During an event like the Skoll World Forum you feel a sense of energy, connection to old friends and colleagues, and the excitement of meeting new folks. Right after the event is over, when you’re coming off the high of being in community with others, on information overload, and hopefully a bit of inspiration hangover, we hit you with a feedback survey. It helps us understand the perceived quality of the convening: what logistically worked well and what didn’t; what speakers stood out and who missed the mark; what practices we should lean into and what we should reconsider for the future. But the real nuggets of gold come when we ask our network about the outcomes several months later that they attribute to their participation.
It’s notoriously hard to measure impact from events. In our heart of hearts, we believe that there is intrinsic value in convening, sharing knowledge, gaining new insights about our work, and taking in some inspirational talks and performances. The Skoll Foundation has a three-pronged approach to our work: Invest, Connect, and Champion. Those latter two elements are a critical part of our theory of change for good reason, and there’s research to back it up. Over time, the more nodes of a network or field start to build connections with each other, the more productive it can be.
But the truth is, for all the resources and time that go into putting on and attending events like the SWF, it is difficult to generate hard, attributable evidence of impact. We seed some serendipitous encounters, we carefully invite a diverse and influential group of people, we invite the foremost experts to impart their knowledge, add a little Oxford magic, and hope that these efforts pay off.
We first conducted a follow-up survey 4 months after the 2019 Skoll World Forum. While our inboxes were full of great anecdotal evidence of ideas sparked, collaborations formed, and funds transferred, we hoped for a more comprehensive view of our impact. Little did we know that 2019 would be our last in-person event – for a very long time.
This year, we hosted the 18th annual Skoll World Forum online. It was our largest convening ever. It was free and open to the public—with nearly 5,000 people joining from 124 countries. Participants heard from luminaries including politician Stacey Abrams, chef and anti-hunger activist Jose Andres, environmental justice advocates Gloria Walton and Mark Ruffalo, and global leaders including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Ernesto Zedillo.
For the majority of the program, we turned over the reins to our global network, issuing a request for session ideas that resulted in more than 500 proposals. Ultimately, we hosted 51 sessions during Forum week, and more than 360 different organizations had speaking roles, leveraging the platform to share their expertise and gaining valuable visibility for their work on the Forum virtual stage on a truly dizzying breadth of topics. Not surprisingly, speakers reported multiple positive impacts from their participation—more than any other group who attended. With triple the number of speakers at the virtual Forum compared to the typical Oxford event, those impacts add up.
While there were no in-person sessions, pub nights, or hugs… there were still Oxford-style debates, hands-on workshops, belly laughs, and dance parties. But what happened when everyone closed their laptop? Read on for what we discovered in our 5 month follow up survey, including select non-attributed quotes from participants:
While roughly 22 percent of respondents had attended the Forum in Oxford previously, the benefits of online convening include convenience (likely our first Forum attendees in pajama pants!), increased access for folks who have not been able to join in person; and the ability to interact with a more globally diverse group of speakers and participants when not limited by geography, flight schedules, or visa rules. On the other hand, the biggest advantage named for joining the SWF in person was higher quality connections and networking—and it was nearly unanimous. Trust us, we get it. We did not become connectors and conveners expecting to do it exclusively via laptop. But there are some good learnings here about how we might get better about connecting people online.
42 percent of online participants said that the event had a positive impact on their personal wellbeing. Survey respondents who have attended the event in Oxford in the past were far more likely to say that their personal wellbeing was nourished as a result of attending the virtual event. Our hypothesis? They were able to engage with old colleagues and friends; relationships they’ve developed doing the hard work of social impact over the years. While the SWF delegates significantly change year over year (about 50 percent), there is a culture of connection and belonging that broke through into the chat box. Though our survey didn’t probe on the depth of this impact, it’s reassuring to see so many attendees report that feeling of nourishment.
The scale of participation in the online Forum adds up. For example, a greater portion of online SWF survey respondents reported professional skill building than what we’ve seen from past in-person Forums. If we extrapolate the numbers, our survey indicates that over a thousand individual participants built professional skills from the experience and over 500 organizations benefitted from capacity building learnings. It’s also exciting to see that even an online convening can be catalytic for flow of investments—we heard that a minimum of $4m was exchanged as a result of joining the virtual Forum.
In 2019, nearly 50 percent reported initiating or deepening a programmatic collaboration with someone they met at the Oxford SWF. That number drops to 23 percent for the virtual version of the convening. Nothing to sneeze at, but maybe there’s something to those pub nights?
In 2022, we plan to host a hybrid Skoll World Forum—and our hope is to produce a convening that takes the best of both worlds—the unparalleled connections and networking in Oxford, alongside the open access and diverse global perspectives represented online. These past two years have provided us with valuable lessons on improving a virtual experience and we’re exploring new ideas including:
As we plan for a hybrid future of the Skoll World Forum in 2022, we’ll lean into the best of what the in-person and virtual platforms offer respectively; and try to create some magic links between those able to attend in Oxford, and those joining via Wi-Fi. In the spirit of creating a bigger, more inclusive, and welcoming tent, we’d love to hear your ideas on how we might create bridges across those audiences—before, during, and after the Forum. Share your thoughts with us on our Engage page.
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