Many organizations have found that moving in-person events online has often doubled or tripled attendance while also attracting attendees from different parts of the country or from abroad (who would not have otherwise traveled).

Doubling a venue size from 100 to 250, or from 250 to 500 can be difficult and expensive. That doesn’t hold true of virtual events. Most platforms can scale to accommodate dozens or hundreds more attendees at an incremental cost. Conversely, scaling an in-person event can mean doubling the size of a venue, providing more catering and swag, and possibly turning away would-be attendees because the venue has reached capacity.

Companies can often attract attendees for online events more easily than they can for in-person events. Why? From the audience’s perspective, attendees may not want to regularly travel to a company’s various conferences and seminars. However, they may join for some sessions of different online events because they can join from their desk. From the company’s perspective, virtual events often take less work to arrange than in-person ones and so online events can occur more frequently.