Everybody loves a good magic trick – like when David Copperfield famously made the Statue of Liberty vanish and then reappear. However, some trade show organizers recently made an entire virtual exhibit hall go "Poof!" – and then forgot to make it rematerialize. As a program manager with an exhibit in that seemingly invisible show hall, it fell to me to make sure our digital experience didn't completely vanish along with all of our prospects and customers.

While working for GE Appliances (GEA), I was preparing for the first all-digital Design & Construction Week, a combo of the International Builders' Show (IBS) and the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS), which was set for early February 2021. Since GEA is a major player in the industry, we opted for a premium-level exhibit that allowed us to host a series of microsites on our own platform that linked out from the show's virtual exhibit hall. Each microsite would be specifically designed to meet the varying needs of clients and prospects and allow each of GEA's brands to have its own distinct experience.

It wasn't until around November that show organizers announced their virtual-platform provider, Convey Services LLC. Our team then met with Convey and hammered out how attendees' registration information would flow to our sites. Once that was set, our virtual partner got to work coding our platform to guarantee visitors had a seamless transition from the shows' sites to ours. In the meantime, I instructed each of our salespeople to preschedule at least four meetings with attendees to make sure we had all the right resources in place for the event.

Then red flags started popping up about 10 days before the show. We got a message from Convey that we would not be getting attendees' info in the manner to which we had agreed. Instead, the data would be in an encrypted code, which presented an enormous challenge. Essentially, our developer would have to rewrite major portions of code on several microsites to make things work. At that time, we and our partner had been completely focused on getting our assets (which we were still relaying) integrated into the microsites. So Convey's switcheroo was too much work in too small a window, and it sent our developer into a tailspin.

My team got the feeling this wasn't going to be the final unwelcome surprise, so we quickly began formulating a series of backup plans to anticipate the next set of problems.

First, I instructed my team to start building a microsite on the Convey platform just to ensure we had something to exhibit in case our vendor couldn't make all the coding changes in time. It was a giant pain in the rear, but doable. However, since the show's exhibit hall didn't support all the features we intended to use, the experience was not going to be the same as I had pitched to my company's C-suite. So I started having uncomfortable conversations with GEA leadership about what a stripped-down virtual experience might have to look like.

The show was set to open Tuesday, and by the previous Thursday things weren't looking good. We'd scheduled a key pre-show meeting with a big prospect for Monday, and we already knew the original microsite wasn't going to be ready. Plus, the show's exhibit space would still be closed. With just four days until the important meeting, we started prepping Plan C, which I called our "skinny site." Essentially, it was a bare-bones platform my sales team could use to squeak us through Monday's meeting. This meant our exhibit provider had to allocate precious resources to construct another micro-site on Saturday and Sunday while the rest of my team focused on building out the microsite on the Convey platform for the rest of the attendees. Then things started to go seriously wrong. Over the weekend, my Convey-site team let me know that the platform was genuinely jacked up. When the site was "working," it was ridiculously slow. Other times, it would simply crash. We began having grave doubts that the show's exhibit hall would be functioning when Tuesday rolled around.

At nearly midnight on Sunday, my public relations team and I demanded a phone call with the KBIS PR team and Convey. Essentially, we vented our frustrations and doubts and asked if they had a plan in case everything went to hell in a handbasket – which is exactly what we were expecting. They assured us they had a communication strategy in place if the worst came to be. On Monday, the skinny site was up and running, and our pre-show meeting went off without a hitch. However, Convey's platform was still in shambles, and we were fairly certain it wasn't going to recover. So I turned most of our resources to a newly devised Plan D, which was to build out the skinny site into something a bit more robust in case we needed to conduct all our customer meetings from there.

By Tuesday morning, we had a Convey-supported exhibit set to take "walk-ins" staffed by a few reps who redirected visitors to the now fleshed-out skinny site. And it was a good thing we did because Design & Construction Week's virtual show hall quickly crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. Chaos and confusion reigned supreme for exhibitors and attendees alike in the show's exhibit hall, where nothing was functioning.

We went full-on Plan D by Tuesday afternoon. Our sales team got in touch with everyone who'd prescheduled meetings to update them on the new arrangement. Continuing to adjust to the evolving landscape, I had our social-media crew start pumping out content directing attendees to the skinny site. Instagram, where most of our design-based clients and prospects practically live, became our main traffic builder.

Soon our site was flooded with attendees looking to get something out of the show, which was great for us. And since we didn't have access to all their registration information, we whipped up a simple contact form they filled out when they visited so sales could follow up with them. While the vast majority of exhibitors were up a creek without a paddle, we rowed on. The outcome of all of this was that we had an incredibly successful show. We wrangled more than 90,000 booth visits and held more than 7,000 customer meetings in addition to the approximately 100 prescheduled VIP engagements. But this only succeeded because of our pre-show work and a lot of on-the-fly adjustments and coordination. You could say that we worked our own brand of magic. Eat your heart out, David Copperfield.