“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.
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.
Using event technology to poll attendees is only the beginning of what you can do to create more attendee engagement.
Event technology, event apps and audience response apps offer several new and improved ways to create conversations with your audience.
Here are some of the things you can do: poll, play, create, capture, share, vote, survey, comment and smile. Yes, smile, because you can share photos too.
With all of these capabilities at your disposal, here are 20 ways you can use event technology to create attendee engagement experiences
At their best, events are an explosion of content and ideas where we craft meaningful stories and create community.
However, events are also where we too often load everybody up with as much coffee as we can give them and then send them into a big, dark room with rows and rows of chairs to watch the CEO’s presentation up on a big screen!
As an event professional, you probably know that most attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes! We polled event professionals at a recent webinar, and 85% of the participants knew that attendees lose their attention after just 10 minutes. And yet, so many meetings don’t seem to take that key fact into account when creating their conference content and agenda. (Read 20 reasons people attend conferences)
We live in the participation economy. We have phones in our pockets that are one tap, click or voice request away from finding anything that we want to know on the Internet.
When I look around, I still see events struggling to integrate and use technology to tap into the power of their attendees to create content and conversations. So, why are we still stuffing people in chairs in rows quietly for hours on end in our events? Why are we still using the lecture model?
Today, senior leaders have a unique opportunity to use events as a transformative tool for their organizations. More specifically, they have the opportunity ask hard questions, tackle unsolved problems and use events as a tool for collaboration.
Several years ago, I was in Norway giving a presentation and using interactive Q&A for the first time in a conference. Previously, I had always used the microphone for my presentations. On this day, we had a new event technology that had a Q&A feature.
I discovered very quickly that if everyone had a chance to ask questions they would do it. I received dozens of questions via the interactive Q&A app.
Second, I learned that people were more willing to ask questions via the technology than stand up in front of the room with microphone.