Atlassian Pty Ltd., a maker of software tools for everything from analytics to customer service, was named after Atlas, the Titan god in Greek mythology who holds the entire earth on his shoulders. Likewise, the company's marketers felt the weight of successfully pulling off Atlassian Team '21, the first all-virtual version of a customer-appreciation event that started in 2009. Aimed at prospective and existing clients varying from software developers to IT teams and more, the event attracted audiences who shared a desire to gain more in-depth knowledge on how best to implement Atlassian products via a heavy slate of educational sessions and forums.

Prior to the rise of COVID-19, the company staged the event in Las Vegas, the glitzy location itself a natural draw with attractions as bright as the neon signs along its famed Strip. But like so many others caught in the viral tempest, Atlassian canceled its 2020 event and crossed its collective fingers that it would be merely a pause for Team, not a finale. Yet, when it came time to consider reviving it in 2021, the pandemic remained an obstacle. Pivoting to an online event would avoid many of the dangers that still lurked behind in-person gatherings, but even digital was fraught with more risks than Atlas' fellow legend, the Hydra, had heads. "We were concerned about how to keep customers engaged, because digital fatigue had already set in with many of them," says Angela Smith, the company's head of experiential events and field marketing. "There was also a lot of industry buzz and peer-to-peer talk about technology failures in digital events." And to raise the stakes to Mt. Olympus-level heights, for the first time Atlassian would charge for an all-access pass to the event, where about 10 to 12 percent of the content would be available only to paying guests.

A Sisyphean Task
Much as any company might initiate its event planning by scouting for a physical venue, Atlassian started by looking for a digital platform that could meet its considerable needs. For example, the last in-person Teams in 2019 attracted nearly 5,000 registrants, and historically the event saw a conversion rate – i.e., the proportion that actually ends up attending – of 90 to 97 percent. Depending on how broadly the company marketed the event, Atlassian could expect an audience of 20,000 or even more, given that potential attendees would not face the logistical or financial hurdles of traveling to a geographic site.

The hypothetically large number of attendees was matched by the volume of speakers Atlassian expected to have on hand. Before 2020, Team usually supplied one to two celebrity keynotes on the main stage along with some C-level company big shots. The canceled 2020 event, by comparison, would have offered in excess of 150 speakers (including session leaders), with marquee names such as Malcolm Gladwell, the renowned author and podcaster, and Katie Sowers, a football coach with the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs, among others. Atlassian was able to reschedule them for the 2021 Team, but that also meant coordinating with them not in one convenient location with its own professional audiovisual equipment, but all around the country with every presenter's homebrewed AV setup.

Atlassian's marketers scoured more than 200 platform providers over the course of two months, but the vast majority lacked a Goldilocks "just right" mix of features and quality assurance. The platforms' biggest downfall was their general inability to offer a branded experience and compelling engagement. Frustrated with the lack of viable choices, Atlassian fell back on an idea as old as the Greek gods themselves: If you want something done right, do it yourself. Assisted by the agency InVision Communications and informed by lessons learned from producing small virtual events in 2020, Atlassian's internal creative services team started designing Team '21 around a few key principles: remove barriers, offer personalized journeys, and don't feel obligated to replicate in-person event components for their own sake.

Choose Your Own Adventure
It's one thing to lay down abstract guidelines about how an event should be designed; it's another to perform the grunt work of putting them into practice. But Atlassian accomplished it with panache and insight. To streamline the sign-up process, guests could register with just a single click if they already had an Atlassian account. (If they didn't have a standing account, they could quickly create one.) And to enable tailored learning experiences, Atlassian designed a variety of ways to deliver content. The first was Content Tracks, with sessions grouped by themes guests could choose, including Teams and Culture, Business Transformation, Journey to the Cloud, and Scaling for the Enterprise.

Next was Learning Journeys. If potential guests weren't comfortable with picking and choosing piecemeal, they could turn to this option, which consisted of pre-set "playlists" based on attendees' job functions and other criteria. Another way, Search and Filtering, let viewers search for keywords to find specific topics to watch. Additionally, there were Personalized Recommendations, which, as the title suggests, were targeted content recommendations served to viewers based on their registration data, profile info, and activities within the event – the last item meaning that even during Team, not just before, the platform would toss out content recommendations to guests they could sign up for on the fly.

