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Insights on events, technology, and the future of gathering
Quick answer: Moving an event online removes most of the reasons organizers cancel. Virtual events are unaffected by illness outbreaks, travel disruption and venue failures, they cost less to run, and their lower break-even point means weak registrations rarely force a cancellation. Since 2020, going virtual has become the standard alternative to cancelling.
2020 turned the events industry upside-down almost overnight. When the pandemic made it unsafe to gather in groups, events with hundreds or thousands of attendees were cancelled at short notice - a serious blow to organizations’ budgets, and to the morale of everyone who looks forward to them.
It never has to happen that way again. There will always be reasons an organization might pull the plug, but virtual events can take care of almost all of them. Below are the five most common causes of cancellation - and how going virtual solves each one.
Cancelling an event because of an illness outbreak was rare before COVID-19, but it has been commonplace ever since: by March 2020, around 83 million events had already been cancelled because of the pandemic. Even with far better protections in place today, local surges and outbreaks can still shut down in-person gatherings.
Virtual events are as pandemic-friendly as it gets. Everyone attends or presents from the safety of their own home or office, so social distancing is built right in - and if a key speaker is exposed to an illness and needs to quarantine, they can still deliver their presentation remotely.
A virtual event cannot be derailed by travel problems, because nobody has to travel to it. In-person events are regularly cancelled when keynote speakers, event coordinators or other critical personnel cannot reach the venue - a short delay is a minor inconvenience, but sometimes people are prevented from arriving at all.
With everyone joining online, that risk disappears. Your region could be hit by a blizzard that grounds the entire airport and it would not disrupt your event.
Virtual events are usually more cost-effective, so unexpected costs are far less likely to sink them. In-person budgets have so many different expenses and moving pieces that surprise costs often come up - and in extreme cases they add up until the final payments on the venue or other key parts of the event cannot be made, forcing a cancellation.
Online, your main expense is the event platform: there is no large venue to hire and no food and drinks to cater. Virtual events are also typically less complex to plan, because you skip the many in-person incidentals, so serious unanticipated expenses are much rarer.
With a virtual event there is no physical venue to fall through. No matter how secure an in-person booking looks, the venue could overbook the day and leave you with the short end of the stick, or an issue like a burst pipe, a flood or a fire could make it unusable.
Anything can happen when you are planning a large in-person event - running it online removes that entire category of risk.
Virtual events have a much lower break-even threshold, so weak registration numbers rarely force a cancellation. In-person events are always costly, and organizations that cannot afford to take a loss sometimes have no choice but to cancel when attendee numbers fall short.
Those situations are heartbreaking, but they are far less likely with a virtual event: because it is usually far less expensive to stage, a smaller audience still makes the numbers work.
Virtual events are not new, but advances in technology and smooth video streaming have made them more enjoyable and accessible than ever before - they were picking up steam even before the pandemic accelerated everything. Purpose-built platforms now handle registration, streaming, networking and analytics in one place: Canapii alone has powered 2,000+ events for 300,000+ attendees across 45+ countries since 2020.
Yes, but it is far less likely. The most common cancellation triggers - illness outbreaks, travel disruption, venue failures and budget overruns - either do not apply to virtual events or hit them far less hard.
There is no venue to lose, no travel to go wrong, and costs are lower, so the break-even point is easier to reach. Speakers and attendees can join from anywhere, which removes most single points of failure.
At a virtual event they simply present remotely. A speaker who is quarantining or stranded by travel disruption can still deliver their session from home, so the agenda goes ahead unchanged.
In most cases, yes. Going virtual preserves your content, your audience and your sponsor commitments, and it usually costs less than staging the in-person version - cancelling forfeits all of that value.
Safeguard your next event against unavoidable cancellations with the Canapii virtual event platform. Get in touch to see how it makes your virtual and hybrid events easier to run.