After years of facilitating online events and conferences for clients, I hosted my first-ever online summit in September.

Despite not being a homeschooling expert, I gathered together an impressive roster of 19 speakers who delivered 21 session (including two panels) over three days. By the time it was over, we had 479 attendees registered for Been There, Homeschooled That, and we are still selling all-access passes to the recordings and supplemental resources.

“I FEEL SEEN! I’ve been so hard on myself comparing myself to social media homeschool accounts who make it look all aesthetic and their house looks ran perfectly. All the stuff I’ve been stressing about getting done at home isn’t as dire as I think it is and I don’t have to be the person to always do it.” — summit attendee feedback response

Where Did I Find 479 Homeschoolers for the Summit?

Though I don’t work in the homeschool market, I have designed and redesigned several communities for homeschool curriculum companies, service providers, and organizations. So the first step I took when planning the summit was to find co-hosts who were true homeschooling “dinosaurs.”

Jen MacKinnon and Dachelle McVey have deep roots in the homeschooling community. Jen, founder of Practical by Default, has been helping working homeschool moms juggle life, work and homeschool without losing their marbles since well before the pandemic. Dachelle, founder of Literary Adventures for Kids, is the creator of comprehensive language arts curriculum inspired by the work of Charlotte Mason but without the pressure of making homeschooling a full-time job for you or your children.

Between the two of them, they facilitated connections that led to 17 of our booked speakers and five of our sponsors.

From there, the numbers multiplied:

• Speakers and sponsors promoting the event accounted for 333 registrants.
• Meta ads brought us 101 registrants for around $700.
• My network (email subscribers, social media followers, etc.) brought in another 45.

For an event built on the premise that you should trust the people who’ve already lived the part you haven’t gotten to, that affiliate number is the one that is most impressive. Two out of every three people here didn’t find us. Someone they trusted sent them.

I ran the whole thing on MemberVault, which is one of several platforms I’ve used for courses and events over the past decade. My reasons for choosing MemberVault were covered in their own version of the story, which you can read here. But the short version is that I wanted a simplified tech stack to make it so attendees could have a single access point for the summit and I wanted solid data gathering to track and measure results. An added bonus was that MemberVault includes affiliate program features on all of its plans — no need to pay more for the privilege.

What was Engagement Like?

Summits are usually like drinking from a firehouse and the level of overwhelm often puts attendees into fight, flight or freeze mode. Everyone signs up for a summit with the best of attentions to watch all the sessions or participate in the community to meet others with shared goals and interests. But then the summit begins, emails start pouring in, notifications start pinging, and it’s easy to feel like you’ve missed way too much to bother jumping in.

Knowing that, I took great care in designing an onboarding experience that was protective of our attendees’ time and attention. When they first enrolled, they only had one objective: Complete the Start Here module.

The module wasn’t hard either — just a guide with a glossary of commonly used homeschool terms and a five-question survey to help ensure we delivered the experience they were hoping for. Attendees who completed the survey unlocked a bingo card that offered the opportunity to win gift cards and event T-shirts. The incentive motivated 41% of registrants to complete that first step and prize announcements kept the energy up throughout the event.

I also include feedback surveys with every workshop and interview session to get a sense of what attendees found most meaningful. Across every session with responses, 96 percent were rated excellent or good. Ninety-seven percent of respondents said they’d recommend that specific session to another homeschool parent. When we asked whether the Start Here resources helped, 96 percent said yes.

Numbers aside, the feedback surveys illustrated the impact of the overall event. One attendee three years into homeschooling wrote that a session finally let her stop measuring her house against “social media homeschool accounts who make it look all aesthetic.” Another, homeschooling a gifted and twice-exceptional child, said it was the first time she’d heard from someone who actually knew what her child was like and the challenges that they were experiencing at home. A first-year homeschooler watching a veteran panel called it “both encouraging and sobering,” because it made her realize how normal she was in worrying about whether she was doing enough for her kids.

We hosted the community on MemberVault too, instead of a Facebook group, so registration, content, and discussion all lived in one place. More than one attendee told me they were relieved it wasn’t yet another Facebook group. Something I really appreciated about MemberVault’s community feature is that it allows you to be intentional about notifying attendees of community activity. You get to choose which posts are blasted out to everyone by email, so you’re only driving attention to the most important posts.

Mixing live and pre-recorded sessions with several days of free access to replays is tricky. In some ways, you’re telling attendees that it doesn’t matter if they show up live. And while that messaging is important for the perfectionists who feel like there is no point in signing up if they can’t attend everything, it can be discouraging for speakers to show up to an empty room.

Been There, Homeschooled That did OK in this area.

We averaged 10 people per live session, topping out at 16 on our final day. That’s a fraction of the 479 registrants, and I think I know why: our sessions were spread through the day with breaks in between on the first and second days. On the third day, the agenda was tight. I also noted that while sessions went from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. we got our best attendance after noon. And when you think about the life of a homeschooler, it makes sense that they would be more able to show up to an event later in the day after schooling was done and possibly when other adults are home to occupy the kids. Next time I’m running a tighter live schedule with fewer breaks, and starting later in the day to meet people when they’re actually able to be present.

Closing the Loop with Speakers and Sponsors

As someone who speaks at online and in-person events and has sponsored several conferences and summits, I know how often you show up to do your absolute best and leave wondering whether any of it mattered. So few event organizers follow-up to provide session feedback, data or even anecdotal reports of the impact of your participation. That’s why the ability to have a feedback survey for every session was so important to me. I wanted to be able to share the feedback with our speakers and I wanted attendees to know their opinions matter.

In closing the loop with our speakers, I shared the feedback received from their session, along with an infographic generated by the event’s Gemini Notebook (a bonus for those who bought the all-access pass). So instead of wondering whether they said anything of value in their session, they could see the value illustrated by Gemini based on the transcripts. This was popular among our speakers and I’ve already seen a few of them share their infographics on social media.

If you’re building something like this in your own industry, that’s a conversation I want to have. Tell me if you’ve got a business, resource, or story that might fit a future Dino Collective summit. And if you missed the live dates, all 21 sessions, the workbooks, and the Q&A are available now as the Homeschool Jumpstart for $27.