5 Steps to have a Successful Live Event for your Government Organization
Published Apr 06 2020 09:00 AM 22.1K Views
Microsoft

A live event is the online equivalent of what happens in an auditorium: One or a few people communicate to a large group, managing the full event experience and controlling the content that is shared. Attendees can watch the event, ask questions, and share in conversation with each other.

 

Hosting a live event in Microsoft Teams enables you to schedule and produce events for large online audiences. Live events use video and interactive discussion to host organization-wide employee briefings or host a virtual council meeting, and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across devices, or catch up later with the event recording that features automatic transcription and search.

 

So, how do you setup a live event?

 

Step 1: Plan the live event

Just like an in-person gathering, a live event works best when properly planned ahead of time. Based on your needs, you can consider hosting a lightweight event using a simple laptop and webcam setup and invite the presenters to participate using their own devices, or opt to use professional camera and sound setup. Further, to ensure a seamless experience for your attendees, you should proactively assign roles to various participants. Some roles to consider are:

  1. Organizer - schedules a live event and ensures the event is set up with the right permissions for attendees and the event group, who will manage the event.
  2. Producer – manages a live event, making sure attendees have a great viewing experience by controlling the live event stream. Responsible for starting and stopping the live event, and switching between presenters. Having a person dedicated to the producer role makes sure that presenters are not burdened with managing the event, and allows presenters to leave the event after they are finished presenting.
  3. Presenter - shares audio, video, or a screen to the live event.
  4. Moderator –joins the event in the “presenter” role to moderate and monitor questions and answers (Q&A). Having a designated moderator ensures timely attention to the questions asked by the attendees and makes for a better attendee experience.

 

Step 2: Schedule a live event from Microsoft Teams

After you have planned the event and assigned roles, you are ready to schedule you event! You can schedule a live event just like any other meeting, using the calendar in Microsoft Teams. First, you will enter event information, including the title, date and time, and assign people to roles.

 

Depending on the audience for your event, you can create a Private or a Public event. Public events are a great option to consider for events such as public townhalls, or council meetings. If an event is public, anyone who has the link can attend without logging in.

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Next, you will select a People and Groups, Org-wide or a Public event. If an event is public, anyone who has the link can attend without logging in, making public events ideal for town hall or council meetings.

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If you want to create a public event but do not see an option to create one, contact your IT administrator. The ability to create a public event is controlled centrally and, by default, users are not granted permission to create a public event. Your administrator can modify the policy for live events in the Teams Admin Center.

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Step 3: Invite attendees to the meeting

As a live event organizer, one of your responsibilities is to invite attendees. When you schedule a live event in Teams, it automatically sends the calendar invite to producers and presenters. From the calendar entry in Teams, you can get a link to the event and send it out to attendees.

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Step 4: Go live

When you want to start the live event, select “Join” from the invite. You will enter the event in setup mode. In this mode, you can add content and video you want to go live with. To get a quick overview of how to use the setup mode and go live, watch the video below:

 

You can also go to this page to learn more about various production capabilities and tools available to you as you go live with your event.

 

Step 5: Manage recording and reports

After the live event is over, you can choose to download the recording, as well as attendee and Q&A reports. Sharing the recording with attendees can help them go over the event and using searchable transcripts, even enable them to watch specific parts of the event that they care about the most.

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Visit this page to learn more.

 

Live events are a great way to connect with your employees as well as constituents. So, take your next council meeting or employee townhall online, and provide an immersive experience for your audience!

 

To know more on how to get started with live events in Microsoft Teams, go to aka.ms/liveevents

14 Comments
Brass Contributor

I recommend having 2 producers for Live Events in case anything happens (network failure, BSOD...) on the main producer environment...

Steel Contributor

@Sankalp_Jain, Any idea when the “Live Poll” (like in SfB Broadcast using Pulse) will come to Teams Live Events? 

Microsoft

Some other things to consider here that will be in our ITPro Playbook which will release soon:

 

1. Speaker preparation -  Ensure your speakers have good connectivity and audio devices. For our recent large scale event at Microsoft we allowed certain speakers to upgrade their home equipment (headsets) to ensure good quality.

2. Dry run - Every great event producer does a dry run especially if you haven't done a life event before.  Get used to switching what your audience is seeing from speaker to speaker or to presentation view. 

3.  Moderation -  It is usually advisable for a large Live Event to have someone else handling moderation so your core producer can focus on quality and visual content.  Getting familiar with the producer/presenter chat as well as the Q&A module is essential to having the conversation feel dynamic as it would in a standard meeting. 

 

Best Practice:  In my invitations I always use a short URL service to wrap the attendee Event link.  That way in case of any disruption we can easily reroute an audience. Trust me.. it's worth the effort!  

