events management company worth its weight in 15-minute rapid tests needs to be on top of all of this for events in 2020, which is why Decibel has started working with a medical director and we will work in concert with their recommendations to protect the health of our staff and event attendees.

As of right now the CDC is not recommending temperature checks at gatherings. Nevertheless, Disney has publicly stated that checks with infrared thermometers are being considered to enter their parks. We also suspect this will become a mandatory entrance requirement to attend professional sporting events should those resume this summer as well. While we know that at least 25{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, it stands to reason that measures like temperature checks will at least prevent some people from exposure to active cases and allow attendees to feel more at ease.

We wish we could offer you clearer conclusions, dates and confidence but we are still some time away from a national reopening and new normal. We will inevitably have to address additional nuanced CDC recommendations and health requirements as the pandemic wanes but the big takeaway here is that we re seeing a lot of reasons to be optimistic and enough information to begin preparing for what comes next.

As always, reach out to us today if you d like to begin planning what comes next.

Press Coverage: 2019 National Book Festival

Press Coverage for the 2019 National Book Festival

New York Times
I Am on My Way to Being Very Well, Justice Ginsburg Tells Thousands of Fans

WRC-TV (NBC)
19th Annual National Book Festival Draws Tens of Thousands of Book Lovers

C-SPAN *VIDEO*
My Own Words Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recounted her life and time on the High Court.

The Georgetowner
Record-Setting Crowd for RBG at National Book Festival (photos)

5 Virtual Events to Watch this April

Federal authorities and most states have extended their social distancing or shelter-at-home order through April 30^th, which means we have at least another full month of witnessing the virtual events industry transform and develop. That s called silver lining, everyone.

So, this week we present to you 5 virtual events that we re looking forward to in April. Now, there are three important things about these events to note before we get started:

Each of these events are completely free and open to the public.
Each of these events performs a public service or provide an opportunity for personal enrichment. If you re organizing your own virtual event from the ground up, strongly consider executing something that reflects the needs of your audience as a way to foster brand engagement. In the case of these 5 events, they each provide much needed distractions and ways to make the shelter-at-home experience fun.
Virtual Events don t necessarily have to be analogous to live events (ex: a web conference to replace a live conference). We re seeing the nature of events and gatherings being completely redefined on a daily basis and entirely new forms of events are emerging.
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Amazon Prime s SXSW Film Festival
(Late April)

From the ashes of last month s canceled SXSW festival comes this special online film festival due in late April.

From the website:

Prime Video presents the SXSW 2020 Film Festival Collection offers filmmakers in the 2020 SXSW Film Festival lineup an invitation to opt in to take part in this online film festival, which will play exclusively on Prime Video in the U.S. for 10-days. The one-time event will be available in front of the Prime Video paywall and free to all audiences around the country, with or without an Amazon Prime membership, all that is needed is a free Amazon account.

The film festival will NOT include films from producers who have already secured distribution deals with Prime Video rivals like Netflix but you should still expect to watch a majority of SXSW s film festival entries from your couch.

All the filmmakers who opt-in to this film festival will receive a nice kick-back from Amazon for their participation and the added bonus of a much larger potential audience than anticipated. We re closely watching this special screening because if it does go off without a hitch, we expect to see more virtual festival events from major services like Prime Video in the future.

Red Hat Summit (April 28^th-29^th)

Cloud-computing and open-source software giants Red Hat were among the first companies to cancel their live event (March 4^th) and spent the past month redeveloping their annual summit as a fully public, immersive online experience. All the special keynotes, discussions, and breakout sessions scheduled for the live event will now be taking place through Zoom and are completely free to the public.

Want to learn more about all the digital architecture behind the latest innovations in cloud tech? Want to find other people who have as strong feelings about Linux as you do? We ll definitely be in attendance if even just to admire the operation of this virtual summit, but if this content strikes your fancy you can view the complete schedule right here.

