If you were lucky enough to attend our recent workshop, you’ll have left with some great takeaways on how to increase event engagement using event apps. One of the workshop highlights was the enthusiastic question and discussion session that went well beyond the allocated time!
The information shared in this session was extremely interesting. I am going to take a moment to look at a couple of those excellent questions and the responses we had from our expert panel.
How Can You Engage Attendees On A One-Day Event?
If you have a packed agenda then a one-day event can be a challenge, particularly when you are also trying to promote networking amongst your delegates.
Your event app is the obvious mechanism to provide the solution. The problem is that networking opportunities will only exist during your two coffee breaks and lunch. Most delegates would prefer to take a break, grab a coffee and catch up on messages.
The quickest and easiest way is to use event app gamification.
You can start the game pre-event. When you email event communications you could add in three questions that are related to delegates.
For example, find out which delegate is a qualified football referee. Delegates would need to search the attendee profiles, find out who is the qualified referee and then enter the name of the delegate. They get points on the board and their names in lights!
During the event get them to connect with other delegates by simply adding a code to their badge. The more codes loaded into the event app, the more points! Try adding the latest hot tech product as a top prize to get participants super motivated.
By dedicating a portion of the day to networking, your event will get the attendee-to-attendee interaction required.
Do Engagement Tools (Such As Live Polling And Q&A) Detract From The Content?
It’s often said that in-session event engagement tools should not be used as it takes the focus away from the session content. But if the live polls are relevant and support high value content it’s guaranteed to keep delegates away from their emails.
The speaker can provide opportunities for delegate engagement via the event app with some well crafted polling questions. The speaker can remain in control of the session, regardless of the outcome of the live poll, by selecting multiple choice answers that he/she can discuss no matter how the vote is weighted. So be prepared to take your session in a slightly different direction but remain in control.
Moderated Q&A via the event app is a fantastic way to gather lots of great content. Spoken questions get forgotten – but with the event app all of those great questions are available to download. Delegates can view all of the moderated questions via the event app and they can vote up those questions that they like.
This is great for the speaker as they immediately know which are the most important questions in the room. Use the Q&A via the event app in conjunction with the traditional roaming mike to cater for all tastes and you have the ingredients for a really lively Q&A session.
Watch this space for more great questions from our workshop!
Felix Stroud-Allen – CrowdComms, Co-Founder
