Hello everyone,

Hosting a successful and memorable event takes effort, and most of the time you only get one shot at doing it right. Getting a picture of how things will play out can make you confident to achieve the objectives you planned for your event. Preparing your event team members—like your staff, session hosts and co-hosts, and speakers—by rehearsing every session can help everyone get on the same page and give you an opportunity to work out any kinks.

When you create a location-based or an online event in Zoho Backstage, apart from adding speakers to their respective sessions in the Agenda tab, you can also configure hosts and co-hosts in the Hosts tab from the Manage Dashboard. Before event day begins, you can prepare your event team by conducting a dry-run for sessions in Backstage with everyone involved. To do this, you can invite up to 20 test participants for an event to join session rehearsals. This makes your practice runs secure and only accessible to the people you choose.

To invite test participants to your event for session rehearsals, go to the Test participants tab under the Rehearsal tab in the Conduct Dashboard. Here you can click the Add participants link and enter the email addresses of people who you want to invite.

To start a rehearsal, go to the Rehearsal tab in the Conduct Dashboard and click the Rehearse sessions tab. This tab will look similar to the Present sessions tab and this action will display all the sessions in your event. Here, click a session in the timeline on the left. On the right, you will see session details displayed. Next, click the Rehearse session button to start the practice session. Apart from the invited test participants, anyone from the list of event organizers, hosts, co-hosts, and staff can also be a part of session rehearsals by clicking the Join Rehearsal button in the Rehearse sessions tab. When they join the rehearsal, they will be listed according to their role in the event.

Speakers who are added to a session will be sent an invitation email to join the rehearsal through the event microsite. They can click the Join Rehearsal button against a session on the Agenda page and join as speakers. Once the session begins, they can go through their material, refine content, plan transitions, time their sessions, and coordinate with the hosts or co-hosts about session flow. Speakers who are new to the event scene can also get used to talking on stage or an online platform and understand how to use in-session engagement tools like, chat, polls, or Q&A in order to be ready for the event day. Any equipment or integration used for audio or video streaming can also be put to the test at this time to get on top of any unanticipated technical issues. Speakers can also join rehearsals conducted for sessions that they're not added to but will be listed as an attendee in that rehearsal.

Test participants will also receive an email when they are invited to take part in session rehearsals for an event. This email will include a link to easily sign in to the event microsite. Once signed in, they can click the Join Rehearsal button for a particular session on the Agenda page in the event microsite and will be listed as attendees in that rehearsal. However, if you invite an event member such as an event organizer, staff, host, or co-hosts, as a test participant, they will not be listed as an attendee but will be listed according to their respective roles. If you would like to send reminders to all the test participants at the time of the rehearsal, click the Inform participants to join event link in the Test participants tab.

You can also conduct multiple rehearsals, however, sessions that are happening in the same hall or track can't be started parallelly. In addition, make sure that you invite a different set of test participants when you are planning on conducting rehearsals that run parallelly.

Just like with a live session, after the rehearsal is complete, you will find a session summary and detailed analytics in the Sessions tab. Click the View details button for any session to do this.

We hope this tip will be useful for you. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

You can also visit our help center or send us an email at support@zohobackstage.com if you have any questions.

Stay tuned for more useful tips to help you craft exceptional events with Zoho Backstage!

Happy organizing!

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