I am helping to run a conference and we have a dedicated digital version of it for the folks who cannot come onsite. Does anyone have any good ideas on how to engage the folks online?
The company I worked for in the past held in-person meetups once per year. The company was 100% remote and not everyone was able to attend. Here is what they did to facilitate remote attendees.
First of all they streamed all the main sessions. This gave remote folks the context of the event so nobody felt that they missed it completely. Please let me note that this approach does not work well all the time. Once I held an offline community meetup in a pub and I wanted to stream the event for folks who could not attend. Even though we sat in a quiet place, the whole thing was a complete failure so we stopped the stream soon. Two reasons why. The first reason is that orgs need different people leading the offline and online part. One person cannot be present here and there at the same time. The second reason is almost identical, attendees themselves cannot be offline and online at the same time. Do not try to link them, those two groups cannot socialize together. So there is no sense to stream anything except the official presentations.
At the same time, the whole point of such events is to make users socialize and to get to know each other. Back to the company I worked for. Two times per day during the event organizers assumed that folks would socialize offline. What they did was to assign special leaders who led the socialization part for remote attendees. Typically we played online quiz games or talked on predefined topics. It went very smoothly.