Budgeting for Virtual Event: Typical Items and More

Thanks to the pandemic, virtual event has become prevalent. Not only work meeting or webinar, we now hold wedding, engagement, religious ceremony, office gathering, and any other social events virtually. As this becomes the normal way of doing an event, your chance of organizing a virtual event will also increase. Hence, this might be a useful guide for virtual event budgeting when you are about to organize one.

1.       Cover the basics

Obviously, the participants and contributors of your virtual event will need internet access to attend it. If this is a mandatory event, you might want to consider providing for the internet access. The simplest way is to extend some funds to procure the internet access. Likewise, you – the organizer – will also require internet access, especially if you are doing live video streaming. Don’t forget to secure the bandwidth for it.

The other basic thing is the platform you are going to use to conduct the event. Aside from normal meeting, you sometime would like to have a quiz or live voting. By now you should be aware that to enjoy full features of the platforms you will most likely have to pay in the form of subscription. Hence, you need to understand the estimated length of your event and what feature you are going to need for the event so you can choose the appropriate subscription plan.

Tip: Check with your colleagues, friends, or families to know if others might have paid for the subscription and you could use the access without extra cost.

2.       Know your event

Just like you need to understand your enemy when you are going to war, you should also understand your event when you are organizing one. Depending on the agenda, you will have to budget for speaker or expert, MC, and/or entertainment.

If you are live streaming and virtual background is not an option, you might still have to decorate the venue, rent the video and audio equipment, and hire professional talents for recording. Furthermore, it is also better to take into account budgeting for make up and/or costume for those who are going to be the main stars of your event.

3.       Marketing

Now more than ever, virtually marketing your event is becoming more important. If you are expecting revenue or image building from the event, you might want to hire a professional to design the marketing materials and strategize the marketing effort (e.g. are you going to use website, social media, or SEO?).

4.       There are mouths to feed

Even though your event is virtual, if you event happens to occur during mealtime, it is preferable for you to budget for the food too. At the end of the day, you can’t fill in empty stomach virtually. Having the same meal while attending the event will create the atmosphere that you are attending the event together just like the old days when you share the moment physically.

5.       Sharing is caring

As previously mentioned, there could be quiz or voting that entails giving out presents. You might also want to share souvenirs to the participants or speakers. As such, you will have to prepare budget for this. It is not uncommon to budget extra for this item either because you manage to save some money because of or want to compensate for holding the event virtually.

6.       Other Expenses: Delivery!

Previously, people will have to travel to attend event. However, virtual event enables participants to attend almost from any part of the world. In relation to sending meal and gifts, this could be a challenge. You or your vendors need to arrange for delivery to the participants and be mindful that you need to deliver to many places. It could often be 1 package to 1 address and imagine if you have hundreds of people to attend the event. Believe me, the delivery fee could be very significant and thus, you really should budget it.

Tip: Do consider using different vendors to cover different locations but beware the participants could be comparing the meals and gifts they receive if they are not uniform. Ideally, you would want to use 1 vendor with several delivery points. Another tip is to provide your “gifts” in monetary form by sending it using e-wallet. This way, you will be able to eliminate the delivery fee (assuming the e-wallet platform does not charge for service fee).

7.       Miscellaneous

As always, it does not hurt to set aside extra budget for rainy days. Along the way there will be additional items to cover for. Just make sure you have budget for the main expenses so that the miscellaneous will be small in terms of percentage of total costs.