When should you consider hiring us?
There are two quick answers to the question about when you need a dedicated technical admin for your hybrid event. The two considerations are numbers and formality.
Is the size of the audience above 15-20?
The reality is that a hybrid meeting is going to have technical challenges.
A hybrid meeting without dedicated admin support is going to take longer to discover issues and resolve them. Some problems are not solved until the meeting is over. (e.g. I waited 20 minutes for someone to notice I was in the waiting room for a hybrid meeting.)*
It is harder to ask forgiveness from the audience(s) if the number of people that are involved is greater than 20.
That is a purely practical suggestion. This will hold true whether the online participation is one individual or fifteen people
Is the meeting formal or informal?
A meeting that is more formal requires more technical support for everyone whether it is the leadership, the online participants, or the in-room audience.
EXAMPLE: Homeowner Association (HOA) Directors’ Meetings are a good example of how the “formality” of the meeting can vary.
HOA – Informal
Some Homeowner meetings welcome comments from anyone who shows up. Our Board has five Directors, and about that many homeowners also attend. They do not have a dedicated admin.
During the Board Meetings, the President encourages people to speak up during any discussion. Any technical issues delay the proceedings, and everyone just waits.
HOA – Formal
Some Homeowner meetings are focused on following and completing an Agenda.
Member comments are held until a specific point in the agenda. Then, members are taken in order and are often limited in the amount of time they can speak. A dedicated admin runs the technical part. The Directors can focus on the subject(s) brought up by the members.
Be Successful!
Because of my engineering background I speak in quotation marks, parenthesizes, and footnotes. The following footnote has no bearing on answering the question: in the title:
* I never did get into that meeting. Being ignored and overlooked is what motivated this particular blog. Later, the leader said that I should have sent a text message. That additional instruction – and the phone number – was not posted anywhere.