Harvard Graduate School of Design s April Events Series
(Multiple Dates in April)

From the website:

Harvard Graduate School of Design has organized a series of virtual public lectures across the month of April, an effort toward sharing and stoking design discourse amid today s almost-entirely digital context. GSD faculty including Dan D Oca, Oana St nescu, Jenny French, and David Moreno Mateos will offer looks into their ongoing and upcoming design preoccupations, while voices from outside the school bring welcomed insights and dialogue. The GSD s series of talks and webinars will be broadcast to our audiences via Zoom and live-streamed to the GSD s Facebook page.

Doesn t that sound fancy? There are a whole host of online design festivals going on this Spring including this one by De Zeen, but the one that stuck out to us the most was this event series. Lectures and Q&A s on urban planning, office planning, ecosystem management, and the famed American architect Bruce Goff are just a few of the events slated for this month. And what s more, think about the self-satisfaction you ll get from telling people you spent the day casually enjoying a Harvard lecture series like it s no big deal. Pants optional.

The Late Show s #indoorappreciationmonth
(Every Day in April on Social Media)

Sometimes its worth thinking about planning a virtual event like you re creating a social phenomenon. While this is a social media campaign, it s a little bit different then just expecting a bunch of people to tweet about how much they like frozen pizza. We see #indoorappreciationmonth as an event because it fosters organized social participation, discussion, and congregation around a particular area of interest or cause. The major ambition of this month-long virtual event is to lead or frame an already extant popular conversation online. This is clever. Take notes.

What better way to make shelter-at-home orders bearable than to make them into a special event of only-at-home activities. This event phenomenon succeeds because its crowd-driven, it reflects the current circumstances of its target audience, it inspires a sense of togetherness, and it provides some much-needed structure for the month. You can observe or participate in the experience on any of your social media accounts by following the hashtag.

New England Aquarium Virtual Visits
(Every Day in April)

As a Chicago native, I had a lot of hometown pride when I watched The Shedd Aquarium s penguin outings at the end of last month. In case you missed it, The Shedd Aquarium employees took videos of their penguins visiting all the different areas of the museum after it was closed to the public. I mean come on, penguins are charismatic, inquisitive, and clumsy on stairs. There was no way that idea was going to fail. What s not to love about that?

New England Aquarium now has daily streaming events series (11 a.m. Eastern) to showcase all the exciting aquarium goings-on that you never get to see. Yeah sure, you ll see some standard cool stuff like shark feedings, but there are also really adorable moments you d never expect. Did you know it s some guy s job to brush seal teeth? Did you know there s an on-site sea turtle hospital for turtle check-ups? In the case of the New England Aquarium, treating virtual audiences to a VIP backstage pass is a compelling way to maintain interest and visibility.

Now is the time to think outside the box and develop brand new virtual event concepts. Need some help? Get in touch with us today!

Decibel Combats Textile Waste by Upcycling

Decibel is getting some love from the Trade Show News Network! Looking forward to seeing more reuse and upcycling in the industry. Especially after tradeshows, when we often see brand new prints end up in the landfill. We would much rather upcycle them into promotional items!

Tips on making your next online presentation professional and effective.

If anyone here hasn t checked out our podcast yet, or doesn t know we have one then give a listen here! We just finished up Episode #2. We ve got a solid rhythm going with it, the pacing is great, and its full of big ideas for your online event contingencies. But that s not all!

Are your children driving you wild at home? Do you need to impose consequences for misbehavior? We strongly recommend forcing them to listen to this podcast. Think about it. You ll get 15 solid minutes of productive helpful suggestions about online event solutions, and they ll get what should feel like an eternity to reflect on their actions while enduring boring adult stuff. Were they extra bad? Make them write a report on it. Win-win.

As you might have noticed from these shameless plugs, we d like to promote this podcast and get that click counter clicking. We worked hard on it! But beyond that we thought it d be helpful to use this week s blog post to walk you through our planning, editing, and recording process as a guide to making an effective audio or visual presentation. If you re seeking out the best way to connect with your remote staff right now, you ll definitely want to give this list a read through.

So, let s talk about how Decibel produces its weekly podcast (which again, you can listen to here), and use that as the basis to describe how you should plan and execute any type of online presentation.

