For many B2B corporate events, team building is Job #1.
Your management wants their meeting attendees to transform from a group of strangers and acquaintances into a unified team aligned with your company culture and strategy.
Because after the meeting’s over, they’ll be much more willing to help their new friends than their unknown coworkers. Plus they’ll be less likely to leave, reducing turnover and increasing productivity, sales, and profits.
To help you achieve your team building event objective, we’ve assembled 60 team building activity ideas you can build into a digital game your attendees can play on their smartphones throughout your event.
Many of these ideas have been used by actual SocialPoint customers in the games we created for their corporate events, while others are further ideas tailored to key use case games we can design for your attendees with our game platform.
While we don’t make Event Apps, we always like to see what the more than 120 event app providers are doing — or not doing. This year, we were excited to see Attendee Engagement and Interactivity (top trend), Gamification (#4 trend) and Interactive Q&A (#10 trend) all rank so high on the chart. Further, we were surprised to see that many of the Event Apps reviewed by the Event Manager Blog are missing capabilities that we offer.
It got us thinking.
We should compare ourselves to event apps so you can see how these two technologies work together to improve attendee engagement.
How Does SocialPoint Compare to Event Apps?
At SocialPoint, our strength is helping deliver dependable, on-brand, custom-looking interactive trade show games and event gamification quickly.
Event Apps, on the other hand, are your online event guide and a single point of contact for event communication.
How do you integrate SocialPoint’s audience engagement games into an Event App?
Let’s use CVENT’s Crowd Compass as an example. In Crowd Compass, you can set up an icon with a link to our web-based app. When attendees click on the icon image, it opens our game as an internal web browser link inside the event app. When the player is ready to return to the event app, they click the back button to exit the game and return to the main menu.
It’s a simple way to add gamification to enhance the attendee experience at corporate meetings and conferences.
What are some of the ways that SocialPoint improves the attendee experience?
1. Manage Live Polls, Interactive Q&A, Word Clouds & Brainstorming
Our app allows you to set up a “show flow” of different types of questions that can be pushed to the attendees (by room) when it is appropriate.
2. Trivia Games and Quizzes with Leaderboards
If you want to turn up the engagement, then use our three strikes trivia game. A popular strategy is to activate trivia during breaks and put the leaderboard on the big screen during walk-in and walk-out. Attendees will go wild. You will quickly get more than 10,000 trivia questions answered in a one-day event.
3. Spin to Win Prize Wheel
Use this as a name picker or a prize picker – either approach will generate excitement in your event. Why SocialPoint? Branded, inventory management, and looks fantastic on the big screen.
4. Attendee Participation Game (APG)
It may look like word soup, but the APG is a content-based event gamification product. The APG ties together the best of what SocialPoint has to offer, so you can script out content-based games aligned to your event’s objectives. Which other vendor allows you to build games that include trivia, kiosks, prize wheels, and leaderboards?
What is the feature-by-feature comparison of apps in the Event App Bible and SocialPoint?
This table compares the audience engagement features in the Event App Bible with the features that you can find in SocialPoint. (Get the Event App Bible to see how your event app vendor compares.)
When it comes to audience participation games, these are some of the questions that our potential clients bring to us in our first meetings. Ultimately, they are searching for the best game for their needs:
What are some simple and fun, games for audience participation?
How can you create audience participation games that are relevant to your content?
How can you create audience participation games that keep attendees engaged over multiple days of your corporate event?
If you are a speaker (or facilitator) trying to spice up your session, how can you implement these games yourself?
How can I use the data collected to make better business decisions?
To help you with your brainstorming, we pulled together a list of audience participation games and provided a short explanation of how they could work inside your event. Use this list as one input for your own sales meetings, customer events, and conferences. We grouped the games into three different game families:
One of the challenges of corporate events is to break out of the cycle of sameness. A series of speeches, presentations, panel discussions and an uninspired trade show can have a hypnotic effect on attendees.
So why not shake things up a little and create some fun, energetic activity with a Virtual Prize Wheel? Here are 5 ways to use a Virtual Prize Wheel for audience engagement at corporate events:
1. Create a Name Wheel for Your Prize Drawing
Instead of drawing a name out of a hat and announcing the winner on stage, use a Spin to Win Virtual Prize wheel to take things to a howl new level. Instead of putting prizes on the prize wheel, put drawing entrants on it. Then, as the wheel spins the crowd excitedly watches to see whose name pops up – is it their name, or one of their friends? Finally, as the wheel gets close to stopping it slows down increasing the tension and excitement.
One of our clents told us that the Name wheel really woke the crowd up first thing in the morning after a late night.
It’s a simple audience engagement ideas that can be easily implemented in any event.