No matter which approach guests took to select their sessions and activities, Atlassian built into its platform more features that made the sea of choices even easier to navigate: session bookmarking, global search, a resource "backpack" into which attendees could download collateral, a personal calendar that tracked their activities and schedules, and a "play bar" that allowed them to stop and start recorded sessions. Viewers could even easily upgrade to the all-access pass during the event with a few clicks.

In order to minimize the digital fatigue that might naturally enough result from such a deep dive into an online event, the company streamlined the number of session sections from 10 to four: Breakouts, Keynotes, Demos, and All Access. And starting 10 weeks before the late-April event kickoff, the company began promotional efforts that encompassed emails, online banners, organic search, paid social-media posts, and more.

Atlassian's goals for Team '21 grew as ambitious as Icarus' flight to the sun: While it initially hoped to register 20,000 potential guests and convert 55 percent of them to actual participants, the company also wanted to compel viewers to spend an average of four hours in the online experience. Lastly, it hoped to achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 30. With those goals firmly in place, Atlassian was ready to take off – and hopefully land a bit softer and more successfully than unfortunate Icarus did.

Business Class
Attending virtual events can sometimes feel like a Homeric odyssey that goes on for far too long and fails to capture the brio of an in-person gathering. But when guests tuned in on opening day, they first encountered a four-hour news-show-like format with a host that smoothly transitioned from, say, Gladwell and Sowers to soccer coach Jill Ellis and Peloton Interactive Inc. CIO Shobhana Ahluwalia. Guests gobbled up the multitude of sessions and speakers, the latter also including Zoom Video Communications Inc. CEO Eric Yuan and Slack Technologies LLC CEO Stewart Butterfield. Anyone starting to experience the generic "Zoom fatigue" could later view the content on demand.

The broadcast was followed by four hours of dedicated time for attendees to browse the on-demand content and watch sessions of their choice. To make the virtual event easy to explore, Atlassian designated these assemblies and other content with specific tags based on user level, product type, etc. To illustrate: Attendees could type in a keyword, and the items with related tags would appear. Personalized content recommendations were served on the fly to viewers throughout the event based on their registration and user profile data, as well as activities they took part in during the event. One of the special tweaks to the standard virtual event was a play bar. Appearing on their screens after the guests watched any fraction of a forum, the bar indicated how much of the content had been viewed, giving them a sense of their progress.

Purchasing the all-access pass entitled those users to exclusive content, which constituted about 12 percent of the overall subject matter. Among the select offerings were "A Conversation on Modern Work and Teams" with best-selling author Daniel Pink and Atlassian's futurist-in-residence Dominic Price, and another discussion zeroing in on how several of its customers implemented successful change-management programs. Owning the premium pass also meant participants could log back into the platform for eight months after the event closed to view the sessions.

What didn't happen at Team '21 is almost as significant as what did. In addition to ditching the physical activities that were an expected component of the in-person event (e.g., yoga classes and group runs), marketers eschewed swag and instead made donations to various causes. Speaker roundtables also got the axe and were replaced with online community forums. Another common feature of digital events was conspicuously absent: technical glitches. That's because Atlassian issued kits (which comprised a mic, webcam, and LED lamp) to all its speakers, ensuring the sound and visual quality was uniform throughout.

Atlassian Hugged
Shouldering the burden of veering to a virtual event with such aplomb might have left even Atlas impressed – it certainly did Corporate Event Awards judges. "Definitely the top event in my book," said one juror. "The execution was high-quality, the content stellar, and the attendee experience exceeded expectations." The results mirrored judges' admiration. Hoping to register 20,000 potential guests and turn 55 percent of them into actual attendees, Atlassian racked up 24,315 registrants and converted 67 percent, substantive gains of 22 percent above each goal. Its NPS hit 36, 20 percent above target. And capping it off, approximately 4,500 registrants – about 19 percent – bought all-access passes, suggesting a pay-to-play option could defray the costs of future events. Finally, while media attention wasn't an official objective, the company received coverage in top-tier US, Australian, French, and German publications, including Business Insider, Australian Financial Review, and TechCrunch.

These positive outcomes resulted from Atlassian's shrewd strategy of developing a bespoke platform with features marketers knew would appeal to their customers, from removing any barriers to registration to recommending the right content. Atlas may have shouldered the world, but Atlassian pulled off its all-virtual Team event with Zeus-like wisdom and fortitude. E