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event gamification

4 Common Gamification Mistakes That Quietly Kill Engagement

Most event games don’t fail because of bad technology. They fail because of a few avoidable mistakes.

After building hundreds of event games over the past 18 years, we’ve seen the same issues quietly reduce engagement again and again.

In this post, we’ll break down four of the most common gamification mistakes and how to avoid them.

The 4 most common issues that quietly hurt game performance: 1. Lack of planning 2. Lack of promotion 3. Too complex 4. Ineffective rewards

If you've ever had a game fall flat, it was probably because of one or more of these. Let’s start with the most common issue: planning.

Jeannie Power March 20, 2026
SocialPoint Trivia Leaderboard with teams playing together
audience engagement

60 Team Building Ideas For Key B2B Corporate Events, Meetings and Conferences

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.

Samuel J. Smith April 16, 2024
Cheat Sheet Event Gamification National Sales Meeting
event gamification

Cheat Sheet: National Sales Meeting Event Gamification

Sales reps love to compete and win. Savvy Sales Leaders reinforce the event’s objectives by aligning game activities to the event content.

Each year sales leaders pull their sales organization together for a national sales meeting or a sales kickoff.  

The goal of these meetings is one part inspiration, one part education, and one part team-building. Leaders want to put their teams through the paces and get them invigorated and ready for an exciting and challenging year ahead. 

The agenda could look something like this.

Samuel J. Smith October 9, 2019
annual national sales meeting themes 2019
event gamification

52 National Sales Meeting Themes Actually Used In 2019

Need the best national sales meeting themes? Of course, you do, because the stakes are so high.

At your annual sales meeting you’ll have your entire high-powered sales force and senior management team all in one place. Likely making it the most visible event you’ll plan all year. But hey, no pressure!

We’re here to help you with proven sales meeting themes for today’s business reality. We’ve gathered 52 national sales meeting themes that were actually chosen by your peers in 2019. Themes that multi-billion dollar corporations have recently invested big money in.

Samuel J. Smith September 30, 2019
Merck Animal Health trivia leaderboard with top scorers
event gamification

7 Secrets To Successful Multi-Player Group Live Event Trivia Games

On Facebook recently, a friend of mine shared a photo of a conference room that made me cringe. It was a ballroom filled with tan chairs in rows.

I felt sorry for the 600 people who were going to be stuffed into those uncomfortable chairs in rows for hours on end listening to somebody ramble through 130 slides.

Contrast that with a friend of mine who is the VP of Marketing for a Manufacturing company. He is responsible for his annual sales meeting and wanted to pump up the energy in the room. He wanted cheering, excitement, and energy.

My VP friend said, “we are fully aware there are going to be dry presentations. We need to pump up the energy in the room.” He needed something more than loud music during walk-in or walk-out would do.

He needed a game for his live event.

He decided to set up a team trivia game that was driven from the stage by a host. All players answered the same questions. The team whose players answered the most questions correctly won.

The live event trivia game was a smashing success. Attendees had a blast.

How does this work? What are the secrets to creating a successful multi-player group live event game? Is it just the game or is there more to it.  Here are our secrets to creating successful trivia games.

Secret #1: Use Leaderboards

People love to see their name in lights. In a large font. Even more, than seeing their name, they love to see that your name is below theirs.

Many players will define winning as being on the leaderboard, or beating a friend (or rival). When there can be only one winner, players find other ways to define success.

In your group trivia games find a way to put 10 – 20 players names on the leaderboard.

Secret #2: Playing Trivia Shoulder to Shoulder

If you have ever played the Daytona Racing Arcade game, you know that the game is much more fun when you compete head-to-head against other players rather than when you play versus the computer.

Over and over, we have seen when you put players next to each other (in chairs or standing at a trivia bar), the competitive juices will go one level higher.

So, find a way to get people playing shoulder to shoulder. On the trade show floor, it’s easy to set up a trivia bar where people play shoulder to shoulder.  In a conference session, players will be seated, but the excitement will still be there.

Secret #3: Team and Group Trivia Games

Team games have the opportunity to make other players fans of each other. In a general session, players get excited as they correctly answer questions and see their team go up the leaderboard, and the others go down!