Sure, everyone s computer now comes standard with a microphone and webcam but there are relatively cheap ways you can improve this set up for significantly better results. If your presentation only requires you to sit at a desk, then your integrated webcam is likely fine. If you re using a real whiteboard or charts, you might want something with higher resolution so everyone can see the details. We recommend this guy right here:

Amazon Link

Your microphone is a different story. Integrated computer microphones tend to pick up a great deal of room noise. So if you were attempting a Skype-based conference call in your bathroom and thought you were pulling a fast one, you weren t. Everyone could hear the echo on tiles and knew exactly what you were up to.

Try a nice external mic that cuts out a lot of the extraneous noise. You ll get a much warmer, crisp, and clear sound that makes listening significantly easier. Here s a couple entry level examples that will be more than enough to do the job:

Amazon Link

I know exactly one person who can speak brilliantly and concisely off the cuff. They know exactly how long they re going to speak for, they know all the right notes to hit, their arguments make logical sense, and they never get tripped up. Everyone else I know starts out strong and gets lost in the weeds after 10 seconds. Like Joe Biden. It s a lot easier to stay on point when you ve written up a road map and it s a lot easier to listen to someone when they re organized. You ll want to include: 1) key points or topics in a logical order 2) benchmarks for length of time spent on each topic. You can check these off as you go along and keep track of your time to make sure you re nailing everything efficiently. Any virtual conferencing platform like Zoom or Adobe Connect or Gotomeeting has time keeping functions by default. This brings us to our next point.

Before we record our Podcast, we typically carve out a half hour to freely chat and allow for some themes to emerge from the noise. While we have a rough idea of what we d like to record, these dry runs let us hone in on or flesh out particular key ideas, establish solid talking points, and get used to a conversational rhythm. We can t emphasize enough how valuable this is.

If you re recording or livestreaming a video there are additional things to consider here. What if your lighting is weird and the stream makes it look like you ve made a poor man s attempt at a film noir? It s distracting.

Have a dry run with your road map and review the video or audio. Make sure your audio and video are clear and professional. Identify the portions of your presentation where you re liable to trip and put in a little extra effort to structure for time and clarity. You may well notice there was something big you forgot to include in your road map. No big deal, you can address it.

The beauty of online video and audio streaming services is the ease of recording and creating backups. As much as I can t stand the sound of my own voice, I always push through our rehearsal recordings to evaluate the quality of the sound and content. There s also always the possibility that your rehearsal produced some magic that might not have been present in your performance run. Download some free open source video editing software like OpenShot to weave together your best moments.

This is especially useful if you re planning to upload your streaming presentation as a VOD. Your remote employees may well be juggling a number of different responsibilities at the moment, and making a VOD available to them with all your greatest hits edited together will account for that need for flexibility. Record everything!

Sitting and watching or listening to a live streamed presentation can be tough, especially when you re at home. You re surrounded by countless toys, distractions and other immediate responsibilities. In addition to making an efficient and well-produced presentation, consider a streaming platform that allows for interaction. Platforms like Zoom can allow for private channels, file sharing, polling, and text-based chats that allow everyone in the virtual room to be actively involved in the experience. After you ve prepped everything else. Find places in your presentation that allow for live feedback, or live reactions to specific content.

Since polling is among the easiest ways to do this, we thought we d direct you to Zoom s very own blog where they provide suggestions for how to integrate them into your next presentation.

For a great example of how these steps produce great results, I will again direct you to Decibel s Podcast. Did you know we had a podcast? And as always, reach out to Decibel to get any and all online event solutions moving today.

National Book Festival 2019: Parade of the States

Follow this link for some great insight, tips and insider info for what to expect at the Parade of the States at the 2019 National Book Festival. And if you ever wonder why they call it the Parade of the States:

It s a parade, as in to exhibit ostentatiously or to flaunt. What the National Book Festival s Parade of the States is flaunting is the literary heritage of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Territories.

National Book Festival

The National Book Festival is on Saturday, Aug. 31, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Visit loc.gov/bookfest for full details.