2. Golden Ticket: Find Your Ticket to Spin the Wheel
Remember the exciting anticipation of seeing who would win the Golden Tickets in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? You can do the same thing in your event. Tape a few Golden Tickets under the seats in your general session. Then, ask people to check to see if they have the Golden Ticket, and the crowd will go wild. Next, bring the winner or winners onstage to spin the Virtual Prize Wheel for a chance to win a few select prizes.
It’s a short audience engagement activity that will really create a sense of excitement and energize the audience.
3. Drive Traffic to the Show Floor
Trade show booths are too often a dull affair. Bring more excitement – and booth traffic – with a “Spin To Win” prize drawing. Our Virtual Prize Wheel can be activated by attendees smashing a big button – a satisfying motion that will have attendees lining up to play.
You can use this as a stand alone drawing or in conjunction with a more advanced audience engagement game such as a trade show passport game. (FYI – this could easily be sponsored item!)
4. Recognition: Pick a Prize after Achieving a Milestone
You have employees or members you need to recognize for having reached an important organizational milestone (years as an employee or member, sales achieved, certification, achieving a career goal a monumental number of times). Rather than give them all the same prize, why not bring them on stage to spin the Virtual Prize Wheel? You can make them all worthwhile prizes, with one exceptional prize – more about picking prizes here. This adds more drama and excitement to a required yet sometimes less interesting part of your event.
5. Prize Entry and Drawing
You can use a Virtual Prize Wheel to do more than offer a prize. It can be used to capture lead data. The chance to win a prize will encourage attendees to self-enter their contact data, get agreement to your lawyer’s lengthy terms and conditions, plus answer a few survey questions that help you determine their potential lead value. Use multiple Virtual Prize Wheel kiosks to simultaneously capture lead data from hundreds of people over the course of your event.
Some events offer lower level prizes at the kiosks and have a regular drawing for some larger prizes throughout the event.
Final Thoughts
The virtual prize wheel is a simple interactive that can help you create fun, audience engagement in sales meetings and customer events. Hopefully, these ideas gave you some inspiration that will help you break out of the cycle of sameness.
“I want 100% of the attendees to participate in this activity!”
It’s a phrase that I hear from meeting planners all the time. They are convinced that the attendee engagement experiences won’t work if only 60% of the people do it.
How many presentations have you attended that could have been delivered more effectively as an email?
You know the drill.
The speaker unleashes a tidal wave of PowerPoint slides with graphs and charts going every which way. It’s hard to pay attention. They rarely ask questions or solicit feedback to involve the audience. To add insult to injury many speakers will read the slides.
That’s bad. Really bad. Because the world has changed, and so have your audiences.
Not including time for audience engagement in your events and presentations might have worked in the past, but today’s audiences have higher expectations of being involved with learning and interacting. So, you need to make the time! Just consider how audiences have become more hands-on in reaction to major recent changes:
20 years ago – Internet searches and YouTube videos:
About 20 years ago Amazon.com was created, kind of when the Internet got really popular. Today, when my friends or my brother and I have an argument about who’s the best sports athlete we don’t just guess – we Google search it to see who is right. And, we Google it on our smart phones. You probably do that, too. And when I need to fix the dishwasher, rather than call a plumber, I go on YouTube to find videos. You probably do that, too, and so do your audiences. Do-it-yourself videos have changed your attendees’ behavior.
10 years ago – Mobile/Socialenables content creation, sharing, collaboration and critiquing:
When the iPhone came out about 10 years ago that really started a social mobile revolution. Now, where I live in Minneapolis Minnesota, over 85% of the people have smartphones! That means 85% of the people are content creators, because the phone in their pocket is a tool for creating content and sharing that content. They don’t need anything else. They have the tools and experience to create content and share or critique it or collaborate with others about it.
Today – More people with advanced education:
In the United States there are more college and master’s degrees per person than ever before. In the last 20 years the number of U.S. master’s degrees has more than doubled. And the number of college degrees per capita went up over 40 percent. The number of secondary degrees is the highest ever. That means your audience is more educated, so you’ve got smart people in the room. With Audience Response Systems (ARS) you have a way to Google them and get them involved in what you’re trying to do, rather than force them to just sit and listen.
If you think that you don’t have time in your program, you better make time! Because your audiences have the tools to figure out what the answers are to their problems and go solve them. You’re better off using that audience collectively, engaging them to create something greater, instead of just having a speaker and leaving all that brainpower and willingness left fallow.
So, you don’t have to be the person who drowns your audience under waves of PowerPoint slides. Instead, follow the suggestions below to get your audience involved and help them pay attention to you!
1. Schedule audience participation into your presentation
Yes, you need to plan audience interaction in your presentation. I would recommend 10-20 minutes.
Why? Because attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes AND your presentation is probably the third one of the day. They can only take so many graphs and charts.
If you can get them to consider rhetorical questions, participate in small group conversations or ask you questions, then you will win.
