How to Run a Best in Class Virtual Annual Meeting
When the March 2020 lockdown hit, I was scared. Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because at Female Founders Fund, we run a very robust in-person event series which is an integral part of our Platform strategy. (Since joining the fund in 2018, I have put on over 90 in-person events ranging from intimate press dinners to 250+ person networking events.) At FFF, events are key to our DNA — both in terms of building our brand, but also in facilitating important introductions leading to deal flow and follow-on investments for our portfolio companies. I knew that we needed to quickly rethink our strategy with limited information and this was a new challenge for me.
Typically, we host our Annual Meetings for a group of 50–75 existing and prospective limited partners on the rooftop of the Nomad Hotel in NYC. As with all of our events, we aim for this to be a best-in-class event experience comparable to any funds with greater AUM. So, this year we decided to partner with a production company to help us run our first-ever virtual Annual Meeting.
After several attendees and platform folks reached out for advice, we decided to share exactly what we learned with the greater community. Based on my experience, here are my 8 tips for running a best-in-class virtual AGM:
- Align on the vision
- Find the right partner
- Start early and stay organized
- Reach for a star keynote
- Inspire your audience
- Showcase your team
- Mix it up
- Over communicate
More below.
Align on the vision
It’s important to start the conversation around vision for the meeting with partners and decision-makers as early as possible — ideally 4–5 months in advance. Some guiding questions for the discussion could include:
- Which (virtual) events have you attended that you liked, and why? Get as clear as possible on the why.
- Who is your dream keynote and why?
- Anything in particular you want to make sure we incorporate (a certain speaker, founder(s), programming, presentation, announcement, gift, etc.)
- What’s our budget? Is there any flexibility if needed?
- How do you want your attendees to feel throughout and after the meeting?
- What do you want your LPs to take away from the meeting?
After aligning with the FFF team, we decided we wanted the feeling of our virtual meeting to be as similar as possible to in-person — engaging, high caliber, well branded, and inspiring. The goal was for our LPs to log off feeling connected to FFF’s vision and mission.
To accomplish this, we knew we needed a high-profile keynote speaker to attract the audience; presentations from our founders about how FFF has supported their growth; and testimonials from peers in the community. Aesthetically, we had just gone through a brand refresh so it was important that all assets reflected FFF’s new “look” from start to finish — from our registration page on Splash, which highlighted event speakers and helped us maintain a beautiful, design-forward, first impression for guests — to branded agendas we attached in our emails, and the look of the recorded presentation.
For me, it was helpful to meet with FFF’s Founding Partner Anu Duggal and the FFF team as early as possible so I could prioritize the non-negotiables and begin drafting up a plan of action.
Find the right partner
Finding the right production company to use will be the #1 most important decision you’ll make in this process. To find ours, I polled the Global VC Platform group for production company recommendations — most frequently mentioned can be found on this list here. After diligencing and interviewing our top picks, we decided to move forward with one company who had worked with a fair amount of other VCs for large-scale virtual events.
Working with a partner was a huge learning experience as we typically operate somewhat independently. This particular production company was helpful with filming, managing camera logistics, stitching the presentations together, and live-streaming support day-of. Now that I know what to look for, I would recommend asking the following questions during the interview process:
- Get samples of the work the production company has done for other firms so you have a sense of product quality and content styles.
- You should have ONE point person on their team who manages communication and logistics with their camera, design, and production staff. The idea here is to get someone who is experienced with this type of event and can basically coach you on best practices, develop a deliverables timeline with you, and meet with you weekly to align on progress and answer questions. Ideally, you should be project managing and leaning on this person for their expertise, vs. micromanaging. I would advise meeting with this person (and possibly request a general plan or deliverables timeline) ahead of hiring the company to get a good sense of their working style, and reference them with 2–3 platform or operations folks on the VC side who they’ve worked with on similar projects before.
- Be clear about your expectations around the day-of streaming platform that will be used for the attendee view. If you want the meeting to be gated (no one except who RSVP’d can attend, no one can record the meeting, etc.), get the company to outline in writing what they can and can’t guarantee. Usually, there will be an additional cost for the streaming platform so it’s important to understand the necessity of what they’re recommending.
- For pre-recorded content, see if the company has access to a teleprompter or some way for the presenter to read their speaking notes while recording. It was challenging for our presenters to memorize their script, which made the delivery seem a little less natural.
