From One-and-Done to Evergreen Virtual Summits with Jenn Zellers
What if the 3+ months of work you put into a virtual summit didn't have to stop bringing in results once the initial event was over?
With an evergreen summit, your one-and-done event can continue to run as long as you want it to. And it's easy!
To talk us through it, Jenn Zellers is here today to share...
- what an evergreen summit is
- how to go evergreen after the live run of your event
- the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to ongoing marketing.
I’ll let Jenn take it from here!
What is an evergreen summit?
An evergreen summit takes your existing summit presentations and allows attendees to sign up at any point in time. Upon signing up, they get limited-time access to the content, similar to the initial run of the event.
An evergreen summit is a great way to continue the life of your event. Rather than putting in 3+ months of work and calling it quits once the live run is over, you can make even more out of your time, effort, and investment.
Not only can you continue bringing in leads and sales, but you can build ongoing connections with affiliates, speakers, and attendees.
Modified All-Access Pass
I generally recommend that someone signing up for the evergreen version of your summit has access to all of the presentations for 48-72 hours.
After that time, attendees can upgrade to a modified all-access pass, just like they would in the live run of the event.
The biggest differences with this version of your all-access pass are that speaker bonuses shouldn't be included (since we can't just keep giving away your speakers' stuff) and the pricing will likely change.
The price of this modified all-access pass should be lower than the original all-access pass. You can even have two tiers available:
- A lower-tier all-access pass can include presentation replays only.
- A higher-tier all-access pass can include presentations replays and any workbooks, worksheets, additional sessions, and replays of any hot seats or workshops that happened during the live event.
Benefits of an Evergreen Summit
While having a summit on evergreen will continue to bring you leads and all-access pass sales, it goes deeper than that.
When you put your summit on evergreen you can:
- Repurpose content - Coming up with content is one of my least favorite activities, but if you have your summit on evergreen, you can continue to talk about each topic that was covered in your summit. From there, encourage your audience to dive deeper into that topic by pointing them to the evergreen summit.
- Continue relationships – You get to continue building relationships with attendees, speakers, and affiliates.
- Connect with new speakers and affiliates - You might find people after the fact that would make great speakers. Add their content to the modified all-access pass and bring them on as affiliates.
Two Quick Planning Tips
If you know you’re going to evergreen your summit ahead of time, there are two things to keep in mind.
- Talk to your speakers about it ahead of time. Don't assume that your speakers are okay with their content being included in the evergreen version. Some might not want to participate at all, while others might do even more than you ask and want to keep their bonus in the all-access pass. It's always better to ask and include your expectations in the speaker agreement.
- Be mindful of the wording in presentations. Do your best to keep specific dates and “next month” type phrases out of presentations. They won’t be relevant in 6 months or a year from now when someone is watching.
Evergreen Summit Tech
Summit tech can feel overwhelming, but the good news is that the evergreen version of your summit can very likely stay on the exact same tech that you used for the live run.
If anything, you can look at it as an opportunity to change things up if there was a piece of tech you didn't enjoy using initially.
But overall, build your evergreen summit tech stack off of your original summit tech stack, and you're good to go.
How to Market Your Evergreen Summit
One of the most challenging pieces of having an evergreen summit is to make it worth the effort, which comes down to effective marketing.
Put together a promotion strategy, whether that’s guest podcasting, live videos, or written content.
For example, a host might put together 3 signature talking points about their evergreen summit so they can:
- go on a guest podcast
- post on Instagram Stories or Reels
- market on Pinterest
Get creative with your strategy and where your audience hangs out.
Jenn’s Biggest Takeaway
I want you to know that making your summit evergreen is not as overwhelming as it might sound. If you can host a live summit, you can definitely handle making it evergreen and then continue to bring in leads and sales from all of your hard work!
About Jenn
Jenn is a strategist for virtual summit speakers and hosts. Through the Virtual Summit Search directories, she connects attendees with awesome summits, as well as hosts with speakers and service providers to help make their summit even more amazing. The Virtual Summit Search team also works with speakers to make the most of their summit presentations to grow their email list and get more sales - without being sleazy or gross! Jenn loves helping hosts and speakers make the most out of their virtual summits.
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