Privacy With Virtual Events

A go-to resource for you to consider when crafting your next virtual conference or customer event

For a long time, data has been the gasoline to make the traditional marketing vehicle move. In recent years, experiential and event marketing has stepped into the big data arena and greatly enhanced their ability to collect and analyze data. By doing this, they further justify the increased share of budget they are receiving from companies.

Virtual events had been coming for quite some time. Then they arrived in epic fashion with the global pandemic. With it, event marketing and meeting professionals salivated at the data capabilities of this new digital ecosystem.

Yet, many organizers aren’t quite sure how to offer security in this virtual wild wild west. So we’ve compiled some insights and considerations for the next time you plan to capture, utilize, and share data from your virtual events.

First and foremost, create a privacy policy that clearly spells out your organization’s intent with user data. Your policy should discuss how you collect data, what you plan to do with it, and most importantly — the measures you have in place to protect it.

People are often concerned with PII (personally identifiable information), so make sure that one of the first steps of your attendees’ journey is to have the opportunity to review the privacy workflows set up for this event by your organization, your partners, and your vendors.

Your sponsors will be a crucial part of your events success. By curating an experience that appeals to their target audience you are enabling a partnership that will likely earn repeat revenue for your organization. But an often-overlooked aspect of the sponsor-event relationship is how data is shared. Spend the time to hash that out with leadership from both sides so there is no grey area. The mutually-agreed upon workflows and access rights will save time in the end, can be vetted against domestic and international data compliance regulations (see more below), and can of course help shape your policy documentation.

On the vendor side, be sure to assess your partners as though you know there will be a data breach. Come up with a questionnaire to ensure you understand their data capabilities, privacy policies, and disaster recovery / business continuity plans. An absolute must-have for most data regulation certifications is end-to-end encryption — so be sure to check that box early.

When you know where your audience is coming from you can be sure your data protocols are compliant with various regulations.

Two that often come up are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Want to know more about these heavily policed mandates? The hybrid events platform InEvent put together this great resource.

One of the incredible benefits of increased data collection is the ability to customize and curate experiences for your audience based on their interests and personal information. However, there can be an adverse consumer effect if this ever crosses the line.

Each customization employed by your virtual event should include a transparent tie to your privacy policy and opt-out. Not all guests feel the same way about their data being used to deliver a personalized experience – give them the autonomy to decide for themselves.

Lastly, each event Best.Day.Ever. has ever worked on has required numerous stakeholders to be involved. We make it a point to write our KPIs on the board at each kickoff meeting and evaluate our performance against them each time we reconvene.

By building data privacy goals into your roadmap early, you will embed it into the fabric of your events. A culture will be fostered on accomplishing the goals as defined – so be sure to consistently include privacy as a key component for your group to strive towards.