By Chris Lesieutre, Dundee Hills Group CEO

When the organizers of the Knowlton Literary Festival first contacted the LIVE! team, I admit, I had to do a Google search and pull up a map to find out where this Town of Brome Lake was and how the village of Knowlton fit into it.

And once I figured out the geography of it all, I had to ask myself: what was this seemingly sleepy little, out-of-the-way spot in the Eastern Townships (Cantons-de-l’Est) of Quebec doing hosting a literary festival?

Brome Lake Website

Digging further into it, I discovered these Eastern Townships and Brome Lake in particular have quite a lot going on, and not just in terms of absolutely fantastic rural landscapes with an abundance of opportunities for outdoor fun. They also have a long tradition of art and culture, with a rich vein deep in the literary arts. The area claims the oldest free public library in the province for one thing, and of course, Louise Penny, best-selling mystery author, calls it home and acts as Honorary Patron of the Festival. And then there is the singularly charming bookstore just across from the Mill Pond in the heart of town.

Louise Penny, Honorary Patron of the Knowlton Literary Festival

Lucy Hoblyn, the owner of Brome Lake Books, reached out to us in her role as the VP of the Knowlton Literary Festival. She was looking for ideas on how to run the festival in an online environment.

                           The Knowlton Literary Festival takes place each October and celebrates English-language literature with a particular focus on Canadian authors. Started in 2010, the festival has pulled in writers from across Canada to engage the local community in and around the Town of Brome Lake. And then in 2020, it didn’t. We all know why.

After canceling the festival in 2020, the organizers and the town were determined to make it happen in 2021, even if it meant not doing it in person. While not exactly sure how to pull off a virtual event, they had some ideas and they knew what they didn’t want. They didn’t want just a series of Zoom sessions.

I asked Lucy why she had decided to contact us.

“Because,” she said, “some of our people attended an international women’s day event that was on LIVE!, and over the first 12 months of the pandemic, that was the only virtual event, of many, that they said actually felt like a real event.”

No one on the LIVE! team had ever attended a literary festival, so we got a crash course in that first meeting. And we listened to the particulars of how the Knowlton Literary Festival didn’t just bring in noted outside authors, but really involved the whole community. They presented point-by-point the things that happened at the literary festival and asked how each event could be replicated online. Musicians, theater performances, book clubs, dance and yoga classes, tourist and local community information. Not just how it could be replicated, but how it could be replicated in the most true-to-life manner possible, so it would work for people who aren’t necessarily attuned to or up on the latest online technology.

The fun part about working with people who don’t come from the high-tech industries where we do most of our work is that they have no idea of the limits of the technology, so they’re perfectly willing to push beyond.

The team from Knowlton Literary Festival went away from our first meeting and then within a week delivered a thoroughly thought-out structure for the entire event. They built it around the premise of recreating the village atmosphere where the in-person literary festival would normally be held. They focused on the graphical presentation, creating an event map overlaid against a recognizable view of what would have been the physical location if the event were held in person. Room icons on the map included familiar elements like the VIP Main Stage, the Gazebo, Bookworm Café, and of course the Bookstore itself (where attendees could order their books, with proceeds going to the festival). The organizers felt that if the look and feel of the platform was attractive and familiar, users would immediately be comfortable and willing to engage within the platform, and not be intimidated by any preformed technical fears.

Along with these design elements and the familiar layout, the platform gave attendees total freedom to move as they wished between different sessions/stages and the static sessions/kiosks. This was a key element in the success of the event.

The music and theater events were held in the Gazebo, the Bookworm Café hosted the book club events and talks with local authors, and of course, the centerpiece, the highlight was a VIP Main Stage where the featured authors spoke, took questions and, as it turned out, engaged in some in-depth discussion of historical and current events, politics and science. It included authors coming in virtually from across Canada, from Quebec to Victoria Island.

Lucy Hoblyn summed up the experience:

“Let’s just say, a good part of our audience doesn’t sit in front of computers online all day, they aren’t technology savvy. So one of our worries was that no matter what the virtual platform, a good portion of our attendees weren’t going to be able to navigate it. But the LIVE! platform was incredibly intuitive. And yes, there were those few who just didn’t get it, including one of the guest authors, but nothing flustered the LIVE! team and they handled each user issue with patience and respect. Their focus really was on the user experience not on the technology; they treated our attendees like people, you know, like you’d expect to be treated if you were walking up to the information desk looking for help at an in-person event. It wasn’t just logging on anonymously to a technology platform. It was real people working with real people. All to allow authors to actually engage with their readers at an event at a time when no one thought it possible.”

“So the only real issue,” Lucy said, “was that the online map and the graphical representation we created seemed so real to some people that they thought we were having an in-person event. They showed up in the bookstore asking where the Main Stage was!”

If you want to get some great books, check out titles from featured authors from the festival here.

Click here to download pdf version of this article

We had been doing a lot of virtual meetings with customers, as everyone has been, and frankly we thought customers were being fatigued by the number of meetings they were in. Everyone looks the same on these generic platforms and we really wanted to have an experience for our customers that more closely mimicked what they would experience in a real person to person event. 

So we did a little searching around – mostly for a social gathering point – to try and re-create one aspect of our annual event, which had to do with meeting in a bar. And through that we found the LIVE! platform and then we learned about how that platform could be used to make a really compelling space for customers to have meetings with us. We took to that right away, it really was different. 

