ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’m not going to name names because that’s not the point.

But I am going to make a few points that I hope program planners take into consideration when they are putting together genealogy events.

First a bit of a disclaimer: at heart I am an old-school, in-person type of individual. While I have warmed to the virtual world slowly, I’m never going to be called an early adopter.

On the other hand, I’m not a luddite. Especially since I have seen over the last two years of life during the pandemic how such virtual get togethers are not just a stopgap until you can get together again … but in fact a vital extension of events going forward.

The effect of virtual or hybrid events in enlarging the audience potential of genealogy events is something that should be taken into consideration when before every event is planned from now on.

Of course, there are some activities of conferences that don’t translate perfectly into the virtual world, including exhibit halls.

But we’ve learned a lot in the last two years about how virtual exhibit halls can be made successful for exhibitors and conference sponsors. Providing the virtual attendees with a good experience requires that their ways of interacting with the conference be taken into consideration as an equally important (vs. the in-person attendees) rather than an afterthought.

On the programming side, the mindset of assigning a time slot to every lecture is one that should be challenged at every juncture.

The future, I think, will be for many lectures to be pre-recorded and made accessible either all at once or at several points in the conference. This can be a great way to cater to the flexibility of the online audience, in turn giving them more time to spend with exhibitors.

I hope all of us who do genealogy events planning will take into consideration that the world is now and forever going forward be a different place. There are opportunities to be grasped and much thought needs to be put into them.

And in addition to these ideas about events in general there are things we’ve learned during the pandemic about some parts of our audiences that should not be lost, such as offering closed captioning.

At a recent conference that used the online events platform Whova as the official app, some attendees were carping about not being able to turn off notifications. I smiled at the cluelessness of those comments—some of these notifications might be from potential cousins!

More generally, when I hear some of the defensive responses to calls for change in conference formats, I’m reminded of the old lament by many a church lady: “But we’ve always done it this way!”

And I’ll let that lament twist slowly in the wind.