“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.
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.