- Finally, if you’re including multiple people for a certain section (i.e. testimonials), see where you can cut corners to make pre-recording as easy as possible on the speakers. For the first few speakers in our sizzle reel, we shipped a relatively complicated camera and lighting set to them and coached them through how to use the equipment over Zoom, even though their entire testimonial lasted typically less than one minute. By the last speaker recordings, we switched to using an iPhone which was nominally less polished, but the ease for the speakers made it worthwhile.
Start early & stay organized
None of us had experience planning a virtual event to this scale before, so there were a bunch of learnings along the way. Fortunately, we started planning in May for a September meeting, so we had ample time to plan and run into logistical issues or delays. For this type of event (larger scale, high importance, quality of attendees), my recommendation is to start planning at least 3 months in advance — 4 if possible. (For example — for 2021’s virtual LP Summit in October, we are sending out Save-the-Dates this June.)
High-level, our planning process looked a little like this:
4 Months Prior
- Interviewed & diligenced production companies. Decided to move forward with one company.
3 Months Prior
- Started building out a checklist of to-do’s by week (i.e. 14 weeks out, 13 weeks out, etc). I lived by this checklist and met with my teammates weekly to divide and conquer, and ensure we were on track.
- Started building our invitee list
- Began outreach to keynote speakers, presenting founders, and panelists
2 Months Prior
- Confirmed recording times with confirmed speakers
- Began gathering assets from our portfolio (i.e. brand videos, press imagery) that we could repurpose throughout the presentation
- Got speaking topics approved via our keynote speaker team
- Created our landing and registration page on Splash
1 Month Prior
- Sent email invite out announcing keynote speaker with Splash page linked
- Completed sizzle reel and founder presentation recordings
- Internally agreed on visual aesthetic of the final presentation
- Began to stitch sizzle reel together
Month Of
- Sent the final agenda to attendees
- Finalized the sizzle reel
- Recorded FFF’s fund presentation
- Finalized run of show
- Completed multiple run-throughs with FFF team and production crew. I highly recommend doing a dry run with your team and production agency a few days before your event (sometimes more than once).
Day Of
- It’s game time! Today is the day to delegate. If you are overseeing/running the meeting, I would highly suggest getting a second person on your team to help with things like: attendees who are having trouble logging in day-of; anyone who wants to join last-minute but hasn’t RSVPed; panelist timing & coordination, etc.
Day After
- Followed up with attendees, and with those who didn’t log in to share the presentation recording.
Reach for a Star Keynote
To help our meeting stand out among the hundreds of virtual events in 2020, we wanted a really special keynote speaker. Given most people were quarantining at home, we had greater access to people than ever before. I would highly suggest a virtual keynote so you’re able to take advantage of remote accessibility, particularly if you are integrating pre-recorded content into your Annual Meeting.
We were incredibly fortunate to confirm one of our LPs, Melinda Gates of Pivotal Ventures, for a conversation between her and F3 Founding Partner Anu Duggal around the topic of investing in diversity — you can watch it here. Added bonus: because the content was recorded, we were able to reformat the talk into a mini episode on our podcast — the Two Percent — which we released following the Annual Meeting this past winter.
I suggest having a team brainstorm to develop a collective list of dream speakers, and drilling back to find who on your team (or in your portfolio) could help make an introduction. Gentle persistence and flexibility with speaker timing and format is key — another important reason to start planning as early as possible.
Inspire your audience
Virtual or IRL, the whole goal of our LP Meeting is to remind our existing LPs why they invested, and to inspire new ones to join our journey. To get our audience engaged right from the start, we kicked the meeting off with a sizzle reel highlighting FFF’s vision, how far we (and the industry) have come since founding FFF in 2014, testimonials from our community of founders and co-investors, as well as a few words from our team. Watch it here.
If you are planning on creating a sizzle reel, it’s important to note that aligning on content, structure, length, and format of this video — as well as confirming speakers, coaching them through how to use the camera and lighting equipment virtually, and editing down for key quotes — was absolutely the most time consuming part of our virtual meeting prep. With that said, we were really pleased with the way the video turned out, and would do it all over again. The time and effort it took to create and execute the video was worth it, as we’re also able to repurpose the video on our website, on Youtube, and in future informational decks and presentations.
