Back in Action, Virtually

After a five-month hiatus that felt more like five years, the RGI team was thrilled to get back in the saddle last week and produce an event with a new client: The Climate Reality Project.

The Climate Reality Project was founded by Vice President Al Gore with the goal of creating “a global network of activists committed to spreading awareness of the climate crisis and working for solutions to the greatest challenge of our time.”

Since the organization’s founding, the CRP team has held 43 in-person trainings across the US - and around the world - bringing together thousands of people at a time for a week of inspiring keynote speakers, networking with fellow Climate Leaders, and developing plans for the requisite “Acts of Leadership” all participants must complete by the end of their first year as a Climate Leader.

If this program sounds like a massive undertaking, that’s because it is.

At the beginning of the year, RGI events came on board the CRP team to help produce the next five in-person trainings through 2021. But as we now know, 2020 had other plans.

When it became clear in-person events of this scale were no longer possible for the foreseeable future, a pivot was needed. The climate crisis – rooted in causes and challenges undeniably linked to those of the current pandemic – is all too important to put on hold, so the team decided to take things virtual.

From Saturday, July 18 to Sunday, July 26, thousands of participants logged onto the CRP training website, accessed highly anticipated speeches (available real time, and later on-demand), networked with fellow trainees via the remote conferencing platform we are all too familiar with these days (Zoom), and strengthened their leadership skills through online learning exercises.

This conference was by far the largest virtual event RGI has produced to date: over 5,000 participants logging in from every time zone, 9 hours of live video content, 5 hours of virtual group work, and 25 hours of virtually facilitated networking sessions.

The most important piece of advice we can share for those planning a virtual event of any scale is test, test, and test again. Virtual events – by nature – are tech heavy productions. In the days leading up to the conference, the team tested each platform over and over until we had a plan for every possible scenario. And if a situation arose that we somehow did not anticipate, the production team for each session had a separate Slack channel running on their computer (and a backup text group), to troubleshoot quickly and efficiently.

While we do miss the adrenaline rush of the in-person event lift, the virtual format had its perks (more than one 5 a.m. session was facilitated from the comfort of our beds). The most pleasant surprise was the personal connection we were able to make with the event’s participants. One segment of our work for CRP involved monitoring the support inbox. As we poured through comments and questions from attendees, we were able to read through the hopeful and excited notes shared with the CRP team, thanking them for their important work.

Those notes were a needed reminder of why we do what we do – mission-based events are our specialty because it is a joy and an honor to help organizations like The Climate Reality Project make change for good.