We were able to have virtual meetings with our customers really at any time because we have a very good well-aligned customer base. But in the virtual world, we had a lot of people to see, we had a compressed time to do it in and by having the LIVE! platform with the multiple meeting rooms, we were able to compress our schedule down to a much more efficient time frame. For example, if we wanted to have 15 private meetings with our key accounts, that would go over a three-day period. We were able to have those meetings all in one day because we were able to have multiple meetings simultaneously with exactly the key people in the key rooms simultaneously on the platform, but the customer still felt like they were having the direct, personal experience. So the efficiency of the platform was really what surprised us – how much we were able to accomplish in a short time-period. 

We have a lot of very sophisticated customers that we communicate with on a very high level. They share their long-term strategies with us and us with them, and doing that in a private setting is really what’s required. Doing that in the social platform, of course, is difficult because of the uncontrolled environments you can find yourself in. So having the private room, our customer was able to come to the event, more around the event and experience the things that they wanted, but at a specific time they were to go to the EVS host, be greeted by name, we knew exactly what room they were going to be going to and who was supposed to be there. And then once they were in that room, they were out of view of all the other attendees at the event, and therefore they felt comfortable that they could have that higher-level strategic experience with us without being concerned about leaking of information. 

Everybody is experienced with doing a virtual meeting – we’re all living that way these days. But using the LIVE! platform with it’s features was a new experience for us and we wanted to make sure our customers were comfortable and could take advantage of the platform. So the LIVE! team was able to give us a lot of education well before the event on how to use certain rooms, what kind of content would be good in one room versus another, ideas that they’ve seen work at other events.. And it gave us the ability to actually craft variable experiences for our customers. So it really allowed us to customize and tailor. The other thing was we had to bring a lot of our team into the virtual meeting to support the event – there hosts and things like that, and presenters – and not all of them were extremely well-experienced with operating virtual platforms. And so we had several days of training leading up to the event, and dry runs where everybody got to experience the platform – how to navigate it, how to use the tools – because that made our customers more comfortable when our people knew exactly what to do. And finally we of course had the LIVE! staff online in the background that if we ever ran into some trouble, all we had to do hit on the Help button and we were able to connect with a LIVE! staff member that either helped us or helped one of our customers get what they needed. So it was a really good 360 pre- and during the event support model. 

By Chris Lesieutre, Dundee Hills Group CEO

While I was lying back in the dentist’s chair today, I was thinking about the word “fatigue.”

I don’t know who coined the term “Zoom fatigue,” but it’s been on my mind.

There isn’t a lot you can do, besides thinking, while recumbent in a dentist’s chair — though I am impressed with how, in modern dentistry, they really try to make you comfortable and give you distractions while they work. I was offered headphones and my choice of Pandora playlists. I could even watch Netflix. I thought, “What the hell, I’ll put on an ‘easy listening’ playlist to calm my nerves,” maybe drown out some of the unpleasant sounds that I was expecting.

It’s a great idea, but seriously, is there enough volume in the world to buffer the high-pitched wail of a drill grinding into your teeth? I’ll say it works to a certain degree, but it does nothing to stop the more general unpleasantness of the situation — the spray that’s shooting out of your mouth, the sensation of almost-having-to-gag-but-not-quite, feeling like you need to swallow but can’t really make it happen, or the absolute worst: the odd dry burning smell as the drill screams and grinds your enamel into dust. You can see the dust drifting out of your mouth in a loose cloud.

No “easy listening” playlist of 1970s Elton John, Gordon Lightfoot, and Hall and Oats is going to calm down anyone with that sight, or the terrible screeching that comes with that most awful smell. For just shy of two hours.

So, let’s talk about fatigue.

After a few hours in the dentist’s chair, I feel totally spent, shattered actually, almost catatonic. As much as I told myself to relax and breathe, I was totally on edge the whole time. I would catch myself clenching my fists or grabbing my wrist and squeezing tight. The whole two hours. It was exhausting.

How does that compare to the fatigue of Zoom meetings? Well, I’d suggest there’s no such thing as Zoom fatigue. It’s really just boredom. And it has nothing to do with the technology of video conferencing; it’s just plain bad meetings and bad virtual events.

Too many people are sitting through too many meetings that are dull. Even when a topic is of interest, the attendees have no chance to actively participate and engage. The experience leaves people with feelings of frustration, disappointment, even emptiness.

That leads me to one of the big gripes I have about virtual events as we’ve experienced them in the past year. You go into an online event, and the content being presented may be outstanding … and yet, you feel totally alone in the environment. There is no real opportunity for true human interaction.

I don’t know how many times at in-person events I’ve been sitting in a presentation and then realized, for example, that hey, Michel Proulx is sitting right behind me, and look, it’s MC Patel just across the aisle, and oh, there’s Paulien Ruijssenaars coming in late. I think, “I need to talk to those people as soon as the session is over!” And I do, and they introduce me to new people and vice versa. In live events, I can do that. In virtual events, not so much — mostly not at all. In most virtual events, it’s impossible to tell who else is in the room, let alone have an opportunity to meet with them after the event or between sessions. It’s not Zoom fatigue; it’s boredom and loneliness.

Even when I’m in the dentist’s chair, the dentist and the technician pause once in a while to ask me how I’m doing. True, with a bite guard in your mouth stretching your jaw well beyond where it was naturally meant to go, you can’t really reply with anything more than basic grunts. But still, it’s more attention than I get at most virtual events.

We can do better. (Go ahead, ask me how.)