How We Hosted a Virtual Marketing Conference

NDC [Archived] Marketing DAO
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We hosted Generation Crypto a Marketing Hackathon over the Course of November.

If you want to do something similar here are some of the steps we took.

Roles Required
Roles

  • Event Lead
    • Manages over the arching event and give final approval
  • Internal Sponsorship Manager
    • Manages the relationships of the internal NEAR ecosystem projects
  • External Sponsorship Manager
    • Reaches out to external sponsors for the event
  • Admin
    • Is responsible for all administrative tasks and organization
  • Speaker Managers
    • Reach out to potential guest speakers for the conference
  • Marketers
    • Responsible for advertising the event and bringing in attendees
  • Website Manager
    • Manages all details of website copy and functionality
  • Copywriter
    • Have a good copywriter for advertising, session information, and biographies

Need to Recruit:

  • Attendees
  • Speakers
  • Sponsors

The best marketing to recruit speakers and attendees was Twitter.

Steps to follow for signing sponsors:

  1. Reach out via introduction or cold outreach
  2. Set up an initial call to discuss the conference - If they can’t afford it, offer to waive the sponsorship fee
  3. Follow up the call by sending them: RFP Template, Conference Informational Slide Deck
  4. Optional: set up another meeting to answer any questions
  5. Send them contract
  6. Have them complete RFP, or fill it out for them
  7. Optional: if the sponsor is not responding, complete RFP for them
  8. Review RFPs with the team internally
  9. Have sponsor sign off on final RFP
  10. Collect payment for bounty and sponsorship fee
  11. Schedule sponsor for AMA
  12. Communicate AMA information and questions to sponsor

Legal Requirements

  • Finalize contracts for RFPs & Sponsors
    • Send the sponsor one contract that includes the sponsorship fee and the RFP amount
    • Relationship managers should have an easy process to send out contracts
    • Send them to Legal
  • Create a wallet to receive sponsorship fees and bounties

How to Staying Aligned

  • Hold a first-time introductory call
  • Set week weekly all-hands
  • Send daily updates to the Slack channel
  • Weekly team meetings

Copy that needs to be created

  • Outreach template for:
    • Internal projects
    • External projects
    • Sponsors
    • Attendees
  • Information on AMA
  • Information on Conference
  • Bounty Template
  • List of AMA Questions
  • Website design
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Thanks, @philipruffini! As someone who has run conferences before, it sparks joy to see a breakdown of roles :slight_smile:
What would you say are some of the challenges you’ve encountered with the conference? Would also love to hear more about the marketers role as I feel like that’s the most challenging part of organizing a conference- getting people to show up.

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Hey @shreyas ! I worked on the team that ran the event and thought I’d share some of the challenges our team had with the conference :slight_smile:

  • As you guessed it, getting people to show up at any conference is HARD!! But, an online crypto conference where all advertisements get banned is crazy! Even while we just advertised an event (not a silly meme token), we got banned by everywhere (google ads, facebook, youtube, twitter, facebook groups, reddit, craigslist, and upwork)! But, while the first couple weeks of advertising on the main channels were rough, we were able to adapt and conquer! We were ultimately able to drive 164,000 unique visits to the website and 208,695 views across the 30 days of streams. Through our social channels, we were even able to reach 8.3MM tweet impressions, and 107k profile visits.

  • Another challenge we had was the time it took to run the sponsorship cycle. From sign on to sign off, the sponsorship cycle took much more time than expected. And as everyone in Web3 knows, time is the moat!

    • To convince sponsors, we flew out to several in person events to do 1 thing: talk about this event. We reached out cold to over 200+ companies about participating as a sponsor and ran the sales cycle.
    • With sponsor bounties, we often heard that people don’t know which problem they want to solve because there are so many things they want help with! To finish the bounty before the event, we often pre-wrote sponsor RFP’s based on their biggest problem and sent it over. This cut down time dramatically between verbal commitment and participant. (Biggest NEAR request?: user acquisition :eyes:)

I actually wrote a whole post-mortem analysis on what it was like to run a marketing event in crypto with NEAR. If you’re open to it, maybe we can schedule a time to chat about it!

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Thanks for sharing that, @amartin.

Oh yeah, I hadn’t even considered the whole thing around crypto ads. 8.3M impressions is really impressive given that this was a fresh account. I’d love to chat more about the post mortem analysis. Please find a time here that works for you.

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