6-Point Strategy for Transitioning Your Live Event Online

Well, here we are again. Now that we re all hunkered down in our toilet paper forts, we figured it s time to stop contributing to mass panic with reports of event cancellations. If panic is your thing, feel free to turn on cable news or google Dow Jones Industrial Average at your convenience.

Just to recap, pretty much everything is cancelled (Coachella, Europe, bars, the bull market, bars, my career aspirations, bars, etc.). The White House just updated it to no gatherings of more than 10 people. That is just how quickly the landscape is changing.

So, take a few moments and have a freak-out session. It s well-deserved. We re all stressed. No judgement here. I watched Contagion for the first time over the weekend assuming it d just be a zombie flick so, I get it.

Now, rein it back in and let us guide you into the shining light of online event solutions. This is only a tactical challenge and you still have plenty of options for meeting your events goals this year.

To help you out, we ve come up with a general 6-point attack strategy for transitioning your live event into an online experience. Before you decide to just cancel your current plans, go through this list. It s easier than you think and you leave yourself in a better position for success if you simply transition your event, rather than cancel it and attempt to regain your audience and momentum down the road.

Revise Your Event Goals & Benchmarks for Success

OK, we know that live events are an impossibility until at least the Summer, so let s revisit the core goals behind your live event. That attendance goal you have? It s probably time to set that aside. Your goals about a product launch, increasing brand awareness, or generating a dialogue through a speaker/panel series however, can still be very much in play. Figure out which goals are still attainable.

In the short term, a successful event is well-attended, most of the right people show up, and most everyone leaves with a positive impression. Great. But we re talking about long-term markers of success how much more traffic does your website receive after your event? How much sustained social media buzz is there for you new product? How many more online or in-store sales are you making? You re going to want your events management company, or an in-house events team to derive a revised set of success benchmarks informed by resources like livestream analytics. Plenty of livestreaming companies offer these services, but here s one just to give you an example of how you can leverage an online event into a business boost.

Revise Your Message

When we talk about a message , we re really thinking about a consistent image or concept that communicates your brand s intentions and identity to your audiences. That s still doable, but it has to change to accommodate these new circumstances. Maybe it s time to seriously alter your event s website to make it your central event hub. Maybe it s time to significantly change your approach to social media. Maybe it s time to shift gears on your brand storytelling. Think about a unified online aesthetic and narrative to communicate the message of your branded event to your audiences. Here s some ideas to get you started.

Translate Format & Attendee/Presenter Experience

Know your content and your audience. Think about the live experiences you intended your audience to have in the abstract how were audiences expected to engage aspects of your event? Was this a sitting-quietly-and-listening event or were audiences expected to interact with a person or new product? In light of that, what formats for presentation would they most likely respond to? Are scheduled video drops the way to go? Is a livestream presentation more appropriate? Would your viewers like something more interactive for Q&A like a message board? Should you send out your new product to handful of lucky people to make their own unboxing videos? There are analogous online experiences that can be created for nearly all of the live experiences you had planned.

Evaluate Personnel & Skill Requirements

Obviously, with a change in format you ll also need to think about the requirements and skills necessary to pull off this online event. Does someone need to moderate a forum or livestream? Do you need additional personnel available by phone or live chat to answer questions? Is your current website and social media management sufficient, or do you need additional personnel to forward your revised message and strategy? After revising message and your event format, prepare a list of new remote work and skill requirements needed to manage your event.

Create New Communication Plan

Navigating an online event can be less intuitive than a live event. You can t really put up signs. Announcements are more difficult. You can t just walk over to the next room and speak with someone. Revising your communication plan so that you can actively maintain contact with event stakeholders, presenters, and audiences is crucial to mitigating these challenges and will insure the success of your online event.

Finalize New Schedule

At least for the next 8 weeks, you ll have a pretty good idea of where your audiences will be and when they ll be available. You do not necessarily have to cram a whole event into a three-day weekend since you re not working under constraints like travel or the cost of renting a space. There are options here to draw out what would have been a very short event into a week-long or multi-week affair that offers viewers a small but steady stream of content every day. Think about how your audiences and presenters are now occupying their time and schedule for the best results.