The challenge in creating teams is to find logical groups of attendees that can quickly figure out who else is on their side. Is it the people at the table? Is it the people on the left-hand side of the room? Are they all from the south region?

Secret #4: Put the Leaderboard Up During Walk-in or Walk-Out

In our experience, clients that have a packed agenda with no time for a live multi-player game during the general session instead want attendees to play trivia during breaks.

In these situations, we advocate for putting the leaderboard up during walk-out and keeping it up during the break. Our data suggest that attendees will play and play and play. Depending on the question bank, it’s a great way to reinforce learning objectives.

Secret #5: Keep the Goal Within Reach

Most people are goal-oriented. We set goals and deadlines at work. Then we work to achieve them. We have annual objectives and quarterly goals.

When the goal appears within reach, players are more likely to keep at it and persist. If the goal feels distant or unattainable, they may give it one shot then give up.

In your game, choose gameplay options that help players achieve goals. If you have one grand prize, how can you keep things close, so people feel like they have a chance? But you don’t want a bunch of ties either. One strategy is to use a count down timer and have points reduce as the time goes down. This way, you can reduce the chances of tie scores and create diversity on the leaderboard. Players will still feel like they have a chance to win.

On the other hand, how do you make people feel like the goal is attainable at a multi-day conference? A common issue at multi-day conferences is that players stop playing after one day, or don’t even attempt to play because the top players get so far ahead of everyone else.

You may choose to offer intermediate rewards (such as a prize wheel spin) and use a progress bar to keep players focused on achieving that goal. Another option is to use drawings to help people work toward the goal. But do you get one entry into the prize draw? Or, do you get one entry for every 500 points you earn? Players are more likely to stop after they obtain the one drawing entry – unless you can offer them more rewards.

Secret #6: New Trivia Questions

We meet a lot of people that want to create a 5-question trivia game with a leaderboard for a shared space in their event. There are three problems with this concept. (A) everyone will have the same score, and the leaderboard won’t look cool. (B) Players will memorize the answers and tell their friends. (It will happen – especially if the prize is Tom Brady memorabilia in Boston.) (C) There is not an incentive to play again.

At SocialPoint, we solve this problem by encouraging our clients to use a deep trivia question bank with 50-60 questions. Even though attendees will only see a few at a time, if they were to play again, the trivia questions would be new. Or if another player comes up to play – you can’t tell her the pattern (A-B-B-A-C). Each player will have to answer the questions as they come up. Also, this format teaches players new concepts and ideas if they play again.

Secret #7: Break up the Live Event Trivia Game

Tennis, Golf and other games break up the game into sets and rounds. This way, players can make a mistake, regroup, and try again. The same applies to your live multi-player group trivia game.

Break it up into rounds (or trivia questions related to the most recent presentation). This approach allows players to make a mistake, or miss a session and get back into the game.

Then use a leaderboard that summarizes all of the scores together into the same game.

Final Thoughts

As you can tell, there is more than one way to implement a successful multi-player group trivia game in your live event. As long as you keep the following ideas in mind, you will end up like my VP friend. Your event will be full of energy and excitement.

Go out and pump up the energy and excitement!

Samuel J. Smith August 16, 2019
audience participation games for corporate events and meetings
audience engagement

13 Audience Participation Games for Corporate Events

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?
  • What should I keep in mind when creating a game?
    • Create a simple game title or theme
    • Game rewards
    What common mistakes should I avoid?

    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:

Samuel J. Smith June 5, 2019
Event Gamification - 4 common mistakes to avoid
event gamification

Event Gamification: 4 Common Mistakes To Avoid

Have you ever created an Event Gamification element for your event that didn’t work? Perhaps you felt like you followed the advice on other blogs or what was intuitive to you — but the game was still a bust.

Perhaps you are here because you are creating your first game and you want to learn from the experiences of others and not make a mistake.

With thousands of games under our belt, we have seen a lot of game patterns that work and several that do not work. Here are 4 common mistakes that we have seen (and heard about from others) regarding Event Gamification.

Event Gamification Mistake # 1: Attendees lose interest after 1 day

One of the complaints we hear about other Event Gamification is that the attendees lose interest after the first day, because a handful of people are already so far ahead of everyone that most attendees feel like they have no chance to win.

