On May 15th, we wrapped up another M365 Philly Virtual event an as I've done each year, here's my post-event article. Last year's event was 3 days long with 3 keynote speakers and 33 sessions. This year, we did 2 days with 1 keynote speaker and 45 sessions.
The Planning
Based on last year's feedback, people seemed to enjoy the 3 half day format that we did. Three days were a bit of a challenge for the team though with work obligations. This year, after a bit of discussion, we decided to reduce it to 2 days. The Friday-Saturday format was partially to help the team out. We also kicked around the idea of doing a full day on Saturday but in the end we decided to keep it at a half day. While this was helpful for the team, we did have concerns that a lot of people wouldn't want to sit in on sessions on the weekend after sitting in front of a screen all day during the week. Turns out we were right and did see a drop off. Saturday's attendance was still good but not as large as Friday's attendance.
About half way through the planning, we reached out to Mark Kashman, co-host of the Intrazone podcast, and Mark was gracious enough to agree to be our keynote speaker. Mark spoke about Microsoft Viva and knocked it out of the park.
The Sessions
We received a lot of submissions this year which was great. When making the speaker selections, we approached it the same way that we did last year which was to set Sessionize to anonymize all of the speakers. For the most part, we didn't know who we were voting for. We didn't know if we were looking at a submission from an MVP or a new speakers. We were strictly voting based on topic descriptions and in the end, we sorted the sessions by highest score and picked the highest rated ones. If someone had multiple sessions with high scores, we picked their best one and moved on to the next speaker.
I like this approach. We had a lot of speakers that I wasn't familiar with. Most of our speakers appeared to be outside of the US too.
Before the event, we had a couple of days where we performed tech checks and we had a surprising number of issues with speakers connecting. That made me quite a bit nervous about the actual event but I'm only aware of one speaker who had an issue connecting on the day of the event and I believe it was resolved fairly quickly.
Leading up to the event, we had to adjust and fill some holes that opened up. I believe we had 4 cancelations in the last few days of the event after selections and a few who had to withdraw after getting selected but before they were announced. All for completely understandable reasons. We filled all but 1 empty slot leaving us with 44 out of 45 sessions. Cancellations are expected so we had backup presentations. I didn't attend to present this year but luckily, I presented on a new topic that week and was able to plug into the event. I did have a minor snafu during my session. My very last demo wouldn't run over despite running 2 hours earlier. Manpreet also filled in a spot and so did another backup speaker.
The Sponsors
Last year, I wasn't sure how to approach finding sponsors because I wasn't sure what to expect or whether not being able to interact with the attendees would be a unappealing for the sponsors. This year, we did a little bit of outreach and there was a bit of buzz around this event so we ended up with 4 sponsors and additional interest.
One of our sponsors also had their own raffle and gave away a DS220+ NAS which I now plan to buy!
The Numbers (Charity and Attendees)
While all of the event planning was happening, I was in contact with someone at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia about doing a small fundraiser for the hospital. We ended up using their platform to setup a small goal of $1000 which I'm happy to say we surpassed.
Overall, I'm really happy with how the event turned out and here is a breakdown:
- 918 unique views through Microsoft Teams
- 274 views on YouTube
- 331 businesses represented by the registered attendees
- $1,130 donated to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
The Team and Support
The core team from last year got together this year to put this event together with additional support from David Leveille from Crush Networks who helped promote the event. If you heard about the event on social media, it is highly likely that David was behind it.
We had some challenges with getting producers this year. I think we were banking on certain people being available and we ended up needing a few more people to step in and help out.
Special thanks to these producers for stepping in at the last minute:
- Mohamed Derhalli
- Tosha Desai
- Jamie Willis-Rose
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