We scheduled the Cheese Tourism 2020 webinar back in the fall as a fairly specific session — how creamery visits, cave tours, and farm-shop traffic fit into a marketing plan. By the time it actually ran last week, on-site tourism was the last thing on most attendees' minds. We kept the content, because the material was still good, but we watched the Q&A chat fill up with a different question entirely: what does the federation have planned that doesn't require anyone to travel?
That's a fair question, and we don't have a full answer yet. What we do have is a webinar that ran cleanly with attendance well above what we'd normally expect for a mid-March session, and a program team that's now treating "how do we run this online" as the operating assumption for the next several months rather than a contingency plan.
Some of that shift was already underway before this month. Trade shows across food and grocery categories started postponing and canceling in early March, well before most of our own spring calendar was in question, and a few members had already asked us privately whether our own events would follow. We didn't have a firm answer for them two weeks ago. We have a better one now, mostly because the Cheese Tourism session forced our hand faster than a planning meeting would have.
What actually worked
A few practical notes for members who are used to our in-person format and are wondering what changes:
- Registration and attendance are decoupled from a room. We didn't cap the webinar the way we'd cap a workshop with a physical venue, and it showed — this was one of our better-attended sessions of the quarter, including several members who've told us in the past that travel is the main reason they skip our programming.
- Q&A ran longer than the material. When people aren't watching a clock to catch a flight or get back to a shop, they ask more questions. We're planning to build extra time into future sessions rather than cutting discussion short.
- The format suits shorter, more frequent sessions better than one long one. We're looking at breaking future in-person workshop content into shorter webinar blocks rather than trying to compress a full-day agenda into one online sitting.
- Recordings matter more than we treated them. A handful of members logged in after the live session ended, expecting a replay. We didn't have one ready. That's changing for anything we run from here forward.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who's run virtual programming before. What's new for us is doing it at short notice, for an audience that mostly hasn't used it, without months of lead time to build the habit in.
What's still on the calendar
We are not canceling programming — we're converting it. Members with an in-person workshop on their calendar for the coming months should watch their inbox rather than assume it's off; several sessions are moving to a virtual format with the same registration, and we'll confirm format changes directly rather than leaving anyone guessing. If your creamery has been sitting on the fence about a course like Listeria Control in Small Creameries because the travel didn't pencil out, this is a reasonable month to check whether a session near you has gone virtual. Check the events page for the current format before you make travel plans either way, and if you'd rather hear it from us directly, the program team is fielding format questions through the member portal this week faster than usual.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.