By: Natalie Johnson
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced every conference, training program, and leadership summit onto a screen, most organizations are still running virtual events the way they ran them in the first frantic month: speakers talking, grids of faces listening, and a chat box absorbing whatever engagement the format cannot kill. The budgets have grown. The platforms have multiplied. The results have not improved much, and the reason, according to Scott Tierno, is that the industry solved the wrong problem. It built better broadcasts when it needed to build better rooms. “What separates a virtual event people genuinely want to attend from one they simply tolerate is whether they feel like they are part of something or merely watching something,” he says. That distinction is not a nicety. It is the difference between an expense line that produces relationships and one that produces logins.
Attendance Is Not Engagement
The uncomfortable truth buried in most event reporting is that the standard metrics measure compliance, not value. Registration numbers, session counts, and time on platform tell an organizer that people showed up and stayed logged in. They say nothing about whether anyone met a person worth knowing. Tierno is blunt about the gap. “We have spent years trying to recreate the conference room online by putting people into boxes on a screen, delivering presentations, and calling it engagement. But attendance and engagement are not the same thing.”
His argument cuts against a habit most event teams have never examined, which is the assumption that content is the product. Think about what survives from an in-person conference. “It is rarely just the keynote or the PowerPoint. It is the conversation afterward, the person you meet between sessions, or the unexpected connection that continues long after the event ends,” Tierno says. Virtual formats have systematically eliminated exactly the part that generates lasting value, then measured the part that remains. The next generation of platforms, in his view, is not about better video. “The opportunity is not to build a better video meeting. It is to create a digital environment where people can experience some of that same freedom, connection, and sense of belonging we naturally experience when we share a physical space.” When the technology recedes, something else takes its place. “When people stop thinking about the platform and start thinking about the people around them, that is when a virtual event becomes an experience rather than another meeting.”
Disengagement Is A Design Failure, Not A Motivation Problem
Organizations spend real money diagnosing why attention collapses in virtual settings, and the diagnosis usually falls on the audience: people are distracted, they multitask, and they will not turn their cameras on. Tierno reverses the blame. “I think we sometimes blame people for disengaging when we should be looking more closely at the experience we designed for them.” Ask someone to sit through hours of sequential presentations with a chat box as their only outlet, and drifting attention is the predictable outcome. “That is not necessarily a motivation problem. It may be a design problem.”
What gets lost in the transition to virtual is agency, and agency is the mechanism that makes physical events work. “At an in-person conference, we naturally make choices. We decide where to sit, who to talk with, which conversation to join, whether to linger after a session, or whether to walk across the room and introduce ourselves to someone. Traditional virtual events have removed much of that freedom.” Restoring these choices changes the participant’s relationship to the room entirely. When people can move through an environment and choose where to engage, Tierno argues, “they become participants in the environment rather than simply viewers of it.” That also demands a more honest read of what engagement looks like. Camera-on rates and speaking turns are proxies for extroversion, not involvement. “Someone listening carefully, contributing through chat, connecting one-on-one, or reflecting on what they have heard may be every bit as engaged as the person speaking in front of the larger group.”
Scale Should Make A Large Event Feel Small
International virtual events promise reach, and reach is where most of them fail. Thousands of participants across time zones, cultures, and comfort levels with digital tools get funneled into a single stream and counted as a community. Tierno, who works in caring science and applies its frameworks to event design, names that assumption directly. “Proximity is not connection.” Bringing people into the same digital space creates an audience. It does not create relationships, and organizers who conflate the two will keep reporting impressive numbers alongside disappointing outcomes.
Building connection at that scale means engineering smallness inside the large experience: informal gathering spaces, peer conversations, room to move between discussions, and unprogrammed time where people can find each other. It also means designing for difference rather than uniformity. “Some people will speak in a large group, others will participate through chat, and some will be much more comfortable in a conversation with two or three people. Good virtual event design gives people multiple pathways into the experience rather than defining engagement as one particular behavior.” Tierno frames the whole exercise as hospitality, where the governing question is not only what people should learn but how they should feel while they are there. His benchmark for success is refreshingly unglamorous. “If someone attending from halfway around the world leaves remembering a conversation, a new relationship, or a moment when they genuinely felt seen, then scale has not gotten in the way of connection.” Leaders who want that outcome in three years should be building the facilitation skills and experimenting with the environments now, and they should replace attendance dashboards with harder questions about whether relationships formed and whether anything changed afterward. “Technology should enable the experience, not define it.”
Follow Scott Tierno on LinkedIn for more insights on virtual event design, human connection in digital spaces, and caring science in experience strategy.
