“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 to Prepare Speakers to Use Audience Response Apps for Greater Attendee Engagement
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?
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.
Related – What is Audience 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.
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.
Related – 10 Ways to Visualize User Generated Content
Related – Part 2: 10 Ways to Increase Event Attendee Engagement with Interactive Technology
Step 4: Recommend conversation templates that give speakers a roadmap for planning their attendee engagement activities
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.
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.
In a recent study, 60% of trade show booth organizers said that “Closed Sales” is their #1 measure of success at their event. Yet, there are many, many more ways that meetings add value beyond revenue generated. How are you measuring the business value that your meetings and events create for your organization?
In MPI’s Business Value of Meetings research, they identified 41 different metrics that can be used to help you measure and track the business value of your meetings. Take a look at the list below – you might be able to find a few new metrics for measuring your success:
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These are measures that are data driven and easy to observe.
Output:
Costs:
Time:
Quality:
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Soft data measures need to be surveyed and the results are not as always concrete as we would like or expect.
Work Climate:
Innovation:
Customer Service:
