This article originally appeared on Association Success

Building attendance for our virtual summit, SURGE 2017, presented us with an interesting challenge. The event was premised upon collaboration, and we were committed to the idea that the success of the summit would lie in the active participation of the attendees. This meant that we were not just promoting an event, but inviting people to become part of our knowledge-sharing community.

We needed to go about broadening our network and expanding our audience. And we discovered that this required calling for some support.

When it comes to creating an outreach strategy for a virtual summit, the potential to build and expand the event community through promotions by our speakers and sponsors is incredible.

Theoretically.

Theoretically, each individual brings with them their own network, so through their combined promotional efforts your audience will expand beyond the scope of your own community. And theoretically, each individual is willing to contribute to increasing attendance.

The problem is, it’s actually very difficult to get people, no matter how committed and excited they are about a project, to follow through on this. It’s a bigger ask than it might seem – and more importantly, our speakers had already put in so much effort to create amazing content, and our sponsors were equally generous in supporting us. We didn’t want to inundate and ask too much of them.

So we asked ourselves: how can we make it as easy as possible to share the event?

The answer to our question came in the form of a partnership with an event tech company called snöball, influencer marketing. We arrived at this solution after a period of attempting different strategies: to explain what led us to partnering with snöball, it’s worth going through the journey we took.