From creating thousands of games, we know that attendees define winning in different ways. Some need to win the overall game, others define winning as being on the leaderboard.  Some want instant gratification like earning a spin on the prize wheel, others want a perfect score and some players just want to have bragging rights over their friends.

If your attendees lose interest after 1 day, it’s usually because the game was designed with a single reward system – the person with the most points wins.  While we have seen this strategy work well with Trivia games and leaderboards, we find that “challenge based” games need to have layered reward systems (or achievements) to keep people feeling like they can “win” the game – even if they start playing late.

Here are some examples of additional rewards to keep people engaged:

  • Top Players on a Leaderboard (limit it so that getting on the leaderboard is part of the reward)
  • Daily Winner Leaderboard
  • Team Winner Leaderboard (Perfect for Team Game Play)
  • Gain entries into a drawing
  • Gain spins on the virtual prize wheel
  • Win an individual challenge.
  • Complete all of the challenges
  • Custom Prize Win and Reward (Such as a VR Game Play)

In addition, you need to reinforce the attendee’s progress. Use the players status screen and a progress bar to provide real-time updates of the attendee’s points and progress toward these rewards or incentives. This helps attendees focus on the rewards that work best for them.

And most of all, keeps attendees engaged through an entire multi-day event.

Event Gamification Mistake # 2: Challenges reward attendees for Event App usage rather than content mastery

Over and over, people tell me about lots of Event App usage-based challenges, such as downloading the app, opening the agenda, etc.  What on earth do these actions have to do with the content and the purpose of the meeting? How does this help you sell more? Or upsell a customer?

It doesn’t!

Sales leaders and Marketing leaders want event gamification solutions that connect attendees to content, not reinforce the value of the Event App.  Here are some strategies for content-based challenges:

  • Reinforce Key Messages: Sales leaders align the challenges and activities to the day’s key messages to help reinforce the meaning. For example, if there are new product introductions or geography updates, the challenges and activities can be aligned to those areas.
  • Evaluate Learning and Understanding: Sales leaders and Marketers can get really creative here in terms of making content evaluations fun. For example – Quiz on IT Security for field sales or instructor evaluation or role play activities can help the organization evaluate understanding and comprehension by incorporating those activities into the game.  
  • Capture Insights from Employees/Customers You can ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to be an employee at XYZ corp? What are the three features/benefits should we prioritize in the next version of ABC product? What challenges are you facing that, in your opinion, we should easily be able to solve?
  • Allow Resource Fair (or Trade Show) Exhibitors to Connect with Attendees:  At some events, game players must go to a booth to watch a demo before earning points. This forces face-to-face conversations between attendees and booth staff. At internal sales meetings, IT, HR and Marketing will do quizzes to see if field sales staff are compliant with things such as IT Security or Brand standards. On the other hand, these same organizations will try to find out what barriers are in the way to field sales success. Using the game to drive booth traffic, capture some data, and encourage face-to-face conversations helps the Sales Organization move ahead faster.

Event Gamification Mistake #3: You make attendees scan QR codes

Many event gamification products on the market use QR codes to get attendees to check-in to a game.  Using QR codes is attractive because they are simple to setup and distribute to physical locations. Also, it’s easy to tell attendees to just scan those QR codes. From an Event organizer’s point of view, it’s easy to check off the box and say, “Problem solved.”

But…we found that many attendees don’t want to scan QR codes. Or they don’t know how.  Or if they do scan the QR code they are doing it just for the game and not interacting with anyone in the booth or physical space.  

How do you fix this?

There are three strategies that we found to be effective:

  • Tactic #1: Setup up content-based kiosks in the booth. Attendees check-in to the kiosk and then take a survey, take a quiz, answer the question of the day, etc. The goals here are to drive booth traffic and make sure that there is an interaction beyond the check-in.
  • Tactic #2:  Reverse the transaction and give the booth staff an app where they can check-in attendees. In this instance the booth staff can lookup the attendees on their phone and give them points for the check-in. This can be particularly valuable if the booth staff will be giving attendees a variety of points.  
  • Tactic #3:  Use a Pin Code for the check-in. This strategy is about improving the User Experience. Not all of your attendees will know how…or have an interest in scanning a QR code. But, all of them can enter a pin code into their phone. It’s an easy way to give them points for attending a session.  

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Samuel J. Smith May 30, 2019