2. Help people participate during your presentation
For audience interaction – speakers should inspire the audience to act.
When we looked at the reasons people attend conferences words like Try, Share, Meet and Discuss bubbled up to the top.
Along those same lines the key audience participation words are ask, answer, poll, rank, vote, play, capture, collect, discuss, display, share. Notice: “sit and listen” are not on the list.
These are the actions that you can inspire your audience to take.
3. Think about attendee engagement as “Googling the audience”
A feedback loop is a way to take all of the small engagement conversations and bring them back to you the speaker. This might be through live polling results, conversation recaps, Q&A, word cloud or some other technique.
For example, sometimes speakers ask the audience to discuss a ___________ that ____________ (example: discuss a leader that inspires you). Then, attendees form groups of 2-3 and talk for a few minutes. Where does that conversation go afterward? Is the information fed back to the audience? Or do they keep it themselves? Savvy presenters will ask someone to share these conversations.
5. Consider Live Polling, Interactive Q&A or Interactive Trivia
If you have a large audience, then Live Polls, Interactive Q&A or Interactive Trivia would be a great way to get people involved with you.
If your event is not providing an event app, then you may consider an audience response app to scale up your audience participation and attendee engagement. There are several options available and most have a basic interactive Q&A and Live Polling feature. Solutions like SocialPoint include the Interactive Trivia.
Also, these audience response apps have live results displays so you can create a feedback loop. Yeah!
If you don’t know how to use the technology read this guide: How to Prepare Your Speakers to Use Audience Response Apps.
The Big Finish
Don’t let your next presentation be a tidal wave of PowerPoint slides. Incorporate 10-20 minutes of audience participation activities into the presentation. We promise that you will see the results in your post-event feedback forms.
Have an awesome next event!
If you need game ideas to increase audience and attendee engagement in your events and trade show booths try our game selector tool below. It will help you generate more fun, excitement, and results.
The greatest advantage of event apps and audience response apps is to give your attendees a voice.
Instead of passing around microphones in a large audience of 1,000 attendees, an event app or audience response app can be used to capture hundreds of questions instantly from curious attendees.
Equally important – activities such as brainstorming can be scaled up to hundreds and thousands of participants with the same rich participation that you get from groups of 8 to 10 people. While these technologies are loaded with capabilities – it’s very likely that most of these technologies will be new to your speakers. This post provides a guide to help you prepare your presenters to use these tools in their presentations and workshops.
To give their event session audiences a voice, more event producers are asking their speakers, facilitators and panel moderators to use interactive technology, such as audience response systems. But are speakers prepared to use them?
Step 1: Create a case for change
Most speakers gravitate to the PowerPoint lecture-style presentation, because that’s the content delivery format that they know. If they are in a large corporation they are probably used to creating PowerPoint documents that double as informational documents that are shared via email as well as in presentations to small groups.
But in today’s world, event speakers need to do more than just lecture to keep people engaged and connected to their content and ideas.
Research shows that attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes in the average conference session. And, it’s worse online! Online attendees are 1 click away from doing anything else on the Internet…like watching cat videos. How can you compete with cat videos?
When attendees spend 4-6 hours per day in conference sessions sitting and listening, most attendees are going to be lucky to remember three key messages from a speaker. So all of those detailed slides with secondary messages and supporting arguments will easily be forgotten.
Interactive meeting technologies such as audience response apps and event apps help with retention because they engage your attendees in a conversation. When you ask them a poll question or open-ended question they become participants in a conversation. The more that you can get attendees to participate the more likely they will be to retain the speakers key messages.
Step 2: Understand how much time you should allocate for attendee engagement
Most speakers plan for a 50 minute presentation and 10 minutes of Q&A. Inevitably they go over time and leave only 2-3 minutes for Q&A. That’s bad.
We recommend that your speakers plan for 20 minutes of interactive time for every 40 minutes of lecture time.
Step 3: Share common attendee engagement tools for creating conversations
Above I mentioned that your speakers are most likely not familiar with all of the tools available to them or how they work. I recommend that you provide them with a list of the audience response system (ARS) capabilities in your event app or audience response app.
Here is a list of the most common conversation tools that you should expect in your audience response app:
Regardless of your vendor you should have access to most of these conversation tools. Each one will work a little differently and all of them can be used to help your speaker’s achieve their conversation goals.
You may want to share examples of each with your speakers. So they can see how they work.
Four years ago, CompTIA contacted Interactive Meeting Technology/SocialPoint to help them deliver their first online event. The goal was to deliver an online, educational event to at least 100 attendees and have them remain online for at least two sessions.
CompTIA had nearly 1,000 registrants and over 300 attendees that first year. Four years later, their attendee numbers have skyrocketed to well over 4,000.
This is how we did it, through a strong collaboration between us, the vendor, and an engaged and motivated client team.