Right now, online events are everyone s jam. Decibel has been tackling this online challenge for years now and plan to continue bringing you helpful content throughout this crisis to keep your organization moving forward. Check out our new podcast series here for more helpful tips, and reach out to get your live event retconned into an effective online experience today.

Decibel and The National Small Business Week Awards

Last month Decibel Management produced one of our flagship events in Washington D.C., the National Small Business Week Awards. Since this is the Decade of Decibel, we thought it might be nice to take a deeper look at this event, seeing as our partnership with SCORE and the U.S. Small Business Administration is one of our longest standing events and to show how we help their team bring this influential event to life.

So first, a little history lesson. National Small Business Week, or NSBW for short, started back in 1963 when President Kennedy signed the first proclamation recognizing the contributions that small businesses provide the U.S. economy. Since then every standing president, regardless of political party, has reissued this proclamation in the continuing acknowledgement of American entrepreneurship.

Flashforward nearly 60 years and the tradition is still going strong. Although things really got going in 2009, or so we like to think at least, when Decibel first got involved with NSBW by partnering with the U.S. Small Business Administration and SCORE, a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses, to host the National Small Business Week Awards in our nation s capital. The awards aim to recognize and honor achievements by business owners from all over the country, their companies and their employees for all they do in the small business world. Categories range from recognizing business innovations to the Small Business Person Of The Year and include winners from every state in the country.

Every year the event takes on a new form as administrations turnover and different goals and challenges are set. This most recent year, for instance, Decibel tackled the addition of a NSBW bus tour, which included a custom-wrapped bus that stopped in multiple cities to honor small businesses in their hometowns.

As for Decibel s exact role in this week-long celebration, well, you name it. Stage design, event management, execution and let s not forget vendor management. So much vendor management. From food to travel, we covered it all. Planning and logistics are a major part of the legwork leading up to events of this caliber, but it s important we not forget the team on the ground that Decibel sends to put out the inevitable fires to come up with any large event. But by now we ve become expert firefighters.

Of course, our ultimate goal is always to provide a great event for all of the nominees in attendance, whether at the main stage in D.C. or along the bus tour route. Funny thing about awards shows, one of the most challenging aspects of producing them is keeping the winners a secret all the way through the rehearsals and show so that they are genuinely surprised when they win.

After producing this event for much of the past decade, with all the new faces and changes we ve seen, there is one thing we always find to be the same. As a small business ourselves, we consistently walk away from this event feeling inspired and hopeful. Getting to meet so many nominees and winners from all over the country gives us a renewed sense of what small businesses can achieve and how they really are the backbone of commerce and business in America. This is truly one of our favorite events here at Decibel Management and we re honored to be a part of it. Looking forward to many more!

Decibel Podcast

Greetings everyone! We re proud to announce that this week we re launching the Decibel podcast. We hope to bring you a series of rich (but brief, we all have stuff to do) round table discussions between Decibel and industry leaders to discuss emergent trends and challenges in the events industry.

Here s what to expect from our debut:

In last week s blog post we offered a run down of the major event cancellations that have occurred due to COVID-19 s effects in the US and Europe. In only a week the situation has escalated faster than any of us could have expected. The entire nation of Italy is on lockdown. A staggering, 8 states have now declared states of emergency and schools across the United States are imposing short-term, and even semester-long closures.

Major events like Facebook s F8 Summit and Google s I/O Summit have been put on hold. Even SXSW, whose organizers held out as long as possible, was canceled last week despite approval from Austin s Public Health Board due to social panic and the loss of major presenters like Netflix. ~~With major Instagram-oriented and occasionally music-oriented events like Indio s Coachella already receiving public pressure to cancel their events in early April~~ (it s been postponed), we expect COVID-19 s influence on the live events industry to echo through at least the Spring and Summer. Remember that even after the virus is successfully contained, it will still take time for public confidence in public events to return.

