Event Spaces are no longer about square footage, or dividers, tables, and chairs. Event Spaces are going digital, and that means you need to take advantage of this for your own benefit.
Businesses like yours are moving digital, you're likely using a CRM, email software, and a bunch of social media to generate buzz. If you're looking to run a physical event, in person, and at a very real location, it's hard to image digital being much more than sharing the event photos and takeaways after the fact. But you're wrong.
It's the spaces themselves that are going digital, and you'll want to listen in to how you take advantage of these shifting tides in physical event space real-estate.
Quick Reads
Event Space Chains, Franchises, and Networks
Co-working-Gone-Event Spaces
Co-working spaces have taken the world by storm, with brands like WeWork, previously NakedHub, Garage Society, and others taking the opportunity to house small businesses, startups, remote workers, and freelancers in cheap, just-enough spaces that offer communal amenities and a good working environment with a certain amount of business support.
However, as long term property purchases come, rent always seeks to go higher, and what was initially a cost-effective way to run a business, has now become a cost as rent consistently rises until small teams can no longer afford the spaces. New property purchases and expansion help with costs, but the inflation rate and rising property costs always follow in its wake.
Co-working spaces already have the business support and infrastructure in place, so the move to Event Spaces made more sense as businesses of any size can justify the cost of one-time events. Meaning it's more likely to make revenue off space for events rather than tirelessly looking for tenants. Many tenants whom cannot scale as quickly as the rent does.
Spaces like Garage Society started off as co-working, but have quickly moved into a sub-brand of their own for event space only, called Garage Commons, which is a series of new properties that are only for digitized event space hosting. While one location may host the physical event, the event can be live streamed and projected to the other venues around the world to another physical audience inside those venues.
And of course, if you're planning to have a free event, then you just simply need to publicly live stream the event for all to see.
Event Space Chains, Franchises, and Networks
Recently it's becoming a trend for co-working spaces to venture into event space sales. It's sort of a natural evolution for spaces that can't rent smaller rooms for months or even years-long contracts with small businesses, freelancers and startups that have difficulty staying afloat as-is.
When it comes to events, however, any level of business finds use in event spaces both large and small, like corporate who can host something like a conference to as small as a round table luncheon. Events are also easy to expense as one-time expenses and even easier to justify the cost if the ticket price or level of engagement is juicy enough.
In this light, co-working spaces and their parent organizations have been carteling together, or privately expanding their event spaces to different cities. And sure, it's nice to be in other cities. But the real value of having event spaces across different cities and countries is the leveraging of live streaming to expand your physical audience into the digital space.
Event spaces have been transforming and reorganizing themselves to fit this model by either privately expanding as a chain with outright property purchases, like Garage Society in Hong Kong who's been slowly but surely expanding its spaces across Asia.
Others have taken the franchising route, meanwhile, other smaller event spaces without the means to expand have grouped together into a network of spaces that share a digital space, exchanging contacts and users among themselves. All of these formulas work in the same fashion, they're using limited space to expand into an unlimited one, where your reach is exposed at your whim.
Live Streaming: Web-based & Remote Events
Live Streaming has also taken more packaged forms provided by event spaces. Originally if you wanted to host an event, spaces would be bare bones, and you'd have to bring your own equipment to the space in order to create a live stream. You'd also need a place to host it like YouTube, or your own live streaming web pages.
These days, however, event spaces and especially those that spawned from Co-working roots, have enough business support services and equipment to stream, record, and host high quality, real-time live streamed events for the web.
As events become more exclusive, event organizers run into the issue of letting events live stream public, while still wanting to expand their audience to other geographies at once. Event spaces and their multitude of locations act as the perfect Remote Event venues. Each event space is connected to one another through their own private networks, which now gives events happening physically in one area the ability to project itself into other cities who have the same audience but still only for paying customers.
Event Space Promotional Partnerships
Probably the sweetest deal ever made with venues in this vein of going digital is the partnerships.
Before, an event ends, and the venue is left behind in the dust. You just move on and the venue aspect is in the rear-view mirror for your organization.
Right?
Do not make this mistake. Venues have other events at their location hundreds of times in a year. Why not tap into the vast database of contacts, experience, and know-how?
Event Spaces as well want their own ROI, just as much as you do. So approach the venue with an awesome partnership proposal. Maybe make your events exclusive to their locations? Share contacts is beneficial as well!
This not only gives you an exchange of contacts and so on, but wouldn't it make your event planning process a lot more painless if you know you have a venue that's always there to support you, maybe even with preferred or even free pricing?
Forget the digital aspect, but that venue partnership creates a long-lasting support beam for your future events, so why not take advantage of it? In this case, let the digital aspect be the icing n the cake.
Want to provide event software to customers for your space? Book a Demo and discover more about Glue Up's solution to running a digital event.
