This year we are continuing Platform Strategies as a virtual event series, with four bimonthly events beginning in May, featuring what we hope you’ll find to be an exciting agenda. The series features a diverse range of topics, speakers, and perspectives – from consultants and technologists to publishers and industry experts, from society and university publishers to commercials, and from STM to HSS. (View the agenda and register here.)
In planning for the 2021 series, we already had a head start over last year. In 2020, we had booked physical venues, caterers, reception venues, and more for the anticipated NYC events, holding out hope that we’d still be able to host them in person until May, when we reluctantly (and, with the benefit of hindsight, inevitably) shifted to virtual. This year, however, we’ve known for months that we’d again be virtual, given the continued uncertainty with vaccine timelines and a lingering unease with travel, which means we have been able to be more proactive rather than reactive in our planning.
Planning for virtual from the start has many advantages:
- We can spread programming over more of the year
- Our in-person Platform Strategies event would happen over a single day-and-a-half each year. But since no one wants to sit on Zoom all day, we can instead break up the events over many months, offering more touchpoints throughout the year and staying engaged as more analysis and data is available from our community.
- We can reach a wider audience
- Because attendance isn’t dependent on location, organizational travel budgets, or scheduling conflicts, more people than ever can access our (completely FREE) live events and on-demand recordings.
- We can implement virtual event best practices
- Virtual-first means we can set up our events not to mimic in-person, but to tailor topics and formats to being virtual. Our agenda reflects the type of discussions and formats that we’ve found to be most engaging as we’ve attended myriad virtual events over the last year. We’ve also set up our registration pages so that attendees can register for all the events at once, simplifying the user experience.
- We can build on things we learned last year
- We surveyed 2020 attendees to learn what worked well in this format and what we could improve on. In-platform surveys, personal outreach, and many of the topics on the agenda all came from direct feedback on last year’s events.
- May 13 - What Now? Making the most of pandemic pilots and pivots
- July 20 - How Unifying Your Data Expands Reach, Revenue, and Impact
- September 9 - Beyond Books & Journals: The wild world of content formats
- November 9 - Putting a Price on it: The changing nature of society publishing
Make sure you’re on the list to receive event reminders, recordings, and news about future events: email strategies@silverchair.com.