While we believe social panic is a key influencer in these cancelations, we understand the public s concern for their well-being and are here to offer solutions to companies who still have events goals this year. We are NOT approaching COVID-19 like a crisis, and are instead approaching it as one of many possible technical or tactical challenges that companies should account for in the planning stages of an event.

Your brand can still capture attention. There are still a number of ways you can hold events and get your message out without compromising the safety of your staff or the public. In fact, this is an opportunity for your brand to build up a robust online event strategy as the industry has been slowly moving in that direction for several years anyway.

We are joined in this week s podcast to discuss events solutions for the COVID-19 outbreak by our own David Sonntag and Dan Lamphier, PM for the AV company CMI. Keep a lookout for the recording to drop later this week!

Navigating COVID-19

This was inevitable. Here we are again to talk about COVID-19 (the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan in mid-December). While the major city and province-wide quarantines implemented by China bought the world some time to prepare, the virus is now on the loose worldwide, leading to quarantines, school closures and widespread market panic. For those of you keeping score, we re only 2 full months in 2020. We suggest calling this one a wash and fast-fowarding to 2021.

As members of the events industry, it should come as no surprise to all of you that threat of COVID-19 has had a major impact on planned public activities. San Francisco and Los Angeles have declared states of emergency. Seattle, Chicago, and New York are all experiencing widescale outbreaks. As we head into the Spring and Summer months when things in the industry typically start to kick in, we expect demand for public events will dwindle and demand for streaming event services to increase.

This week, we d like to offer all of you a brief rundown on industry reactions to the virus who is postponing their events and who is staying the course? How will the events industry (and Decibel, by extension) change to accommodate this pandemic in the long term?

The tech industry has been the most proactive with regards to shuttering planned events. In just the past week, Facebook canceled both their Global Marketing Summit in San Francisco, as well as their F8 developer conference in San Jose. The massive global tech conference Mobile World Congress was to be held in Barcelona but was similarly canceled due to widescale outbreak in Spain. The game developer conference GDC has been postponed to the summer, and even Google has even canceled their own internal conferences amid fears of a global pandemic.

There do remain several events that are pushing ahead as planned. Even despite an outbreak in Seattle, Emerald City Comic Conwill go on as scheduled. However, as Washington state has just declared a state of emergency, we suspect this is subject to change at any time.

We still don t know what s happening with SXSW which is set to take place from March 13^th to the 22^nd. While there have been public calls to cancel Austin s annual social tech and entertainment industry extravaganza, organizers have stated they are pushing ahead with the event with support from Austin Public Health and will be implementing public health measures to protect their presenters and attendees.

We know this virus isn t going to disappear any time soon, but life has to go on and companies will need to keep their brands and workforces stable as it runs its course. There are events solutions here, and in light of public health concerns we believe this could be the best time to look towards events companies with live streaming chops. Adobe, for example, has canceled all public events for the Las Vegas Adobe Summit (March 29^th April 2^nd) and is instead changing the event into a fully livestreamed, online experience. Events companies like Decibel can provide a full suite of online services in digital promotion, live streaming, and broadcasting to make sure events can go on as planned while still protecting the health and safety of their participants. Just reach out.

Whether you re planning or attending an event in spite of the crisis, we d like to offer you some resources to make sure you stay safe. Eventscouncil.org has this fantastic FAQ that is constantly being updated with the latest info on how to stay safe in public and tips on how to handle live events under these circumstances. It s very comprehensive. We suggest you visit that page frequently for updates if you plan to be out and about.

If you re looking for more general information on how to prep for the virus and stay safe, look no further than the CDC. You won t find a lot of doomy spin here, just a comprehensive rundown on current outbreaks and solid information on how to keep yourself healthy. Additionally, we ve put together our own sheet for our event colleagues with some tips to help make your events safer. Practice Safe Stage! Print it out and share it! Also, we d love to updated it with any additional good ideas you would like to add. (Note: We re not medical doctors. Our list is a compilation of ideas we think are good practice.)

Stay safe and get in touch with us if you need an 11^th hour solution to move your event online!

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