 

Multiple Live Events happen every day, now more than ever, and its an important component in your communications plan.  You can ask your questions here or bring additional questions about designing virtual events with all the tools you have at your disposal in PubSec to the Driving Adoption community.  The first version of our playbook is available here at https://aka.ms/O365ChampionResources.  We covered this topic in our March community call. Both the deck and recording are available in the community.   Thank you.

Copper Contributor

@Sankalp_Jain you mention "host a virtual council meeting" which is exactly what we wish to do, however your very informative article does not mention the very restrictive limitation that presenters must use the desktop Teams app which regrettably means Live Events is a non-starter for 1,000's of councils. Are you aware of any plans to change this ?  

Copper Contributor

We've recently started live events where all the presenters and producers are in different locations, i.e. everybody is at home.  There's a huge need for the producers and presenters to have a separate way of communicating that can't be heard/seen by the audience.  For example, sometimes the presenters want to have an offline discussion about who should answer a question submitted by the audience, or need to nudge each other about advancing a slide.  Until Teams is able to handle pop-out windows for separate chats, we've used two mechanisms for communication: (1) a group SMS chat, (2) an un-published question in the Q&A.  Any suggestions from Microsoft or other readers on better ways to handle this communication?

Steel Contributor

@Brad Newton

The chat window in the live event is only for the producers/presenters, you can use this to communicate. 


And to make sure your teams will not be visible for the recording while sharing your screen, make sure to use at least 2 screens. On your primary screen you can run Microsoft Teams and on the secondary monitor you can open an application you need to present. If you only want to present a PowerPoint, you can share this directly, with the possibility to switch between PowerPoint and Teams, without exposing your entire screen.

Let me know if you have more questions.

 

For now

Kind regards & stay healthy,

Mitchell Bakker 

 

Copper Contributor

Is it possible for the organizer's video to be pinned so that (only) she/he can be seen on full-screen?

Copper Contributor

A couple questions about live events: is there capacity to require registration so as to build a record of attendee profiles and contact information? Can the organizer poll attendees during the meeting? Is there a chat window for attendees to use during the presentations, or a Q+A function? Thank you!

Copper Contributor

Becky - you can set up the meeting to include a Q&A and a Chat session... When we've run Live Events we usually have a Q&A so that the presenters can accept questions, answer them privately, speak to the answers, or answer them in writing and publish the results to all attendees.  If we have a Chat session we usually announce that it is unmoderated and the presenters won't be following it, so it's solely for interaction between attendees... but if you have a big enough presenter/producer team you might be able to have someone participate in the chat.

 

Participation in the meeting can be limited to people within your organization, and the attendee report you download after the meeting shows when they each joined and when they left the meeting... but in our last event there are about 16 'join' events out of close to 700 that don't have names... which might mean we didn't correctly limit participation.

 

I don't know how to poll the audience during the meeting - I'll let one of the experts answer, but I suspect there's a way to do this with a Yammer poll inside the event... but I don't know how to make that a seamless experience for the attendees.

 

RG_IITM - for a Live Event, unlike a Teams Meeting, the Producer controls exactly what the audience sees - so it's very easy to pin the organizer's camera feed or screen share so that nobody will see anything else.

Copper Contributor

our city council is running its meetings using Teams, but the public speaking segment is kind of torturous.  members of the public wanting to speak must register (as they always have) prior to meeting and provide a phone number. when it's their turn to speak, they're called from a city phone and allotted their 3 minutes.  it's very cumbersome.  i see other towns just allowing Q&A or emailed comments, but that lacks immediacy, and if needed - give and take between the public and elected officials.

 

i'm trying to find documentation on the "Lobby" feature of Teams so that potential speakers could be queued up and then let into the meeting one by one.  i'm not sure we'd allow camera access - folks are terrified of "zoombombing" - but it would seem to make a lot more sense speaking via PC than sitting at home waiting for a call.  naturally, we could moderate comments, albeit moderately - even at a live council meeting people have a right to a certain amount of speech that others might find offensive - that's an issue for the attorneys, not me (thankfully).

 

if anyone could point me in the right direction or has any experience with this feature, i'd appreciate it.  the MS-Teams documentation isn't really giving me what i need.

 

thanks!

Copper Contributor

I would also add that considering accessibility is critical. Be sure to ask if anyone participating needs any sort of accommodation and, if so, whether you can offer it. 

 

That said, it's disappointing that the images in this post don't have alt-text. In this day and age, it should be a given to consider accessibility whenever sharing content with the public.

Copper Contributor

It is possible to go live on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook while taking live meeting on Microsoft Teams? 

Copper Contributor

I saw a question regarding Live events, asking whether or not preregistration could be required in advance (not just an attendee report after the event). I don't think I've seen an answer yet. Can anyone advise if this is possible and how?

Brass Contributor

 

RStephens0124, according to several sessions at Ignite, this feature is coming soon, but no firm date, as usual.
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