How The Texas Tribune Pivoted a Flagship Fundraising Event to Virtual

“TribFeast” is an annual, high-production, high-visibility event presented by The Texas Tribune as part of the yearly programming for The Texas Tribune Festival. It is a gala fundraiser that brings together major donors as well as representatives of our institutional supporters. It also provides a limited number of high-value sponsorship opportunities for brand partners in support of our nonprofit newsroom. Revenue from TribFeast accounts for a small but meaningful percentage of our overall annual income, and is an important source of contributions from individual major donors.

Traditionally, the format has been an in-person gathering over food presided over by Tribune CEO Evan Smith and one or more featured speakers. Previous speakers have included presidential historians, the casts of celebrated TV shows and authors.

At the beginning of the second quarter of 2020, as part of our pandemic adaptations, we decided to move to a virtual format. At the same time, we chose to move the planned date for the event up from September into early June.

We had three primary goals:

1) Provide an excellent and enjoyable experience for our guests and speakers

2) Maintain (or improve) our net margin on the event vs 2019

3) Use TribFeast as a testing ground for an entirely virtual TribFest experience (planned for September 2020)

Slightly to our surprise, given the difficulty and complexity of navigating through a pandemic and the aggressive timeline in which we delivered this pivot, we achieved all three of our goals.

We more than quadrupled our margin by carefully controlling costs, received glowing feedback from attendees and sponsors, and identified several key areas of opportunity and lessons applicable to our upcoming TribFest.

Provide an excellent and enjoyable experience for our guests and speakers. Early into the planning process for the virtual TribFeast, we decided our primary success metric would be qualitative feedback from our attendees. That meant we gave special consideration to ensuring a friction-free and delightful attendee experience for a mostly non-technical audience who were less used to digital experiences.

To achieve this, we:

Maintain (or improve) our net margin on the event vs 2019. Because TribFeast is important financially to the Tribune, we needed to ensure that the move to virtual would not undermine the event’s profitability. Fortunately, we were able to dramatically reduce costs which helped offset a slight decline in revenue vs 2019. Taking the event virtual meant we no longer needed to rent a venue and hire additional AV support staff. This represented a significant savings. Our primary costs related to production (video editing and digital marketing assets) and the physical fulfillment of the gift packages. We spent nearly 75% less than we did on last year’s event.

We anticipated a revenue decline vs 2019 attributable to fallout from the pandemic, a hunch confirmed by feedback from sponsors.

The virtual format allowed us to market “event only” access (with limited physical fulfillment and no access to VIP experiences) at the $500 level which also improved our pipeline of potential new major givers.

Use TribFeast as a testing ground for an entirely virtual TribFest experience (planned for September 2020). By April of 2020, as we looked at the coronavirus trends we were covering in our reporting, we had already realized that hosting an in-person event for thousands of people in downtown Austin would be irresponsible at best. TribFest is our biggest annual event, a multi-day gathering for conversation and discussion with hundreds of speakers and panel sessions. While TribFeast is a very different affair — a single, elegant evening with drinks and dinner — we saw an opportunity to test and learn ahead of the more complex Festival undertaking.

That meant moving TribFeast up by three months ahead to give ourselves ample opportunity to learn and iterate on ideas and strategies. This was risky: our Feast attendees included some of our most loyal (and high-touch) supporters, few of whom had ever participated in a virtual event of this nature. We took the risk knowing that we would learn invaluable lessons about production challenges, script and run-of-show considerations, gaps in the experience, resourcing or the technology hand-in-hand with an audience that knew us and trusted us.

The main takeaways in each of those areas were:

Production challenges and run-of-show considerations: We opted to do a mix of pre-recorded video followed by a livestreamed, real-time conversation between Evan Smith and a guest. Last-minute changes to the pre-recorded video meant limited time to do additional rehearsals and run-throughs. We also encountered technical challenges related to internet speeds.

Gaps in the experience: We used Zoom’s “breakout rooms” to provide curated and exclusive VIP experiences with celebrity guests. While our attendees loved the content and the opportunity to ask questions of celebrity speakers, the technical experience even with a small number of guests was challenging. The flow to move attendees from a Zoom “waiting room” into a main room and then into a breakout room is not intuitive, and we resorted to talking to some of our guests through this process via chat and phone calls.

Resourcing and technology: A major challenge of virtual events is the front-loading of preparation and production as well as the need for multiple teams to be on high alert during the event. This is especially true for virtual events that combine pre-recorded with live elements. We underestimated how many people would be involved in all aspects of making the event successful. We had to divert staff time to content strategy (primarily designing and writing our email campaigns to attendees, as well as managing the Facebook Group); technical integrations and resilience testing; production of the pre-recorded video and then the live elements of the evening. A significant part of staff time spent on the night of TribFeast involved responding to attendee questions and providing technical support in addition to participating in the open and live Q&A during the event itself.