I write this just a day after we said goodbye to this year’s #CommsCampStaysHome unconference. We had more than 170 people attend this year, from as far north as Orkney, and as far south as Devon.

Held as a virtual event over two half days, there were more than 50 sessions; from how to incorporate internal comms into leadership and management development, to behavioural science in littering campaigns. From segmenting audiences to health comms, to sharing shockers on stretch logos, and stakeholder engagement if you can’t meet in real life (we liked this suggestion!).

These are my reflections, more than 24 hours on, of my favourite public sector communications event of the calendar - virtual or not.

If you’re running a virtual event, forget trying to replicate in-real-life events online. Think about how you can make it bigger, and better.

And if you make it virtual it *is* better for so many. Virtual events are more accessible for those who live in remote parts of the UK (like Orkney), for those in small teams who can’t spare the time or the cost that travel to in-person events adds on, or for those with disabilities who find events too difficult to negotiate. And they’re also much cheaper.

If you’re running an event online, a half-day is the right length. When planning #CommsCamp we debated this, but not for long. We ran #CommsCampStaysHome as two half-days. This not only made the amount of time in front of a screen manageable, but it also meant we could have more tickets available. Build in plenty of breaks though.

On the advice of the very clever Lloyd Davis we used some tech called QiQochat to power the event. QiQo - pronounced ‘Key-Ko’ - allows you to set up a series of rooms, which then link to Zoom calls. You then navigate between these rooms on your browser window. You know who is in each of these rooms and can add notes, ask questions and chat if you don’t want to Zoom. We had one room for each session as well as a few for ‘water-cooler’ chats.

If you’re using new tech, show people how to use it. The brilliant Dan Slee (he who started #CommsCamp eight years ago) put together a great instruction video to show people the ropes. And the online social the night before - replacing the curry night we have before every camp - was a good chance for people to get used to QiQo, and for us to properly test it.

Having 100+ people at a virtual event is fine. We could have had a lot more. The more people you have, the more session spaces/rooms you have. And people are mostly sensible and respectful. They mute their microphones, ask to speak, listen to others. We still wrote some House Preferences that we wanted everyone to be aware of, so if you’re running an event and not as trusting of your attendees as we were, have a read.

Maybe we should forget Twitter, or at least dial-down its importance. It’s been said before, but only 22% of the population use it. 88% are on Facebook and, for us, it was where the vast majority of our messaging around the event happened. It’s where we shared blog posts and videos, voted on the best cake of the day (you can download our special recipe book), where we put tips and tools from sessions and where we posted numerous dog photos.

The channel that also popped up in many of the discussions was WhatsApp, used by 70% of the population, and increasingly a strategic comms channel. Top tip: use it on your desktop from https://web.whatsapp.com/, rather than your phone.

*So was it better? Well I missed the cake table, and did miss the impromptu ‘hellos’. But I did get to meet some new and fantastic people I’d never seen at camps before. For me, as a professional and full-time extrovert, I just prefer the ‘normal’ #CommsCamp. But what’s normal now anyway, so if this is what we’ve got for a bit, I think it’s a pretty good alternative.

You can read more about #CommsCamp here.