Recently, I’ve been going through old HashiCorp photos, RFCs I’ve written, and presentations I made for various all-hands. I found a presentation from early 2017 where I was talking about how we, the Events & Experiential team, do what we do. I had defined a set of building blocks that were, and still are, the bases upon which all decisions are made by my team. This has enabled us to create consistent experiences for our community over the years while continuing to build upon these experiences as our company and community grows.
This year, the building blocks became even more important, as we had the tough challenge of quickly figuring out how to transform our in-person conferences to be fully digital-first experiences. HashiConf EU and US were going to be multi-day conferences with thousands of expected attendees, 3–5 content tracks, 11–15 full-day product training courses, 15 satellite programs, and 35–50 sponsors. There was no way we could recreate that experience successfully online. I’ve definitely seen companies try.
Instead, we referred back to our building blocks and focused on what was most important for our community — knowledge sharing, genuine connections, trust building, and designing the experience with empathy.
Knowledge Sharing
People are hungry for knowledge. Our community members want to learn from us and from each other. This is why we invested the most time, money, and energy into providing technical product workshops, curating content, and producing that content to be high quality. We made it easy for people to watch the content live or watch it later in the On Demand Video section.
Genuine Connections
It’s always been important for us to create safe and inviting spaces that encourage and enable genuine connections amongst our community members. This was a lot easier to create at in-person conferences, but I feel like we were able to accomplish this. Here are some ways we tried:
Code of Conduct- Make sure you have a clearly defined CoC with an escalation policy along with trained moderators have the power to handle situations as they arise. This is important!
Chat- Allow people to talk to each other throughout the day.
Profiles- Make it easy for people to create profiles with photos or avatars. This helps add a human element.
Lightning Talks- We built a feature in the platform that functioned like a Hallway Track. This allowed attendees to propose 15-minute talks that were added to the schedule, and people could sign up to attend.
Moments of Play- We had live music, cool art visuals, coffee lessons, latte art, and emcees were energetic and engaging. This made a virtual setting a nice place to hangout. It gave attendees things to connect on and to talk about.
Trust Building
It’s always been important for us to be kind, empathic, approachable, and humble. We always want to provide people with something of value and to not waste their time. We try to create warm and inviting spaces (in-person and now virtually) where people can hear our founders talk about the vision for our products and to hear deep dives from the engineers built the products. It all gets wrapped up into an experience that helps establish trust and increases loyalty between us (HashiCorp) and our community.
Design With Empathy
This building block impacts all experiential decisions from the platform we selected, the features we built, how we designed the schedule and breaks, speaker environments and decor, the broadcast animations, and so much more. For us, it was about designing a seamless virtual attendee experience and clearly communicating that experience with attendees.
We put our attendees at the heart of all decisions.
