How to Manage No Shows at Your Event

A lot of effort goes into planning an event. But, inevitably, you’ll have no shows as real life gets in the way, leading to both presenters and attendees being absent at short notice.

Sometimes you’re able to find last-minute replacements for speakers and presenters. However, event organizers can often find themselves left in the lurch, with little to no time to rescue their event from a no show disaster. 

This can lead to a re-organization of the entire schedule, or perhaps more significant breaks for networking – something which can leave your event feeling poorly structured and unevenly paced, negatively impacting the attendee experience.

Below we will talk through how, with a little bit of planning, no-show presenters can still add value to your online event, despite their lack of attendance.

Step 1: Create your event site

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to create your event site with Event Anywhere. To do this, navigate to and click the “Host a free event” button to register your community event site. 

Step 2: Ask them to pre-record their session

If a presenter or speaker can notify you ahead of time that they won’t be able to attend live, you could always ask them to pre-record their session. 

This is where a video-first platform like Event Anywhere really succeeds, offering several different ways to record and share video either before, or during an event, using either the public timeline or live stage. 

While it’s never going to be as good as a live session, having the ability to pre-record content in your back pocket can help to avert an event disaster, should schedules or commitments change with little notice. 

Step 3: Be sure to inform attendees that the session won’t be live ahead of time

Explain to the audience that your presenter could not be here in person but has recorded a message. You can then play the pre-recorded video on the live stage.

While you can’t beat live presenters and the spontaneous interaction with the audience, a pre-recorded video is the next best thing. 

So rather than a big-name presenter not showing up, a hybrid presentation with a live host and a pre-recorded presenter offers an insurance policy.

Other use cases for pre-recorded video at virtual events

There are plenty other use cases for using pre-recorded videos in your virtual event. 

Pre-recorded videos can be streamed on the live stage as corporate adverts, audience participation with pre-recorded questions posted on the public timeline, or used to keep attendees informed of happenings in the lead-up to, during, and after the close of your event. 

Pre-recorded video is also vital to give your event staying power, turning it into an online community that can be accessed at any time, from anywhere. 

Live events are great, but not everyone can attend – with recordings, you can turn live events into highly-sharable, on-demand videos. This gives more people the opportunity to participate in your event and engage with its content more than you otherwise would if your event was purely live.

Planning a virtual event right now?

Speak with our virtual event consultants who are on-hand to you can get started with Event Anywhere’s virtual event management software solution, and how it can help you maximize return on investment from your events.