Europeana guide to organising online events

When large parts of Europe went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Europeana events team and the Europeana Network Association’s specialist communities had to start to work very differently. Big physical events went digital. Face-to-face discussions became screen-to-screen. The focus of conversations changed. The need to connect to other people was more important than ever.

The Europeana Network Association communities developed their own webinars. For example, Europeana Communicators’ series of ‘Culture From Home’ webinars looked at how cultural institutions were turning online to connect with their audiences. Europeana Education delivered several webinars in conjunction with their partners and Europeana Copyright ran webinars on ‘Copyright and OpenGLAM’. The Europeana Aggregators’ Forum - usually a two-day in-person event - went entirely virtual this year. And our ‘Europe Day’ webinar was attended by around 500 people.

The Europeana Community and Partner Engagement team coordinates these events to make sure they benefit the communities and the sector at large, that the programme of events is consistent and coherent and that individual events are well-managed. To support professionals in the sector, and share our learnings, we developed a guide to organising online events, which you can download and use below. It was designed so that we have a set of useful and usable guidelines for digital events organised by Europeana or organised in cooperation with Europeana.

In 2021, we were also pleased to create an online version of this events guide - explore our Events toolkit. You can also explore our webinar: Running webinars - what we've learnt so far.