As additional inspiration for our LPs, we also decided to showcase 3 of our portfolio founders — Krystle Mobayeni of Bentobox, Natalie Mackey of Winky Lux, and Shivani Siroya of Tala — to share their stories via a short pre-recorded talk alongside a 3–5 slide deck. Their talks each touched on 3 main points:
- Their founding story and why they decided to build their company
- How FFF has played a role in their growth over time
- Their future vision for the company
By highlighting the experiences and vision of a few major players in our portfolio, we were able to highlight the scale of growth that our founders have accomplished across a variety of industries.
Showcase your team
The Annual Meeting is a great opportunity for LPs to get to know the team — particularly those who they don’t interact with regularly. For example, Anu has had me present the platform highlights from the year prior at every LP Meeting. This has been helpful for our investors to get a sense of what we do and why we do it, directly from the person running the programming.
For a virtual event, think about different ways to integrate your team members into the day — whether it be a short testimonial of why they joined the fund in your sizzle reel, having them present a portion of the fund deck, interview a founder or speaker, or moderate a panel.
Mix it up
We decided to pre-record the “meatier” content in advance which took a lot of stress off the day-of, and resulted in a more streamlined and polished finished product. For example, our fund presentation was pre-recorded so we could get the visual deck-to-speaker ratio right, as well as speaking energy and pace nailed down. Other pre-recorded aspects of the meeting were founder presentations and our keynote conversation with Melinda Gates.
To keep the audience engaged, we broke pre-recorded content up with live moments in between: welcoming the guests to the meeting, live Q&A following the fund presentation, general live MCing, etc. (One note: if you decide to take this route, I recommend having your speaker(s) wear the same outfit as they wore in their pre-recordings, so the transitions between recorded content and live moments feel more natural).
We ended the day with a live panel on the topic of “LP’s Committed To Diversity”, featuring John China (SVB), Lo Toney (Plexo Capital), and Leena Bhutta (DDCF). We decided to host this portion on Zoom which was easy/intuitive for the panelists, but integrated the view into our livestream so the experience remained fluid for our viewers. Involving LP’s in the meeting content was an excellent way to keep our attendees engaged by providing LP’s an opportunity to hear from their peers.
Over communicate
There’s nothing worse than putting all this effort into an event, only to have 20–30 people show up. That’s why one of the less glamorous, more important things to do is follow-up with your invite list multiple times. I would suggest following a schedule like the one below to guarantee you’ve reached your desired attendees at least 3–4 times:
- 3–4 months prior: Send a Save the Date (via paperless post, branded newsletter, or email)
- 2 months prior: announce keynote speaker and rough agenda, RSVP reminder (same as above)
- 1 month prior: final agenda, reminder to RSVP (email)
- 1 week prior: last call to RSVP to no response invitees (email)
- Day before: see you tomorrow email to attendees with necessary links (email). This can also be done via SMS reminder through paperless post.
- Day after: thank you for attending, schedule follow up calls with prospective LPs (email). Pro tip: draft this email ahead of time (i.e. the week before) as you’ll be drained the day after the event.
In Closing…
After a year and a half of hosting virtual events for FFF, I’ve learned that they can be an incredibly impactful way to build community. Hosting our Annual Meeting virtually provided the opportunity to reach more attendees and prospective LPs than ever before — we had 125 virtual attendees vs. our typical 50–75 in person, which was incredibly valuable to us while fundraising. That said, there’s something about the magic of in-person that can’t be replaced — so now that more folks are vaccinated and restrictions are lifted a bit, we’ll be integrating a small in-person component to this year’s Annual Meeting for a select group of LPs.
Now that we’ve gone through the process once and I understand better how the pieces fit together, if we needed to do a virtual event on a smaller budget (i.e. without a production company, or agreeing to only use the production company for piecemeal items), I would consider the following:
- Purchasing a camera kit and ring light to ship to the main presenters, and using an iPhone to record the shorter presenters
- Partnering with a freelance videographer to edit and stitch the pre-recording files together
- Hiring a freelance designer to partner with the videographer/editor to brand the presentation
- Hosting the event on a platform like Zoom, Upstream, Hopin, etc. and sharing your screen to show the recordings
All in all, I’ve learned a successful online event can be executed by anyone with an eye for detail, strong organization and forethought, clear written and verbal communication skills, and a good understanding of the feeling you want your attendees to leave with. So, for your next virtual Annual Meeting or Summit — make sure to align with your partners on the vision as early as possible, live by your weekly checklist, and practice, practice, practice!
I’d love to hear how you’ve executed best-in-class events at your fund! Email me with your feedback and additions to this piece at emily@femalefoundersfund.com.